Joe Biden managed to tread carefully around historic and current political sensitivities during the first part of his trip to the island of Ireland this week, marking 25 years since the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement sought to secure lasting peace for Northern Ireland.
But not long after crossing from that U.K. region into the Republic of Ireland on Wednesday, the U.S. president made a major gaffe: He confused New Zealand’s “All Blacks” rugby team with the notorious “Black and Tans” British military unit that fought the Irish Republican Army a century ago.
At the end of a rambling speech in a pub Wednesday night, Biden — flanked by Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin and star rugby player Rob Kearney, a distant cousin — tried to pay a compliment to one of Kearney’s greatest sporting accomplishments. That would be when Ireland’s rugby team defeated New Zealand for the first time in 111 years, in November 2016 in Chicago. New Zealand’s squad is famously called the All Blacks, in reference to their uniforms.
Trouble is, Biden let slip a reference that could well reflect his affinity with Irish rebel history and its folk songs.
“He’s a hell of a rugby player, and he beat the hell out of the Black and Tans,” Biden said to audience laughter.
The Black and Tans were an auxiliary unit of Britain’s security forces that fought IRA rebels in their 1919-21 war of independence from Britain. Their name reflected the improvised and inconsistent colors of their uniforms.
The unrelentingly pro-Biden coverage on state broadcaster RTÉ, which televised his speech live, didn’t acknowledge the mistake. The commentator’s sign-off? “Well, that’s Joe Biden: a little bit sentimental, a little bit schmaltzy, but a thoroughly decent guy and a great friend to Ireland. The trip is off to a great start.”
But the gaffe and “Rob Kearney” blew up on social media in Ireland. Some listed the retired rugby fullback’s career accomplishments including, most famously, his single-handed defeat of the British forces a century ago.
“The greatest gift Ireland wanted from Joe Biden was a signature gaffe. And … didn’t he just go and give us one for the century,” tweeted comedian Oliver Callan.
Attempting to hose down the row on Thursday, Biden aide Amanda Sloat, the National Security Council senior director for Europe, said: “I think for everyone in Ireland who was a rugby fan it was incredibly clear that the president was talking about the All Blacks and Ireland’s defeat of the New Zealand team in 2016.”
She added: “It was clear what the president was referring to. It was certainly clear to his cousin sitting next to him who had played in that match.”
Lost in the shuffle was Biden’s other Kearney gaffe: He still hasn’t figured out how to say his name.
When introducing Kearney at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, Biden called him Keer-ney. The Irish pronounce the name Kar-ney. Biden stuck with Keer-ney on Wednesday.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
There is no doubt that the former governor, hailing from a red state where Democratic presidential candidates lose by 40 points, is a different kind of Democrat, especially on energy, cultural issues such as guns, abortion and immigration, and procedural matters like the filibuster and court-packing.
Yet, he’s still recognizably a Democrat, who tends to be there for his party — whatever drama he might create during the sausage-making — on big pieces of legislation.
During an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Manchin spoke openly about the possibility of a presidential run. He portrayed himself as a unifying force occupying the neglected center. “I’m fiscally responsible,” he said, “and socially compassionate” — a sentiment that owes more to false labels than no labels.
Let’s review the past two years: Manchin voted for the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill at the outset of the Biden administration; he voted for a $550 billion infrastructure bill; he voted for a $280 billion chips bill; and, finally, he voted for — indeed, helped craft — nearly $500 billion in yet more spending on green-energy and health care initiatives in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that is offset by what is supposed to be roughly $800 billion in new taxes and reductions in Medicare spending.
Add it all up, and this is not the voting record of a fiscal conservative, a fiscal moderate, or even a fiscal realist.
It’s true that Manchin cut down Biden’s Build Back Better proposal by a couple of trillion before it morphed into the Inflation Reduction Act. But if your party wants to shoot money out of a powerful M20 Super-Bazooka (which was developed near the end of World War II), and you want to shoot money out of an earlier, less potent M1 Bazooka instead, that doesn’t make you a force for austerity.
