APRIL 26, 2019
by PAUL STREET
Besides being a grabby old
coot who needs to stop joking about complaints over his serially inappropriate
touching of females, Joe Biden is a grinning neoliberal sell-out who stands
well to the right of majority progressive public opinion. No elegantly crafted
three-and-a-half minute campaign launch video on the horrors of Charlottesville
and Donald Trump can change that essential fact.
The media trope that portrays
“Lunch-Bucket Joe” Biden as a regular, down-to-earth guy who cares deeply about
regular folks is pure, unadulterated bullshit. His real constituents wear
pinstripe suits and works on Wall Street and in corporate headquarters. They
fly around in fancy private jets. And the supposed “everyman liberal” Joe Biden
is their loyal apparatchik.
“The Folks at the Top Aren’t
Bad Guys”
It’s not for nothing that
Biden relies on big money backers, not small and working-class donors – and
that he is an especially close ally and beneficiary of Washington lobbyists. He
has spent decades ripping on progressive “special interests” while joining with
Republicans to advance policies harmful to the working-class.
In 1978, Biden worked for Wall
Street by voting to rollback bankruptcy protections for college graduates with
federal student loans. Six years later he did the same to vocational school
graduates. In 2005, he worked with Republican allies to pass the Bankruptcy
Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which put traditional “clean
slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy out of reach for millions of ordinary Americans and
thousands of small businesses. The bill put bankruptcy filers under far
stricter Chapter 13 rules, turning countless citizens into de facto indentured
servants of finance capital (including the many credit card companies
headquartered in Delaware.) Biden backed an earlier version of the bill that
was too corporatist even for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
He voted against a bill that
would have compelled credit card companies to warn customers of the costs of
only making minimum payments.
In 1979, Biden recognized
campaign donations from Coca-Cola by cosponsoring a bill that permitted
soft-drink producers to skirt antitrust laws. That same year he was one of just
two Congressional Democrats to vote against a Judiciary Committee measure to
increase consumers’ rights to sue corporations for price-fixing.
Biden strongly supported the
1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which permitted the re-merging of investment and
commercial banking by repealing the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act. This
helped create the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent recession.
Biden naturally supported the
corporate-neoliberal North American Free Trade agreement and the globalist
investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.
All of this and more in
Biden’s record is richly consistent with the beginning of his political career.
He’s been an unapologetic corporatist from the start. As Branko Marcetic noted
on Jacobin last summer:
“In 1984, the Washington
Post specifically named him, along with Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, as one
of the best-known figures among that era’s Democratic Party’s ‘neo-liberals,’
who ‘singled out slimming the role of government and pushing new technology’….Biden
built his career advertising himself as someone who refuses to toe the
progressive line. He proudly boasted of defying liberal orthodoxy
on school busing, for instance. But throughout his career, that boast has
most often taken the form of bashing liberal ‘special interests.’
Biden toured the country in 1985 chiding…unions and farmers for being
too narrowly focused, and complained that Democrats too often ‘think in terms
of special interests first and the greater interest second.’ In the latter
case, Biden was specifically complaining about their opposition to his
calls for a spending freeze on entitlements and an increase in the
retirement age” (emphasis added).
“The Anti-Populist”
Biden is so corporatist and
pro-Wall Street that he can’t join the other corporate (neo) liberals in the
2020 presidential horse race in playing what a still-Left Christopher Hitchens
once called (in a sharp volume on the neoliberal Clintons) “the essence of
American politics”: “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Biden won’t
deign to pay lip-service to populism. Indeed, he has billed himself the
“anti-populist” – the antidote to both the right-wing reactionary populism of
Trump and the leftish progressive populism of Bernie Sanders.
Biden absurdly criticizes
those who advocate a universal basic income of “selling American workers short”
and undermining the “dignity” of work. He opposes calls for free college
tuition and Single Payer health insurance. He defends Big Business from popular
criticism, writing in 2017 that “Some want to single out big corporations for
all the blame. … But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold
every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy.”
That’s called blaming the
working-class victim. It’s also called propagating a fantasy – the existence of
a political system in which the working-class majority has the power to hold
concentrated wealth and power accountable.
“I don’t think five hundred
billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad
guys,” he told the Brookings Institution last year – this as he claimed to
worry about how the “gap is yawning” between the super-rich and the rest.
“I Have No Empathy…Give Me a
Break”
Joe Biden is such a
right-winger that he has even gone so far as to say that he has “no empathy”
for Millennials struggle to get by in the savagely unequal and insecure
precariat economy he helped create over his many, many years of service to the
Lords of Capital. “The younger generation now tells me how tough things
are—give me a break,” said Biden, while speaking to Patt Morrison of the Los
Angeles Times last year. “No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a
break.”
