President Biden's "JFK Moment". Harbinger of a New Fighting Orientation?
This piece will be short, and serve as mainly an introduction to the Press Conference linked below by President Kennedy from April 11, 1962, in which he issued what amounted to a declaration of war with US Steel.
As he sets the stage with his opening statement, JFK detailed the nature of the full blown national security and economic crisis dumped in his lap by the most destructive policies of the Eisenhower administration. (under the misleadership of Fed Chaiman Burns, and the Dulles Brothers, John Foster and Allen, during the period of Eisenhower's convalescence from his most recent heart attack, my added backstory to give context)
The J.P. Morgan interests that owned US Steel had a long term track record of sabotage and theft from the American public. They worked against FDR's recovery plan, and covertly financed a violent Coup attempt to depose the President and set up a military Junta. (See "The Business Plot")
In short, the United Steelworkers Union made plans for a national strike for a wage increase, which they had long agreed to forgo in the name of National defense and economic recovery. JFK negotiated an agreement to avert the strike, by convincing the USWA to hold off on the pay raise in exchange for US Steel agreeing not to raise steel prices.
US Steel and its President Roger Blough lied, and immediately increased steel prices in flagrant disregard for the Public Interest, (JFK's words) an act of unmitigated corporate greed which threatentened to cause a collapse of the US Economic output, sabotaging infrastructure, national defense, agriculture and every area of the economy dependent on affordable steel inventories. It was intended as a faceoff with the President to break his will, and to set a precedent for American Corporations to violate any existing or future pact of responsibility to the American people.
Kennedy would not be broken. Rather, he instructed US Attorney General Robert Kennedy to proceed with the first steps for filing an Anti-Trust suit at the Department of Justice to literally break up US Steel, for acting as an illegal monopoly.
USS blinked, backing down and rolling back the price increase immediately, as did the other Steel Companies which had followed US Steel's lead in raising prices. President Kennedy asserted himself and used the full power of the Presidency to fight for "The General Welfare" principle, which is the central concept underlying the Preamble to the Constitution. He went directly to the American people to explain what transpired, and why, using scathing language which one would not associate with the romanticized fiction written about "Camelot" by today's historically illiterate cognoscenti, whose history writings are designed more as screenplays for a Netflix series, rather than to educate Americans on Civics and government.
President Biden had his "JFK Moment" this week. He went eyeball to eyeball with McConnell over the increase in the debt ceiling, and exerted Presidential power in playing his most powerful card, the threat to Nuke the Fillibuster to do it over the heads of the GOP. And McConnell blinked. Don't delude yourselves into thinking that reality played any role in McConnell's backdown. He couldn't care less about the chaos and damage that a US default would entail. This backdown was the sheer consequence of the political calculus of power, and the implied threat of seeing more of the same.
What happened is what I've been hoping for for some time. President Biden kicked the chessboard off the table, and put his "old friends" in the Senate on notice, that his commitment to the national interest overrode politics, and that he was prepared to throw out any further pretense at unity and bipartisanship to defend that national interest under the most extreme danger to our economic system, and to defend the full faith and credit of the United States government. It is the best and most hopeful thing that he has done yet, but there needs to be more.
President Biden should immediately take this out of the realm of a threat, and turn it into action. Now is the time to go ahead and actually end the filibuster, play hardball with the Centrist saboteurs in his own Party and White House, and ram through the infrastructure and Voting rights legislation that the American people voted for. Now is the time for President Biden to follow on and use his Presidential power as did President Kennedy 59 years ago. What does he or any of us have to lose at this point?
Will it happen? The more urgent question is, "what will we do to make it happen"?