In point of fact, you don’t need to shoot money out of bazookas at all.
While the Senate was evenly split, Manchin had stopping power. He could have single-handedly prevented Biden from spending an additional dollar. Instead, he went along with the big-ticket items and made it possible for Democrats to get more than they reasonably could have hoped for — and now harangues Biden to do more about the debt.
This is an accomplice to a crime after the fact, tsk-tsking the mastermind of the heist for not being more law-abiding.
Manchin has taken to complaining that his baby, the Inflation Reduction Act, has been distorted by the Biden administration. “When President Biden and I spoke before Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act last summer,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, “we agreed that the bill was designed to pay down our national debt and shore up America’s energy security.”
He might have wanted to get that in writing. If the rest of your party is convinced that a major bill is climate legislation — and proudly touts it as such — while you are the only one who believes that it is really about deficit reduction and exploiting more fossil fuels, there is a good chance you are the one who is wrong.
Say this for Biden — he may have lost a step, but he apparently can still take Manchin to the cleaners.
The senator had a large hand in drafting the bill, and had the leverage to insist on any provision that he wanted. There is nothing he wants nowthat he couldn’t have insisted on or made explicit in the legislation. Manchin’s denunciations of how the bill is being implemented are really confessions of his own poor negotiating and shabby legislative draftsmanship.
None of this is an auspicious launching pad for a national campaign. The typical fallacy of such third-party efforts is the belief that all, or a lion’s share, of self-identified independents would vote for an independent candidate. This ignores the fact that many independents lean Democrat or Republican, and vote much like actual Democrats and Republicans.
While the distaste for another Trump and Biden race is real, most Republicans and Democrats will make peace with these candidates if they win their respective nominations. Even if there is greater openness than usual to an alternative at the outset of the race, an independent candidate will inevitably look more like a spoiler or a wasted vote the closer the election gets, eroding their support further and making the campaign look even more quixotic and forlorn.
There’s also the matter of charisma and star power. The last independent candidate to get real traction, Ross Perot in 1992, was a one-of-a-kind American original with a kind of anti-charm and a set of distinctive issues, running in just the right populist environment. Manchin can do Sunday shows and looms large in West Virginia, but there’s nothing to suggest he has the performative ability or a unique ideology to dominate on a national stage.
Even if he did, he’d be most likely to help elect Trump. Biden wants to win independents and disaffected Republicans, the voters Manchin would be targeting as well. If he were serious about winning, Manchin would have to argue that Biden is not the moderate he campaigns as, and thus help make Trump’s case for him.
We live in a time of political unpredictability and disruption, just not enough for Manchin 2024 to make sense.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Schultz may no longer be holding the reins, but he made clear he does not believe the company has done anything illegal in its effort to quell a unionization drive that gained steam in 2021 and rippled across hundreds of Starbucks stores in 2022.
“Starbucks Coffee Company unequivocally — and let me set the zone for this very early on — has not broken the law,” Schultz said at the outset of Wednesday’s hearing before repeating variations of that declaration numerous times throughout the proceedings.
The National Labor Relations Board is prosecuting more than 80 complaints, covering 278 unfair labor practice charges, against the company. NLRB judges have handed down a smattering of rulings that Starbucks did break federal law, though the company appears intent on appealing such decisions for as long as it takes.
“We’re confident those allegations will be proven false,” Schultz said. “Starbucks has not broken the law.”
Republicans (reluctantly) came to Starbucks’ defense
GOP members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee members were willing to go to bat for Starbucks, even though the company has allied itself with progressive causes over the years.
“There’s some irony to a non-coffee-drinking Mormon conservative defending a Democrat candidate for president and perhaps one of the most liberal companies in America,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said. “That being said, I also think it’s somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job.”
(Schultz never ran for president, though he did flirt with the idea in both the 2016 and 2020 cycles. And in 2019 he said he had disaffiliated with the Democratic Party for ideological reasons.)