So what if Millennials face a
significant diminution of opportunity, wealth, income and security compared to
the Baby Boomers with whom Biden identifies? Who cares if he helped shrink the
American Dream for young people with the neoliberal policies and politics he
helped advance?
“Reaching Across the Aisle to
Get [Capitalist] Things Done”
How Biden has managed to
simultaneously distance himself from majority progressive-populist sentiments
and pose as a friend of the everyday working man is an interesting question
that probably can’t be answered without factoring in the Orwellian role of
corporate media in promoting love as hate, war as peace, black as white, and
corporate apparatchiks as regular working-class guys.
A critical part of Joe
“Anti-Populist” Biden’s media-crafted appeal is his “get things done” claim to
be able to “reach out across the aisle” in the famous, hallowed, and CNN- and
“P”BS-honored “spirit of bipartisanship.” That’s a shame. Why should we want a
president who promises to team up with the widely loathed and creeping fascist
white-nationalist Republican Party? And what has the holy bipartisanship that
Biden is celebrated for embracing wrought for We the People over the years?
Not much. As Andrew Cockburn
wrote last month at Harpers:
“By tapping into…popular
tropes—‘The system is broken,’ ‘Why can’t Congress just get along?’—the
practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident
reality: that the system is under sustained assault by a [bipartisan] ideology
bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a
greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought
us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of
black people [Biden backed Bill Clinton’s ‘Three Strikes’ crime and prison bill
– P.S.], 1990s welfare ‘reform’ [Biden backed the Clinton-Gingrich abolition of
Aid for Families with Dependent Children], Wall Street deregulation and the
consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use
of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system
is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to
break it” (emphasis added).
Biden even took his embrace of
the supposedly sacred virtue of bipartisanship to the grotesque level of forming
close friendships with vicious southern white racists like Republican Senators
Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the frothing warmonger John
McCain.
With Biden as with Barack
Obama, Bill Clinton and a long line of dismal dollar Democrats in the
neoliberal era, there’s an accurate translation for “reaching across the aisle
to get things done:” joining hands across the two major party wings of the
same corporate-imperial bird of prey to make policy in accord with the wishes
of the rich and powerful.
“A March to Peace and
Security”
Speaking of young people and
empire, no assessment of “Lunch Bucket Joe” (LBJ) Biden is complete without
reference to what Institute for Policy Studies foreign policy analyst Stephen
Zunes calls Biden’s “key role in making possible an inappropriate and utterly
disastrous war” – the monumentally criminal and mass-murderous U.S. invasion of
Iraq. As Zunes explains at The Progressive:
“As chair of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden stated that Saddam Hussein
had a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons as well as biological weapons,
including anthrax, and that ‘he may have a strain’ of smallpox, despite UN
inspectors reporting that Iraq no longer appeared to have any weaponized
chemical or biological agents. And even though the International Atomic Energy
Agency had reported as far back as 1997 that there was no evidence
whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted that
Saddam was ‘seeking nuclear weapons.’”
“At the start of hearings before
his committee on July 31, 2002, Biden stated, ‘One thing is clear: These
weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.
If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late…
“In an Orwellian twist of
language designed to justify the war resolution, Biden claimed in
Senate session in October 2002, ‘I do not believe this is a rush to war. I
believe it is a march to peace and security.’ This gave President Bush the
unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that
was no threat to the United States” (emphasis added).
It was an invasion that led to
the premature death of 4500 mostly younger U.S. Americans – and of course to
much larger Iraqi casualties.
The “Stop Sanders Democrats”
Why is this dirty old
imperialist and corporatist dog being rolled out to corporate media acclaim as
the supposed people’s alternative to Trump in the White House? It’s all about
blocking Bernie Sanders, who is the Democrats’ best chance to win back the
presidency since he nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination three
years ago (Sanders would have prevailed over the vapid centrist Hillary Clinton
but for the corrupt shenanigans of the Democratic National Committee) and is
still running (as before) in sincere accord with majority-progressive-populist
sentiments on key domestic issues. Norman Solomon has explained it well here
at Counterpunch:
“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 They’re Floating
Alternatives.’…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, Sen. 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’” (emphasis added).
Only the popular front-runner
Sanders is likely to prevail against Trump even without a recession (certainly
a possibility) between now and the election. But, as in the last presidential
cycle, corporate-Democratic politicos are working to sabotage the nomination of
their most viable candidate in the general election. They are:
+ Flooding the primary
campaign with such an absurdly large number of candidates that Sanders will
likely be unable to garner the majority of primary delegates required for a
first-ballot nomination at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in
Milwaukee.
