Day 316…
The new Administration has immediately ceased construction on the Mexican border wall. Funds that had been directed to it will be directed elsewhere.
Immigrants who had been brought to the US as children now have a clearer path to citizenship. The Obama-era DACA program will survive and be strengthened. Non-citizens will no longer be excluded from the census count. Aggressive efforts to deport undocumented immigrants have been halted. The ban on travel from several Muslim nations has been lifted and the harm that those bans may have caused will be addressed.
The United States has rejoined the World Health Organization. Dr. Anthony Fauci will head the American delegation to the executive board.
Jeffrey D. Zients, who under President Obama was the head of the National Economic Council, has been made the official COVID-19 response coordinator whose first duty will be to raise the level of the nation’s response to the pandemic.
On all federal property throughout the US and its territories, mask-wearing and social distancing is now mandatory. No longer will aides be walking the halls of the White House without them. There is no way to institute a national mask-wearing mandate but a “100-day masking challenge” has been initiated to urge people to do so.
The United States of America will re-enter the Paris Accord in thirty days. We will rejoin the nearly 200 countries who are working together to move away from the use of fossil fuels.
The Keystone XL pipeline permit has been revoked. A temporary halt to oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic has been extended. Vehicle emission standards that had been rolled back have been reinstated.
Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument have been restored to their former sizes, with development within their borders prohibited. A group that will work together to examine the social costs of greenhouse gases has been formed.
The 1776 Commission, created with the aim to rewrite and distort US history from a white perspective, has been disbanded.
Federal agencies and their contractors will now need to resume diversity and inclusion training. Susan E. Rice, who, as of yesterday, now heads the Domestic Policy Council, has been put in charge of an intra-agency effort to combat systemic racism in the way that these agencies currently operate. They have 200 days to review and report on the equity within their structures.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that requires that the Federal government not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity has been reinforced after having been diluted.
A federal moratorium on evictions during this crisis is now on the way to being extended. The Departments of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development have also all been asked to extend their moratoriums on foreclosures on federally guaranteed mortgages.
There is movement towards a continuation of the temporary halt to the accrual of interest on student loans with the hope that it will continue at least through September. There is discussion about possibly forgiving a portion of every student’s debt.
All of the new appointees in the executive branch of our government have been ordered to sign an ethics pledge. A clear set of ethical rules has been set.
Every one of the executive orders that were signed following the election on November 6 have been put on hold until they can be reviewed and evaluated. Those without merit will be discarded.
All of that happened just yesterday afternoon.
Over the course of one half of one day, the government of the United States began to operate again.
This morning, there are reports that when the Biden administration officials were finally able to investigate the COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan yesterday, what they found was that there wasn’t one. There was nothing that needed to be reworked because there was exactly nothing in place. Today, a distribution plan for the coronavirus vaccine is beginning to be built from the ground up. President Biden ran on a promise to get 100 million vaccines into arms in the first 100 days he was in office. Zients says that that is still possible.
Operation Warp Speed chief scientific advisor Moncef Slaoui and Surgeon General Jerome Adams have been asked to resign.
Peter Robb, the appointed general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board was also asked to resign. Robb was an attorney who helped Reagan defeat the air traffic controllers’ union. During his tenure he relentlessly pushed a pro-corporate agenda at the expense of American workers. Robb, with 10 months left to go on his appointment, refused to resign so President Biden fired him.
In my career, I have worked with directors who rely on the people they hire to run the various different parts of their productions. They issue the mandates and all of us then march off to fulfill them. Much of what happens is then taken care of within our various departments.
This type of director is focused on the endgame and they are not concerned with the minutiae of how we get there. When an issue comes up that effects the final product, then and only then is the matter brought to the director’s attention. The rest of the time, they forge our path forward.
I have also worked with directors who want to know everything that is going on at every minute of the day. They don’t trust the people they’ve hired to be able to make even the most mundane decisions on their own.
Invariably, easily solved issues, become more complicated and more fraught because of the director’s involvement. They lose track of the bigger picture and final result and everyone suffers as a result. They don’t trust discussions that happen outside of their earshot so they keep everyone who works for them as much in the dark about the overall plan as they can. Nobody, therefore, can actually do any work on their own because nobody knows where they are going.
I don’t work for that second kind of director twice. Those directors look at everyone else on the production as tools rather than as colleagues.
Regardless of which kind of director is at the helm, that person is in charge.
A director who trusts the people who work with them and shares their plans and concerns and allows the work to happen.
A director who doesn’t stifles the creativity of everyone involved and keeps the final product from being everything that it can be.
I wouldn’t have stayed with Jersey Boys for a decade and a half if Des McAnuff weren’t one of the former. He knows that I know what he wants and trusts me to give it to him.
Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes he changes his mind about something. Sometimes I disagree with him but at the end of the day, it’s his show, so if he wants something a certain way, that’s how it’s done. He will always, and I mean always, hear me out. Every once in a while, not often mind you, but it has happened, he will say, “You were right.”
This, from what I can see, is the kind of leader we now have in President Biden.
Yesterday he very firmly signaled what kind of President he is going to be. He has thrown a lot of balls up into the air and he is trusting the remarkable people he has chosen to support him to do the actual juggling and get in there to keep them aloft.
He will continually throw more and more balls into the mix. When some of them drop or when something happens to make the juggling that much more difficult, he will step in and help. Otherwise, he will leave them alone to do their jobs and they will report back on how things are going.
Yesterday, I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I realized exactly who we had elected to run this country.
Watching our our nation’s artists come together last night to celebrate his inauguration was another huge sigh of relief.
It has been four long years since we’ve heard or seen anything like it. It’s hard to put on a compelling performance when all you have to work with is Kid Rock and Dean Cain.
Last night, it felt like Glinda was calling all the good Munchkins back out of their houses.
Beautifully performed and beautifully produced, the evening began with Tom Hanks and ended with Katy Perry singing Firework in front of one of the most spectacular evening of fireworks we’ve ever seen.
Real performing artists and technicians and craftspeople put that show together and they knew exactly what they were doing.
It felt like we were back.
It felt like it was safe to come out of our houses.
In short, it feels like, once again, we are living in the United States of America.
Wonderfully written!
It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, for you and me!