Romney was one of several Republicans who said they disagreed with some of Starbucks’ political stances but nonetheless felt it was being villainized by Democrats and union supporters.
Schultz: Blunt rhetoric, but no laws were broken
During the hearing, senators of both parties got Schultz to confirm a number of facts about Starbucks and its response to the unionization drive — much of which will eventually make its way into legal filings.
The former CEO confirmed that workers at unionized stores were not extended certain compensation benefits granted to non-union stores, that it has opposed having collective bargaining negotiations done over Zoom and that Schultz told one worker “if you hate the company, you could work somewhere else.”
Schultz said that Starbucks believes labor law prohibits it from unilaterally changing employee compensation at unionized stores and that the company has pushed for in-person talks out of safety concerns for managers involved — though the NLRB has argued otherwise. He also said that his comments to that worker, which were at a company event, may have been “misinterpreted” and were not intended as anti-union intimidation.
He also said that there was nothing wrong with Starbucks telling workers that it believes they would be better off without unionizing.
“We have consistently laid out our preference without breaking any law,” he said.
Unions rile up Mullins
For the second time in a month, first-year Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) got into a spirited back-and-forth during a hearing related to unionization — this time with Sanders.
Mullin accused Sanders of being hypocritical in lambasting the wealth of Schultz and other business leaders when he himself has profited from the American system.
“If you can be a millionaire, why can’t Mr. Schultz and other CEOs be millionaires and be honest, too?”
Sanders took issue with Mullin’s estimate of his net worth and said that he had “made more misstatements in a shorter period of time than I have ever heard.”
A few weeks earlier Mullin had a testy exchange with Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien, and the senator said during that hearing that his disdain for unions was born out of personal experience with how they treated him when they attempted to organize the plumbing business he ran.
Expect to hear a lot more about the NLRB’s fairness
Starbucks has accused staffers at the labor agency of being biased against it and colluding with the union in several elections. An agency official, Rachel Dormon, went to the coffee company with concerns last year and the information she provided has helped it challenge the results of at least one union vote.
“The NLRB is facing its own credibility crisis,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the top Republican on the HELP Committee. “Are NLRB employees weaponizing the agency against American employers to benefit politically connected labor unions?”
The NLRB has denied Starbucks’ allegations, though House Education and the Workforce Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) issued a subpoena last week to Dormon for information on the matter.
In the midst of Wednesday’s hearing, House Democrats revealed that the NLRB has opened an inquiry into issues surrounding the subpoena. Republicans assailed the probe as an attempt to intimidate Dormon for coming forward, and the development will likely ratchet up tensions between the NLRB and conservative lawmakers.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Washington: US President Joe Biden on Sunday spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the phone after the Sharm El Sheikh meeting between officials of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
During the call, Biden welcomed the meeting between senior political and security officials from Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, and the United States with an aim to reduce tensions, the White House said in a readout of the call.
Biden reinforced the need for all sides to take urgent, collaborative steps to enhance security coordination, condemn all acts of terrorism, and maintain the viability of a two-state solution, the White House said.
“The President also underscored his belief that democratic values have always been, and must remain, a hallmark of the U.S.-Israel relationship, that democratic societies are strengthened by genuine checks and balances, and that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support,” it said.
According to the White House, Biden offered support for efforts underway in Israel to forge a compromise on proposed judicial reforms consistent with those core principles.
“The two leaders also discussed tensions and violence in the West Bank,” it said. Biden reiterated his unwavering commitment to Israel’s security and the ongoing cooperation between the two national security teams, including to counter all threats posed by Iran. Both leaders agreed to stay in regular contact over the coming weeks, the White House said.
“The participants noted that meetings at this level have not taken place in nearly a decade, and that these meetings are building toward establishing a series of understandings upon which to de-escalate tension,” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, White House, said in a separate statement.
We welcome the meeting and understandings reached today in Sharm El Sheikh between senior political and security officials of Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” he said adding that this was the second such meeting in this format, with participation by senior officials from the United States, Egypt, and Jordan, following the gathering in Aqaba three weeks ago.
