 U.S. President Joe Biden delivered his annual State of the Union address on March 1st. The speech came amid the war in Ukraine, in which U.S. manoeuvres have played a key part. Predictably, Biden used the speech as a rallying cry and projected a tough stance towards Russia. However, the speech did expose many of the gaps and failings of his international and domestic agenda. How did Biden use the speech to address the crisis in Ukraine? What was the approach he projected? Eugene Purir of Breakthrough News explains, I think Joe Biden opening the State of the Union speech in about 15 straight minutes around Ukraine was presenting a vision of extreme militarism and the continued militarism of Europe. I mean, there were no significant calls at all in Biden's speech for any form of negotiations, any form of ceasefire. It was just 100% directed towards how the U.S. is going to continue to send weapons, how the U.S. has $6.8 billion reserved, how they are drawing a line in the stands to steal a phrase from George H.W. Bush in the NATO countries in Eastern Europe, Romania, Poland, and the like, and essentially rattling the saber against Russia even more, saying that NATO isn't going to fight is what he said, but that they are willing to fight. So a little bit contradictory, but I think that you can see that really the nature of his speech was to 100% back Ukraine and to back the efforts of the European Union and the United States as well to pump even more weapons in the conflict and no call for peace. And in fact, he more or less denigrated, as the U.S. has done for the past few months now, he more or less denigrated the idea of diplomacy by saying that Russia wasn't interested in diplomacy and by telling a number of lies about Russia having rejected diplomatic overtures. So we can see that he's building up the agenda. I think an important subtext of this that people have to remember is one of the things that Biden will be bringing in the next couple months in front of the Congress will be his annual request for money for the Pentagon. Now the rumor has it that they're going to ask for $800 billion. This is $800 billion in one year, the largest ever request for the Pentagon. The U.S. National Defense Strategy has specifically listed competition between Russia and China as a reason the defense budget needs to be increased, which is something that many people in this country have criticized for years and continue to criticize. So I think a lot of Biden's presentation about what's going on and the context of the war, the fact that just before the speech, his officials told Congress people that they expected this war could go on for decades, meaning that it would go into an insurgency basis, that his that little 15 minutes in the State of the Union speech is very much trying to prepare the grounds for an even larger investment in war and militarism in the United States. When it came to the domestic front, a key focus area of the speech was inflation, where he claimed that he had solutions. In fact, Biden suggested that the policies he had been planning for so long, but it failed to pass are the solutions to inflation. However, whether he will be able to get these through remains a big question. He also presented a unity agenda, which was a series of proposals where there is supposedly bipartisan support and unity. What was Biden's solution to inflation and what were the points in his unity agenda? I thought Biden focusing so much on inflation was a little strange in some ways because the two main factors increasing inflation right now in the United States are energy costs and also used car sales. I mean, there is inflation and food and other things like that. But the reason it's sort of galloping is the cost of energy, both gas in your car, gas and your heaters, whatever it may be, is drastically increasing. And because of chip shortages and things like that, many more people who are looking for cars are buying used cars. So this is becoming a big area. And Biden not only didn't address that at all, but of course stated about he was talking about Ukraine. Don't worry about gas prices. And I don't know how anyone can credibly say that they're going to restrain gas prices while driving a war against Russia. So I think Biden's anti-inflation push more or less was saying, well, I'm not going to really address the key drivers of inflation, but I will address other major costs. Or if my plan is passed, I will address major costs for families, childcare costs in particular, also talking about raising the wage floor, $15 minimum wage, in addition with the child tax credit, also making more childcare generally available so women can return to the workforce so that there can be more two-income families. So he's basically saying, if my bills are passed and it's notable that this was just a complete rehash of the Build Back Better Plan, that the net result will be that your, the money out of your pocket every month and every year will go down even if some things are more expensive. And he did say that his government was on a regulatory level going to attack many of the monopolies, especially in the food industry and the meatpacking industry, that are obviously raising prices well above any supply chain issues or anything like that in order to profiteer in this moment. So that is the one thing that Biden attacked directly there is food prices, but these are long cases and things like that. So how quickly that can affect, I don't know. And quite frankly, almost every single thing from Build Back Better that he's now saying is now an anti-inflation plan, we know will almost never pass that there's no chance of it passing. So even though he's sinning the issue of inflation, talking about lowering costs for families, he's essentially more or less punted the ball as we say in the United States, kick the can down the road on actually doing anything by proposing as his anti-inflation plan, things that at least over the next, let's say six to nine months are very unlikely to happen. I think Biden's unity agenda is really important because the fact that he said, we have all these really important things that we need to do and spend a whole, the largest