+ Coordinating among the
Democratic Convention super-delegates—the more than 350 county and state party
bosses and elected officials who are granted delegate status without
election—to vote as a bloc to stop Sanders on the convention’s second
ballot. (These super-delegates exist precisely for the purpose of blocking
challengers to the party’s corporate establishment.)
+ Working to change state
party elections from caucuses to primaries, as caucuses are friendlier to
progressive challengers. (Sanders won 11 of the nation’s 18 caucus states three
years ago.)
+ Smearing Sanders’ popular
social-democratic policy agenda as “fantastic,” “unaffordable,” “unrealistic”
and too dangerously “socialist”—this while Democratic elites refuse to
acknowledge the fascist tendencies of the president they helped elect in 2016.
+ Branding the electable
Sanders “unelectable” on the grounds that he is an “extremist” who is “too far
left” for the U.S. electorate generally and independent voters specifically.
The “unelectable” charge is
false. Sanders appeals to independents (who are nowhere near as conservative as
is commonly reported), people of color, infrequent voters and the white
working-class that has largely abandoned the Democratic Party.
His anti-establishment
message, coupled with his long record of representing rural voters, makes him
highly competitive with Trump, not only in the Rust Belts states where Hillary
Clinton faltered but even in some dark red states like West Virginia. Even the
likes of Karl Rove believe Sanders could defeat Trump in 2020.
Biden is part of the corporate
“Stop Sanders” campaign inside the Democratic Party. It helps that he is a
white male in an election cycle shaped by the Democrats’ fear that running a
woman and/or person of color might fuel the patriarchal and racist sentiments
of the Trump base, increasing its turnout in battleground states.
Look for the Democratic
establishment to do everything it can to prevent its party from defeating Trump
by running its most popular candidate, Bernie Sanders. Surprised? You shouldn’t
be. The Democratic Party exists to serve its corporate clients. Its leaders
fear the specter of socialism while the world’s most powerful nation threatens
to slide into fascism. (Never mind that democratic eco-socialism—a political
project significantly more radical than what Sanders is proposing—is precisely
what America and the world need right now.) Establishment Democrats would
rather lose to a white-nationalist right than even the mildly social-democratic
left within their own party. It’s why the late political scientist Sheldon
Wolin labeled them “the Inauthentic Opposition.”
The Best Thing Joe Can Do
Joe Biden can wave the bloody
flag of Charlottesville all he wants. He is the distilled essence of neoliberal
Fake Resistance and Inauthentic Opposition. Barring an economic meltdown
between now and the first Tuesday in November of 2020, look for him to get
knocked out by the orange beast in the general election if the “Stop Sanders”
Democrats are successful.
Keep your passports up to
date. Trumpism is Amerikaner fascism, eager to up its ugly game by stepping
beyond mere flirtation with mass violence. As Paul Krugman recently told a
nonplussed Anderson Cooper on CNN, “if you’re not terrified” yet, then “you]re
not paying attention”:
Cooper: “You write that it’s
very much up in the air whether America as we know it will survive.”
Krugman: “Institutions depend
upon the willingness of people to obey norms, and occasionally to say, okay,
‘this is not how we do things in our country.’ …This didn’t start with Trump.
There’s been a steady erosion of those norms. This has been building for a long
time, and we’re very close to the edge right now.”
Cooper: “When you say close to
the edge, what does that mean to you?”
Krugman: “You know, on paper,
we’ll stay a democracy,
but I worry very much about a sort of Hungary-type situation where you have on
paper the institutions of democracy. You even hold votes, but the system is
rigged, and in fact, it’s become effectively you have a one-party rule…We’re
very close. If Trump is re-elected if the Republicans retake control of the
House, what are the odds that we will really have a functioning democracy after
that?”
Cooper: “I mean, that’s a
pretty terrifying idea”
Krugman: “If you’re not
terrified, you’re not paying attention”
What Biden said in his launch
video yesterday morning is correct: “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the
White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this
nation…We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville.” A second Trump term is
not a pleasant thing to contemplate. Biden says he “can’t stand by and let that
happen.”
The irony is the best thing he
could do to stop a second Trump term is to stand aside and tell the rest of the
candidate field and voters to congeal behind Sanders. The corporate-neoliberal
Democratic Clinton-Obama model is what put the supremely dangerous orange
monster in the White House in the first place in 2016. The establishment
Democrats, who prefer barbarism to even the mildest hint of socialism, are
working to give the monster a second term. If Joe really hates fascism as much
as his launch video suggests, then he needs to de-launch. Maybe some activists
in Iowa or New Hampshire can set up for his final, politically fatal gropes.
Extreme times call for extreme
measures. His candidacy is terrifying.
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