“We look forward to continuing these discussions as we enter the Holy month of Ramadan, Passover, and Easter, and over the months to follow,” Watson said.
Joe Biden is at pains to assert that “I’m a capitalist. I’m not a socialist.”
A lot of what Biden is proposing would look quite at home in Scandinavia and Western Europe.
Those nations aren’t really “socialist” at all, even if they’re celebrated by America’s best-known socialist.
Republicans really, really hate socialism — but will also scream bloody murder if Democrats suggest they want to so much as touch the most obviously socialistic programs of the American government.
Making sense of these assertions does not require squaring a circle; what it does require is an understanding of just how amorphous the term “socialist” is, and why whatever you call Biden’s various policy goals, they are firmly within the American political tradition — and may indeed be very smart politics, at that.
All through his two presidential runs, Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked what it meant that he called himself a “democratic socialist.” Invariably, the Vermont independent would point to the Scandinavian nations and their universal health care, paid family leave and free college education. (He did not call for the government to “control the means of production and distribution,” the classic definition of socialism and an omission at odds with the Democratic Socialists of America, a 92,000-member organization that asserts: “We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation.”)
But are Denmark, Sweden and Norway really “socialist” nations? They wouldn’t cut it for the DSA. The private sector is alive and well, businesses have a lighter tax burden than in the U.S., and even their health care systems are far from totally public. In Sweden, by one estimate, some 40 percent of health clinics are private, for-profit enterprises.
Indeed, throughout the industrialized world, the traditional goal of socialism has long since been jettisoned, even as elements of its core philosophy have been embedded in government policy. For example, Germany, whether run by center-right Christian Democrats or center-left Social Democrats, is a resolutely capitalist land, but its laws also require workers to be well represented on large corporations’ supervisory boards, where key decisions are made. In Britain, the Labour Party under Tony Blair renounced nationalization almost 30 years ago. The last Labour leader to embrace the idea, Jeremy Corbyn, presided over a historic walloping at the polls, and current leader Keir Starmer says he would not nationalize the energy industry (though a significant element of the party’s rank and file embraces the notion of “common ownership”).
Ideas like universal health care and expansive workers’ rights have long carried the label of “social democracy”: if not full socialism, then the notion that the government should craft a strong social safety net, impose higher taxes on the wealthy and limit the private sector’s power. (Those who see the hand of Karl Marx in such ideas — as Ronald Reagan did when he assailed the idea of Medicare back in 1964 — need to contend with the fact that the father of government-financed old age and health insurance was the ardent anti-socialist Otto von Bismarck, who first proposed the idea in 1881).
In the 2020 Democratic presidential contest, the left had its champions and Biden was most certainly not among them. But even the most committed Bernie Bro might acknowledge the president’s progress toward nudging the United States toward social democracy.
Consider the elements of Biden’s bipartisan $40 billion investment in semiconductor manufacturing — itself an impressive display of industrial policy. The package comes with strings, the New York Times notes. Companies have to pay union wages; they have to share some of their profits with the government; they have to provide free childcare for their workers; they have to run their plants with environmentally friendly energy sources. These proposals are of a piece with some of the more ambitious Biden policies, some of which, like the expanded child-tax credit, have expired, and some of which, like capping the price of insulin for seniors, remain in place and have been embraced by the private sector. His recent State of the Union address contained a swath of proposals to limit the power of private companies, whether by capping excessive airline baggage fees or hidden credit card charges.
The response to all of this from Republicans has been to raise the specter of “socialism.” Last month, the GOP-controlled House voted 328-86 for a resolution declaring that “socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships. … Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.” If the goal was to split their opponents, Republicans succeeded: More than 100 Democrats voted for the resolution which, taken literally, would condemn the policies of some of America’s most resolute allies, and which was clearly designed to throw shade at the president.
Of course, almost as vociferous as the GOP’s denunciation of socialism was its fury at the very idea the party might be moving to lay a finger on the two most clearly socialistic elements of U.S. policy — Social Security and Medicare.
