Richard,
If the Democratic Party is stupid enough to choose him, we'll have another
four years of Donald Trump. At the end of that time, any traces of democracy
that we have now, will be gone.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of R. E. Driscoll Sr
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 6:01 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Joe Biden: Puffery vs. Reality
All: Looks and sounds like Joe Biden will be an excellent Democratic
candidate for POTUS.
Richard
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 24, 2019, at 3:36 PM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
"predators on our streets"
Joe Biden: Puffery vs. Reality
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
24 April 19
Let's be blunt: As a supposed friend of American workers, Joe Biden
is a phony. And now that he's running for president, Biden's huge task
is to hide his phoniness.
From the outset, with dim prospects from small donors, the Biden
campaign is depending on big checks from the rich and corporate elites
who greatly appreciate his services rendered. "He must rely heavily,
at least at first, upon an old-fashioned network of money bundlers -
political insiders, former ambassadors and business executives," The
New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Biden has a media image that exudes down-to-earth caring and advocacy
for regular folks. But his actual record is a very different story.
During the 1970s, in his first Senate term, Biden spouted white
backlash rhetoric, used tropes pandering to racism, and teamed up with
arch segregationists against measures like busing for school
integration. He went on to be a fount of racially charged appeals and
oratory on the Senate floor as he led the successful effort to passThey're Floating Alternatives."
the now-notorious 1994 crime bill.
A gavel in Biden's hand repeatedly proved to be dangerous. In 1991, as
chair of the Judiciary Committee, Biden prevented key witnesses from
testifying to corroborate Anita Hill's accusations of sexual
harassment during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings for the
Supreme Court. In 2002, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee,
Biden was the Senate's most crucial supporter of the Iraq invasion.
Meanwhile, for well over four decades - while corporate media preened
his image as "Lunch Bucket Joe" fighting for the middle class - Biden
continued his assist for strengthening oligarchy as a powerful
champion of legalizing corporate plunder on a mind-boggling scale.
Now, Joe Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the
Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders.
Urgency is in the media air. Last week, The New York Times told
readers that "Stop Sanders" Democrats were "agonizing over his
momentum." The story was front-page news. At The Washington Post, a
two-sentence headline appeared just above a nice photo of Biden:
"Far-Left Policies Will Drive a 2020 Defeat, Centrist Democrats Fear. So
bad guys."
Biden is the most reliable alternative for corporate America. He has
what Sanders completely lacks - vast experience as an elected official
serving the interests of credit-card companies, big banks, insurance
firms, and other parts of the financial services industry. His
alignment with corporate interests has been comprehensive. It was a
fulcrum of his entire political career when, in 1993, Senator Biden
voted yes while most Democrats in Congress voted against NAFTA.
In recent months, from his pro-corporate vantage point, Biden has been
taking potshots at the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders. At a
gathering in Alabama last fall, Biden said: "Guys, the wealthy are as
patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn't like me saying that, but
they are." Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he told an
audience at the Brookings Institution, "I don't think five hundred
billionaires are the reason we're in trouble. The folks at the top aren't
money."
Overall, in sharp contrast to the longstanding and continuing negative
coverage of Sanders, mainstream media treatment of Biden often borders
on reverential. The affection from so many high-profile political
journalists toward Biden emerged yet again a few weeks ago during the
uproar about his persistent pattern of intrusively touching women and
girls. During one cable news show after another, reporters and pundits
were at pains to emphasize his essential decency and fine qualities.
But lately, some independent-minded journalists have been exhuming
what "Lunch Bucket Joe" is eager to keep buried. For instance:
Libby Watson, Splinter News: "Joe Biden is telling striking workers
he's their friend while taking money from, and therefore being
beholden to, the class of people oppressing them. According to Axios,
Biden's first fundraiser will be with David Cohen, the executive vice
president of and principal lobbyist for Comcast. Comcast is one of
America's most hated companies, and for good reason. It represents
everything that sucks for the modern consumer-citizen, for whom things
like internet or TV access are extremely basic necessities, but who
are usually given the option of purchasing it from just one or two
companies." What's more, Comcast supports such policies as "ending net
neutrality and repealing broadband privacy protections.... And Joe
Biden is going to kick off his presidential campaign by begging for their
bankruptcy."
