APR 24, 2019
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 “predators
on our streets” oratory on the Senate floor as he led
the successful effort to pass 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 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.” 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 bad guys.”
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 money.”
** 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
bankruptcy.”
** 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 welfare-reform bill, his eagerness to
support the repeal of Glass-Steagall.”
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
midterm 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 Sen. 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 repeated.
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