When Biden used his State of the Union address to note that “some” Republicans were suggesting cuts in the programs — most specifically Sen. Rick Scott of Florida — GOP lawmakers erupted in anger. Scott, for his part, quickly amended his proposal sunsetting government programs by exempting the popular social insurance systems. It calls to mind the cry of a citizen at a congressional town hall meeting years ago: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” (Notably, Donald Trump also deserves some credit for steering the GOP away from a free-market orthodoxy intent on gutting retirement programs.)
It’s a little unfair to ascribe cognitive dissonance solely to Republicans. The confusion about what consists of “socialism” is pervasive. Polls show Americans disapprove of “entitlements,” but overwhelmingly approve of Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits — in other words, programs people are entitled to by law. Sanders’ idea of free tuition for public colleges may seem a reach, but a generation or two ago, free college was widely available. City University of New York was famously tuition free from 1847 until 1976, and many state universities once imposed only fees. In some places, community college is still free.
A large majority of Americans see health care as a right, even as majorities of Americans say the government is too powerful and tries to do too much. This dissonance was crystalized by the election victory of Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed in his 1981 Inaugural Address that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and then presided over a government that was bigger when he left it. (For that matter, Margaret Thatcher never tried to repeal Britain’s national health insurance.)
In this populist moment, Biden has also won applause from the left and right for flexing government’s muscle when it comes to cracking down on Big Tech and the growth of monopolies, be they in the form of airlines or book publishers. Biden is showing his Rooseveltian roots, not just FDR but TR.
A long-running debate exists over why socialism failed to take root in the United States, unlike in Europe. In the near run, the success of Biden’s “social democracy” efforts will stand or fall on whether he can — as many of his Democratic predecessors did — define his policies not as the importation of a foreign ideology, but as part of a continuing effort to make the economic playing field fairer and safer without changing the fundamental rules of the game.
For a century or more, those efforts have met with powerful resistance, even as the political consensus gradually shifts toward a more robust American welfare state. The most recent example: Republicans have given up their efforts to repeal Obamacare after years of pushing to do just that. It turns out that, with a little more modest ambitions, “socialism” has found a home of sorts in this land of individual freedom — as long as you call it something else.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Ladapo’s report was used as evidence in vaccine guidance he released in October that came under heavy criticism from the medical community, which said the surgeon general’s stance that the vaccine posed a health risk in healthy young men was flawed and went against Covid-vaccine recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The guidance even prompted Twitter to temporarily block a social media post from the surgeon general promoting the analysis, though the company later restored it.
The inspector general’s office opened the investigation in November after it received the complaint and later closed it an undisclosed date after the complainant didn’t respond to follow-up questions regarding the accusations, according to state documents that include a copy of the original complaint.
Nothing is known about the complainant, and anyone can submit a grievance with the Department of Health’s inspector general. But the individual appeared to have detailed knowledge of state health agencies, according to the documents the Florida Department of Health provided to POLITICO.
Ladapo on Wednesday called the accusations against him untrue and said the report in question was completed by a team of staffers at the Florida Department of Health.
“It’s factually false,” Ladapo said in an interview with POLITICO. “I trust the team — they used our Florida data, they performed the analysis, and we’re an accredited public health organization.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hand-picked Ladapo, a Harvard-educated medical doctor, to be his top health official in 2021. Ladapo has long questioned the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and at one point joined a petition to urge the FDA against quickly authorizing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Ladapo found a national audience early in the pandemic by writing opinion pieces in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today that criticized community lockdowns and the use of facemasks.
The November complaint against Ladapo asked the inspector general to speak with employees at the state Department of Health Communicable Disease Division, who helped write earlier drafts of the report that was eventually released. Emails were kept to a minimum, the complainant wrote, and notes were hand-delivered.
“You may not find these documents by email, as they get transmitted by hand,” the complainant stated, according to state documents. “But they have been seen by several individuals.
“Lots of people know about this,” the individual stated.
