Joe Biden wants to “win the 21st century” with class …

From Washington, DC. His first 100 days in office have passed and Joseph Biden now has an ambitious agenda ahead of him. He aspires to a law that will allow a billion dollar investment in infrastructure to create jobs. He wants another who provides public support to families. All paid for with contributions from the richest 1% in the country. His message is clear: he says that it is these initiatives that will allow the United States to “win the competition against the rest of the world for the 21st century”, in which China appears as the great rival.

Biden presented this plan last Wednesday, when he spoke, for the first time since his inauguration, in front of both houses of the US Congress. It was not a normal presidential speech. Due to the pandemic, there were only 200 people in the House of Representatives, a number that doesn’t even include half of lawmakers.

The image was also historic: behind Biden were the two Presidents of the Chambers, the Vice President Kamala harris by the Senate and Nancy Pelosi, third in the presidential succession, by the House of Representatives. It was the first time that a US president had been escorted by two women in a speech to Congress. “It’s about time,” the Democrat said in one of the opening lines of his speech.

From the podium of the Lower House, Biden gave the definitions of what his government will be. His obsession seems to be employment. He said that word 46 times in his speech on Wednesday, the third most repeated concept after “United States” and “Americans”.

The cornerstone of job creation will be your American Employment Plan, a two trillion dollar package which he has already sent to Congress. With this, it seeks to modernize roads, streets, transportation systems and invest in information technology, housing, construction and the electric vehicle industry. A “workers’ project to build the United States”, he characterized in the speech.

This is nothing new in Biden’s speech. The president spent the entire campaign that led him to the White House talking about the middle class and its origins in Scranton, a city in the industrial belt of the state of Pennsylvania. “Wall Street did not build this country. The middle class built this country. And the unions have built the middle class ”, pointed out Wednesday.

The second initiative, which Biden just announced this week, focuses on families and child care. The White House baptized him the “Plan for American Families”, in line with the names of the packages you have already submitted. It is about allocating over $ 2 billion in four areas: access to education, including admission to community colleges; a quality and accessible child care system; maternity and paternity leave, which do not exist in the United States, and a tax cut for families. “The middle class and working people in this country are already paying enough taxes,” he said.

This is not the case in other areas of the country. For Biden, that $ 4 trillion will be spent without increasing deficits. “It is time for the richest 1% of Americans and American companies to start making their contribution,” he said. He also promised that the IRS, the US tax agency, would “crack down” on “millionaires and billionaires who cheat on taxes.” “The economics of the spill never worked. It is time to grow the economy from the bottom up and from the center out, ”said the president.

For the Republican Party, Biden’s words are a source of horror and concern. “Boring, but radical”, defined the senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, who fell asleep in the middle of the speech. For him, the president is devoted solely to “keeping radical leftists happy”. “The socialist regime is here,” he added.

Too Mitt Romney, a senator from Utah and one of the more moderate voices in the Republican Party, questioned the president’s initiatives. “They represent four times our federal budget,” he complained. “You are not going to unify the United States if you only speak to the progressive wing of your own party,” he added.

However, although senators Bernie sanders Yes Elizabeth warren hailed Biden’s mentions of unions and care systems in America, the most progressive wing of the party asking for more. “If you say you think health is a right and not a privilege, then support Medicare for all,” complained the congresswoman on Twitter. Ilhan Omar Minnesota, in reference to an initiative that the president rejects.

“Not enough credit is given to the countless activists and organizers whose tireless work is the reason we barely hear anything tonight about universal care, white supremacy like terrorism, work and wages decent. You can’t stop until it’s done, ”said his colleague. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York.

The agenda does not have an easy path in Congress that Biden spoke to. As presented, both packages would never reach a vote. They have no support from the Republican Party, key to avoiding any obstruction in the Senate. The Democratic Party now has two avenues: negotiating with the opposition, which has its own infrastructure plans and questioning the spending of the two initiatives, or trying to approve what can be done with its own votes.

If there were portions of the speech that appeared to be drawn from the campaign promises of progressive candidates like Sanders or Warren, there were also proposals that could have been in a tweet from Donald trump. While Biden’s gaze is global in scope, he remains the “America First” component of his predecessor. “There is no reason why wind turbine blades cannot be built in Pittsburgh, Pa., Instead of Beijing,” Biden said last Wednesday. “All investments in the US jobs plan will be guided by one principle: buy American products,” he added.

For Latin America, the man who spoke of a work agenda “from Canada to Argentina” made only one mention of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in the section on immigration. He spoke of violence, corruption, gangs, political instability, natural disasters. “We have to get to the root of the problem that people are fleeing to our southern border,” he said only.