chunk of his speech talking about it, but then excluded all of those things from the unity agenda, lets you know that he himself knows that most of his plan will never pass. But the unity agenda is the lowest of low hanging fruit. And it's mainly things that have already been agreed to, very recently, so combating the opioid epidemic, that's something that's been bipartisan for some time. So increasing the amount of money to already existing programs to help those who become addicted to opioids should be relatively inconsequential. The issue of mental health where he specifically mentioned the issue of mental health parity in insurance. In the United States, a lot of insurance companies essentially discriminate against mental health versus physical health. And it can be very difficult for people to get mental health care at a decent cost, even if they are well insured. I mean, sometimes even very well insured because of that. So that's something that has been talked about. In fact, it's been something that Republicans have raised themselves over the years as a sort of pushback in terms of people saying, oh, Republicans are just for no one having healthcare. So it's one of the issues Republicans have consistently raised as, oh, no, no, we do care about healthcare and we wanna improve healthcare. So mental healthcare, that's something that can happen. Helping veterans in the United States, it's never difficult to get more money for anything related to the military in the United States. Obviously many veterans in the United States do need a lot of assistance because they were sent as cannon fodder to these meaningless wars all around the world, but it's something that is consistently can be done on a pretty regular basis. And some of the other things that he discussed in there as well, addressing issues with young people and the social media companies and the video game companies, that's something that has large bipartisan support and has for some time. When it comes to regulating what children see on television and movies on the internet, there's a big bipartisan majority around those sorts of issues and people wanting to make sure there are not too many things negatively happening towards young people in those arenas. So I mean, there are all things that in the most general sense, you can say like, oh, yeah, it's pretty good, but there are all things that are so low hanging fruit that almost no matter who was doing it in any seat in Congress, no matter who they were would vote for this, even if you changed every single person in every single government seat. So it just shows that the level of legislative gridlock in the United States is such that the only things that they can even potentially agree on, because it's not even clear they'll agree on this, the only things they can potentially agree on are things that quite frankly, and unfortunately, will really not in any way, shape, or form address the massive challenges facing working class people, especially in the US. Joe Biden also quoted a lot of controversy for his claim that the need of the hour was to fund the police. This was in response to the nationwide demand to defund the police. Biden's statement flies in the face of data and successful policy initiatives on this front. What did Biden mean with this statement? You know, I mean, it really says everything you need to know about the United States, that the two biggest bipartisan applause lines were for militarism vis-a-vis Ukraine and for more militarism vis-a-vis the police in the United States. Like that's the biggest bipartisan issue in Congress right now is increasing war at home and abroad. And you know, I think Biden might want to think about firing whoever wrote that speech with the fund the police thing, which was just, I mean, really, that's the best you could come up with. But you know, it's continuing to perpetuate the myth that there is a movement amongst politicians to defund the police. There is a movement obviously in society. So it's creating this fake boogeyman and it's obviously aimed towards the Republican criticism of the Democrats of not being for the police. And even in the context of him talking about quote unquote, creative solutions like violence interruption and non-police ways of addressing community violence, you know, it shows right there that it's all a canard because obviously the whole idea of increasing funding for non-police ways of addressing violence is to reduce the scope of policing in society to spend less money on the police and to need fewer police officers because you're addressing the issue in a different way. So the fact that he just kind of threw that bone to people who are criticizing them, but then went on to say, you know, you need more money for the police, the police need more money, they need to be controlled on anything is clearly ideological because quite frankly, we know from the actual facts that exist that the police are not very effective at solving public safety. And the fact that you can have a police department like New York City that has a larger budget than the military budget of Ukraine and they still are allegedly unable to address any of these issues and are themselves complaining just shows that it's a completely failed institution in terms of public safety, but it's ideological because of the law and order politics of which Biden was one of the originators in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. And he's obviously doubling down on that to try to appeal on a racist basis to suburban voters who are the key voting constituency for the Democrats, white suburban voters who are relatively affluent, who fear black people in particular on the basis of racist criminalization of black people. And he's looking to make sure that they blunt the appeal of Republicans to those people that the only way that you can stay safe from the black and brown hordes coming out into the suburbs and robbing, killing and raping is to have more cops. That's what that's all about. So it just shows that Biden and the Democrats are deeply committed to law and order vision rooted in a racist reality about what actually exists in terms of public safety in this country.