Ladapo, however, stood by his Covid guidance and defended his stance on vaccines.
“Between my scientific experience, and training and the fact that I am only comfortable saying the truth and speaking the truth, I felt completely fine with that announcement,” Ladapo said. “That’s what the data show.”
Ladapo said experts who have rejected his ideas are unwilling to face what he called honesty in modern medical care.
“It really strains credulity to try and write this off as being anything but related to the safety of these mRNA Covid vaccines,” Ladapo said. “I think people should know that it’s OK to believe what their eyes are showing them.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Joe Biden’s European friends may be miffed about his climate law.
But the U.S. president’s America-first, subsidy-heavy approach has actually gained some grudging — and for a Democrat unlikely — admirers on the Continent: Europe’s conservatives.
Within the center-right European People’s Party, the largest alliance of parties in the European Parliament, officials are smarting over why their own politicians aren’t taking a page from the Biden playbook.
Their frustration is homing in on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — a putative conservative the EPP itself helped install. Officials fear they have let von der Leyen lead the party away from its pro-industry, regulation-slashing ideals, according to interviews with leading party figures.
Biden’s law has now brought their grumbling to the surface.
On Thursday, a wing of EPP lawmakers defected during a Parliament vote over whether to back von der Leyen’s planned response to Biden’s marquee green spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Their concern: it doesn’t go far enough in championing European industries.
Essentially, they want it to feel more like Biden’s plan.
The IRA was an “embarrassment” for Europe, said Thanasis Bakolas, the EPP’s power broker and secretary general. The EU “had all these well-funded policies available. And then comes Biden with his IRA. And he introduces policies that are more efficient, more effective, more accessible to businesses and consumers.”
A bitter inspiration
European leaders were blindsided last summer when Biden signed the IRA into law.
Since then, they have complained loudly that the U.S. subsidies for homegrown clean tech are a threat to their own industries. But for the EPP, ostensibly on the opposite side to Biden’s Democrats, the law is also serving as bitter inspiration.
“It’s a little bit like in the fairy tale, that someone in the crowd — and this time it wasn’t the boy, it was the Americans — pretty much pointing the finger to the [European] Commission, and saying, ‘Oh, the king is naked?’” said Christian Ehler, a German European Parliament member from the EPP.
Viewed from bureaucratic, free-trading Brussels, Biden’s climate policy looks more sleek, geopolitically muscular — and, notably for the EPP, more appealing to voters on the right than anything actually coming out of the EPP-led Commission | Oliver Contreras/Getty Images
Under the EU’s centerpiece climate policy, the European Green Deal, the European Commission, the EU’s policy-making executive arm, has doggedly introduced law after law aimed at squeezing polluters from every angle using tighter regulations or carbon pricing. The goal is to zero out the bloc’s net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Biden’s IRA approaches the same goal by different means. It is laden with voter- and industry-friendly tax breaks and made-in-America requirements. Viewed from bureaucratic, free-trading Brussels, Biden’s climate policy looks more sleek, geopolitically muscular — and, notably for the EPP, more appealing to voters on the right than anything actually coming out of the EPP-led Commission.
For some, the sense of betrayal isn’t directed at Washington, but inward.
“We learned that we lost track for the last two years on the deal part of the Green Deal,” said Ehler, who is using his seat on Parliament’s powerful Committee on Industry, Research and Energy to push forfewer climate burdens on industry. “We are in the midst of the super regulation.”
The irony is that Biden and the Democrats probably wouldn’t have chosen this path were it not for Republicans’ decades-long refusal to move any form of climate regulation through Congress.
The IRA was a product of political necessity, shaped to suit independent-minded Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin of coal-heavy West Virginia.If Biden and his party had their druthers, Biden’s climate policy might have looked far more like the Brussels model.
Let’s get political
As party boss, Bakolas is preparing the platform on which the EPP — a pan-European umbrella group of 81 center-right parties — will campaign for the 2024 EU elections.
