WASHINGTON, DC (9 Feb 2023)—The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s largest umbrella group of Muslim institutions, endorsed President Joseph Biden’s State of the Union report of some much-needed domestic improvements over the divisive and disastrous past administration but disapproved of his discouraging omission of U.S. strategy and involvement abroad, in light of his failure to deliver on his much-promised humanitarian-based foreign policy agenda.
We generally support President Biden’s call for most of the economic measures he cited in his speech. Yet it is crucial to note what the president left out of his report on the state of this nation.
Biden is the first president, in the modern era at least, to give such short shrift to an assessment of U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East where America has waged more than two decades of catastrophic and debilitating war. This has been our nation’s greatest failure. In this regard, we have two crucial observations:
1. President Biden came into office on the promise of creating a moral, humanitarian-driven foreign policy. What he has given us instead are two years of a foreign policy dangerously entrenched in preserving a miserable, lethal status quo. He has normalized blind U.S. support for client-regimes massively violating human rights under racist, imperialist rule; U.S. support for strongman, authoritarian despots; and cynical U.S. acceptance of civil war stalemates ruthlessly destroying the region’s lands and peoples.
The president’s humiliating fawning support for an Israeli racist apartheid fascist in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his fanatic settler-colonialist government of occupation and death squads is utterly unconscionable and morally bankruptcy – especially for a president who claims 40 years of foreign policy expertise.
Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, and Yemen – in each case of bloody stalemate and division President Biden has supported maintaining a state of injustice, misery, violation, and oppression of their peoples in some perceived political self-benefit. His has been a foreign policy of total Machiavellianism.
2. The domestic face of this inertia is the subjecting of American Muslims to virulent anti-Muslim bigotry, epitomized in President Biden’s failure to appoint an Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia, on par with the long-recognized Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Muslims have waited, and are suffering, far too long and dangerously for this appointment.
Please, President Biden, live up to your moral duties and humanitarian promises in your Middle East foreign policy and for American Muslims at home.
As to President Biden’s domestic economic policies and actions, as cited in his address, American Muslims are generally among his staunchest supporters, except for his perpetuation of a stilted anti-immigration policy, meant, it seems, to appease an underlying sentiment of bigoted disdain and a toxic culture of inhospitable blame. Along with American Muslim support of the president’s basic social and domestic agenda, it is crucial to note some important realities the president left out of his report on the state of this nation:
1. We are strongly behind leveling the disproportionate tax burden on the people by requiring the wealthy, and especially mega-wealthy tax-scofflaw corporations, to pay their proportionally fair share of taxes regularly. Some 55 companies making $40 billion in profits have paid no federal taxes in 2020, according to a recent Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy study.
2. We greatly support and, in fact, call for bolstering Medicare and Social Security against growing conservative corporate-greed sentiments, all be it camouflaged in calls to phase-out the lifelines of Medicare and Social Security through sunset laws or eligibility-age increases. While we fully support Medicare having the power to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies that have gouged Americans for decades, it is less than heartening that Biden’s touted Inflation Reduction Act measure will not even take effect until 2026.
3. We uphold removing, indeed outlawing, corporate indenturing of workers by compelling them to sign non-compete and no-poach agreements that keep people from changing jobs for better pay and working conditions in the same industry or area of expertise, though we recognize that the president mixed these two agreements in his example.
4. We applaud the president’s success in much-needed job creation thus far in his term, but we are realistic about the difference between his reported “historic” raw numbers – 12 million new jobs in two years – and measuring this in real terms against American population growth, which puts the president’s success in the middle of that of past presidents in this category, proportionally.
5. We firmly believe in deficit cutting and support the president’s attempts to do so, but the $1.7 trillion cuts in his two years of office need to be measured longer term than comparing it with the deficits incurred in the two preceding pandemic years. The national deficit under President Biden is, in fact, very much in line with 2019 pre-pandemic numbers.
6. Curbing inflation has been an important development for Americans these past eight months, from 9% to 6%, though still high. Yet we take the president’s claim of American worker wage increases for take-home pay the last six months with a grain of salt, as this growth is still $9 a week less ($364) than where worker pay was (at $373 a week) when he took office 18 months ago, albeit up from an intervening low of $359 a week.
7. We strongly support the president’s call for a sweeping assault weapons ban, after Republicans let it expire in 2004, with a dramatic tripling in mass shooting deaths in America since, such deaths leaping from 4.8 to 23.8 per year in the 10 years after conservative lawmakers refused to renew the ban.
8. We are fully behind the infrastructure law that the president pushed through Congress, though in our estimation this should equal a greater percentage of total GDP than it does, even at $110 billion. The 2009 Reinvestment Act with which it is compared was 0.3% of our GDP in 2010, whereas this law, though $85 billion more in today’s dollars, is just 0.24% of current GDP. President Eisenhower’s development benchmark Interstate Highway System project funded $275 billion in infrastructure in today’s dollars, more than double Biden’s.
9. We do not support anti-migrant measures now barring desperate asylees and refugees – especially from the Caribbean and Central and South America, or countries where the U.S. has been waging war in the Middle East for two decades – in the absence of simultaneously opening up just, merciful, and responsible immigration avenues for the millions, from these areas especially, who deserve our welcome as neighbors in need and people whose lands and livelihoods we have helped devastate.
USCMO leaders, members, and American Muslims generally stand with President Biden in his efforts to steer the nation to peaceful prosperity at home yet call for him to have the courage of his sworn convictions abroad for other peoples, especially the U.S.-abetted oppressed and beleaguered of the Middle East. It seems clear that the former cannot be achieved – neither in a president or in this nation – without the latter.
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