In the US, there is no pro-workers, pro-union, fight against big corporations party in the US. There is no trustbusting party, there is no worker collectives party, there is no 35 hour workweek party. So maybe republicans can shut the fuck up about "Demoncrats are socialism" for like a minute.
But that won't happen because these are the same people who blame Biden for a 10 cent increase in gas prices that he had no control over, as made obvious when it dropped immediately after the election despite Biden still being the president. Also, if gas going up by 10 cents is enough for you to throw away any principle, or friendliness, or anything just to vote for the same guys you've always voted for, maybe consider that you are not doing very well in the world and the people you've been voting for this whole time and are largely the ones who have held power over the past fifty years have MAYBE been fucking you over?
Imagine what would have happened with a rail strike during midterms. Like just imagine. That slight-republican-lean in the house would have been more like 60-70% and who knows about keeping the senate.
Again, like, people just want their fucking amazon packages to show up, and any sort of a sense that we're backsliding into further supply chain issues (and what if a rail strike does cause that supply chain whiplash to resume, while inflation is already high etc?) is going to turn people out like crazy, and up until it affected them personally nobody really cared about this issue as an abstract point, not enough to vote on.
Now, of course, diving into further loosening of brakes/safety requirements is incredibly tone-deaf at this moment, and I think perhaps that was a case of Biden/Buttigieg not understanding that the ground shifted out from underneath them... but they were gonna!
Biden is a very keen politician in many ways, and rule #1 is don't create drama where none exists. People want deregulation, people want rail jobs, people don't like the unions, they don't want transportation disruptions to resume. Biden read that room correctly. The revealed preference of the american public is that reliable amazon packages are more important than dead kids.
And it could very well all still blow over too. America shrugs its shoulders about dead kids all the time, we run on dunkin and dead kids here.
But there's just not enough political capital to have a knock-down drag-out deathmatch over every single Right Thing To Do for people who don't even want him to do it. Every single thing Biden does goes to SCOTUS and every time it's a question of whether the court is just going to nuke that regulatory power entirely. Like the EPA. Two months ago was this the fight that the american voter in ohio thought was worth having? If anything two months ago they would have been behind him busting the union's balls on this - go back and look at some polling and I bet they are.
This is what people keep voting for, they can say whatever they want but this is the revealed preference, fighting the War On LGBT is just a lot more important than some dead kids you don't even know. You can't drag people kicking and screaming on every single issue. Biden's got things he needs to do too.
Like yeah you could pull the lever every time you see a potentially hot axle but that would send the trolley headed straight into norfolk southern's profit margin. It's really unforeseeable and there's definitely not a union that has been screaming about safety issues and was just slapped down a few months ago in bipartisan fashion, nothing that can be done about this says only nation where this happens regularly. Thoughts and prayers. /s
Like, the people of ohio have made it real clear that being open for business is what they want politically. They definitely don't want the unions to score a win, even if it might increase the risk of their kids dying it's obviously worth it because people keep voting this way. There is a firm 50% of congress that is a guaranteed "fuck unions and fuck anything that threatens industry, we want jobs and we want em now" and the rest of the legislature is divided anyway. What do you do if you're democrats? Deathmatch SCOTUS over people who don't even want you to, and get your regulatory authority taken away entirely because the founders never said anything about trains in the constitution?
Like, just name a single ohio republican who wouldn't have leapt on the "biden favors unions over america and christmas" two months ago. Complete loser of an issue politically, people want their amazon packages and any hint of a return to the supply-chain chaos of 2020 is gonna make people lose their shit. This is how people actually vote, dead kids sounds bad but threaten my amazon packages and people will line the fuck up to get you out of office, they aren't actually motivated by the dead kids.
Anyway, we have to get back to coverage of the war on LGBT, that's what plays with the voters in Ohio. Sorry about your kids, thoughts and prayers. Dead kids is what america is built on these days.