Ryan Cooper, The Week: "As a loyal toady of the large corporations
(especially finance, insurance, and credit cards) that put their
headquarters in Delaware because its suborned government allows them
to evade regulations in other states, Biden voted for repeated rounds
of deregulation in multiple areas and helped roll back anti-trust
policy - often siding with Republicans in the process. He was a key
architect of the infamous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill which made means
tests much more strict and near-impossible to discharge student loans in
welfare-reform bill, his eagerness to support the repeal of Glass-Steagall."
Paul Waldman, The American Prospect: "Joe Biden, we are told over and
over, is the one who can speak to the disaffected white men angry at
the loss of their primacy. He's the one who doesn't like abortion, but
is willing to let the ladies have them. He's the one who tells white
people to be nice to immigrants, even as he mirrors their xenophobia
('You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a
slight Indian accent,' he said in 2006). He's the one who validates
their racism and sexism while gently trying to assure them that
they're still welcome in the Democratic Party.... It's not yet clear
what policy agenda Biden will propose, though it's likely to be pretty
standard Democratic fare that rejects some of the more ambitious goals
other candidates have embraced. But Biden represents something more
fundamental: a link to the politics and political style of the past."
Rebecca Traister, The Cut: "Much of what Democrats blame Republicans
for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose
confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to
disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights,
reproductive rights, voting rights.... In his years in power, Biden
and his party (elected thanks to a nonwhite base enfranchised in the
1960s) built the carceral state that disproportionately imprisons and
disenfranchises people of color, as part of what Michelle Alexander
has described as the New Jim Crow. With his failure to treat seriously
claims of sexual harassment made against powerful men on their way to
accruing more power (claims rooted in prohibitions that emerged from
the feminist and civil-rights movements of the 1970s), Biden created a
precedent that surely made it easier for accused harassers, including
Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, to nonetheless ascend. Economic
chasms and racial wealth gaps have yawned open, in part thanks to Joe
Biden's defenses of credit card companies, his support of that odious
repeated.
One of Biden's illuminating actions came last year in Michigan when he
gave a speech - for a fee of $200,000 including "travel allowance" -
that praised the local Republican congressman, Fred Upton, just three
weeks before the mid-term election. From the podium, the former vice
president lauded Upton as "one of the finest guys I've ever worked
with." For good measure, Biden refused to endorse Upton's Democratic
opponent, who went on to lose by less than 5 percent.
Biden likes to present himself as a protector of the elderly.
Campaigning for Senator Bill Nelson in Florida last autumn, Biden
denounced Republicans for aiming to "cut Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid." Yet five months earlier, speaking to the Brookings
Institution on May 8, Biden spoke favorably of means testing that
would go a long way toward damaging political support for Social
Security and Medicare and smoothing the way for such cuts.
Indications of being a "moderate" and a "centrist" play well with the
Washington press corps and corporate media, but amount to a surefire
way to undermine enthusiasm and voter turnout from the base of the
Democratic Party. The consequences have been catastrophic, and the
danger of the party's deference to corporate power looms ahead. Much
touted by the same kind of insular punditry that insisted Hillary
Clinton was an ideal candidate to defeat Donald Trump, the ostensible
"electability" of Joe Biden has been refuted by careful analysis of data.
As a former Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National
Convention and a current coordinator of the relaunched independent
Bernie Delegates Network for 2019, I remain convinced that the media
meme about choosing between strong progressive commitments and
capacity to defeat Trump is a false choice. On the contrary, Biden
exemplifies a disastrous approach of jettisoning progressive
principles and failing to provide a progressive populist alternative
to right-wing populism. That's the history of 2016. It should not be
Email This Page
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of
RootsAction.org. He is the author of a dozen books including War Made
Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back
to Reader Supported News.
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