He is also flirting with an alliance with the far right, meaning the center-right and center-left consensus that has dominated climate policy in Brussels could break up. Bakolas advocates “a more political approach.”
“We need to do the same [as the U.S.], with the same tenacity and determination,” he said.
One big problem: It’s hard for the European Union, which doesn’t control tax policy, to match the political eye-candy of offering cashback for electric Hummers (something Americans can now claim on their taxes).
“Can Europe, this institutional arrangement in Brussels … act as effortlessly and seamlessly as the American administration? No, because it’s a difficult exercise for Europe to reach a decision … but it’s an exercise we need to do,” said Bakolas.
Within the center-right European People’s Party, the largest alliance of parties in the European Parliament, officials are smarting over why their own politicians aren’t taking a page from the Biden playbook | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
In other words, the EPP is looking to emulate Biden’s law — at least in spirit, if not in legalese.
The conservative thinking is beginning to coalesce into a few main themes: slowing down green regulation they feel burden industry; using sector-specific programs to help companies reinvest their profits into cleaning up their businesses; and slashing red tape they say slows already clean industries from getting on with the job.
EPP lawmaker Peter Liese said he had been “desperately calling” for these red-tape-slashing measures. He was glad to see some in von der Leyen’s contested IRA response plan. But Liese and the EPP want more.
“We can have an answer of the two crises, the two challenges, that we have: the climate crisis and challenge for our economy, including the IRA,” said Liese.
Green groups and left-wing lawmakers argue the EPP is simply using the IRA and Europe’s broader economic woes as a smokescreen to cover a broad retreat from the Green Deal. In recent months the party has blocked, or threatened to block, a host of green regulations proposed by the Commission.
“This is like trying to put on the ballroom shoes of your grandfather and trying to do a 100-meter sprint,” Green MEP Anna Cavazzini told Parliament on Wednesday.
Bakolas rejected that.
He said the party had finally woken up to the need to set a climate agenda that better reflected its own, center-right, free-market ideals.
“What the IRA did,” he said, “is to ring an alarm bell.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
New York: Ahead of next year’s election, US President Joe Biden on Tuesday termed Air India’s $34 billion order for 220 Boeing planes as a “historic” deal that will support his agenda with one million US jobs and promote its lead in technology.
He linked the orders to his domestic plans to create good jobs for the working class, noting that many of the one million jobs “will not require a four-year college degree” and will be spread across 44 states.
Biden has been pushing for creating better-paying industrial jobs for the working class beaten down by such works going overseas, mainly to China, as well as boosting manufacturing in the US.
Biden said that Air India’s Boeing purchase shows that “the United States can and will lead the world in manufacturing”.
The reference to jobs in the US, which a White House official said will, directly and indirectly, amount to 1.47 million, can also offset criticism in the US of tech jobs going to India by showing that US workers also benefit.
The Air India order will have a total economic impact of $70 billion, the official said.
The Air India order is Boeing’s third-biggest sale of all time in dollar value and second in quantity, according to the official.
The official said that the order for 220 planes from Air India is worth $34 billion and covers 190 Boeing 737 MAXs, 20 Boeing 787s, and 10 Boeing 777Xs.
The agreement includes an option to buy additional 50 Boeing 737 MAXs and 20 Boeing 787s and if they go through, the total purchases will be 290 planes raising the value to $45.9 billion, the official said.
Air India, which is now back with its original owner Tata Group after last year’s privatisation, also announced a deal to buy 250 planes from Europe’s Airbus – 210 A320neo narrowbody planes and 40 A350 widebody aircraft.
The “historic” Boeing deal, Biden said, “Reflects the strength of the US-India economic partnership.”
“Together with Prime Minister Modi, I look forward to deepening our partnership even further as we continue to confront shared global challenges – creating a more secure and prosperous future for all of our citizens,” he added.
The White House official linked the announcement to the inaugural launch of the US-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) launched last month.
The initiative seeks to expand the strategic technology partnership and defence industrial cooperation between the two governments, businesses, and universities.
