Our candidate should have a record that clearly contrasts with Trump, and a vision for the future. Biden’s record clouds the contrast and his vision for the future is to look to the past. Take a look below for what’s ahead if Biden is the nominee. If you support Biden or Sanders at this point, you should know Biden’s history.
You will see his own record undercuts many of the most obvious attack lines against Trump. This will be a liability in November if he can get to the Primary finish line without stumbling. Biden’s a corporate friendly centrist similar to our last candidate, Hillary Clinton. Her private speeches to Wall Street undercut her message to middle class workers. “If she’s on Wall Street’s side she can’t be on my side.” Biden has similar baggage. It looks like we’re repeating the failures of 2016. A candidate who promises more of the status quo, who puts business before people, who enthusiastically moves to the right for a compromise.
Social Security
Trump said he would cut Social Security in a recent interview.
Any Democratic candidate should be able to pounce on this and punish Trump. But not Biden. He already has called for cuts to social security.
theintercept.com/…
And after a Republican wave swept Congress in 1994, Biden’s support for cutting Social Security, and his general advocacy for budget austerity, made him a leading combatant in the centrist-wing battle against the party’s retreating liberals in the 1980s and ’90s.
“When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,” he told the Senate in 1995. “I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.” (A freeze would have reduced the amount that would be paid out, cutting the program’s benefit.)
War and Foreign Policy:
Trump somehow managed to stay out of starting new wars. But he did betray our ally the Kurds, leaving them open to a Turkish offensive which provided ISIS space to recover and rebuild. A close 2nd is Trump nullifying the Iran Deal. 3rd is Trumps failure to contain North Korea’s nuclear program. There’s a lot of material for a Democratic nominee to exploit.
Biden will have a hard time criticizing Trump’s foreign policy because Biden supported the Iraq War that ended up costing $2 trillion, 4,400 American soldiers lives, 32,000 wounded, 182,000 Iraqi civilians killed, and destabilized the region (which led to the formation of ISIS). This example of poor judgement largely neutralizes any attacks on Trump’s foreign policy.
Biden did more than just voting to authorize the War, he helped shape the narrative during the lead-up. He assisted in misleading the public even if it wasn’t his intention.
Biden did vastly more than just vote for the war. Yet his role in bringing about that war remains mostly unknown or misunderstood by the public. When the war was debated and then authorized by the US Congress in 2002, Democrats controlled the Senate and Biden was chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations. Biden himself had enormous influence as chair and argued strongly in favor of the 2002 resolution granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq.
“I do not believe this is a rush to war,” Biden said a few days before the vote. “I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur …”
But he had a power much greater than his own words. He was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position. They argued in favor of “regime change as the stated US policy” and warned of “a nuclear-armed Saddam sometime in this decade”. That Iraqis would “welcome the United States as liberators” And that Iraq “permits known al-Qaida members to live and move freely about in Iraq” and that “they are being supported”.
[...]
Senator Dick Durbin, who sat on the Senate intelligence committee at the time, was astounded by the difference between what he was hearing there and what was being fed to the public. “The American people were deceived into this war,” he said.
www.theguardian.com/...
Trade:
Trump pretends to protect American industry with Tariffs. Early in his term he also made some highly publicized moves to save manufacturing jobs. It was nonsense but it got enough air time to fool low information voters. These little stunts are a minor concern compared to this: Trump tore up the TPP and renegotiated a newer version of NAFTA with some worker protections added by Democrats.
Biden can’t say much about tariffs and offshoring jobs because he supported NAFTA and the TPP. This undercuts his image as the ordinary Joe from Scranton who supports union workers. These trade agreements are very unpopular and are blamed for stagnant wages and jobs lost to cheap oversees labor.
“There are many reasons Joe Biden is the least electable Democrat our side could possibly nominate,” said Adam Green, the co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which supports Elizabeth Warren. “Being seen as cozy with big corporations and loving to cut backroom deals with political insiders are two of those reasons — and they are exactly what trade deals like the TPP represent. That's the opposite of the outsider zeitgeist Trump tapped into in 2016 and will try to repeat in 2020.”
www.politico.com/...
Me Too:
Trump is accused of rape and other unwanted sexual advances.
Justice Clarence Thomas was accused of similar behavior. Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings. Biden totally bungled the hearings to the detriment of Anita Hill. His actions allowed Republicans to attack her reputation and cleared the path for a lifetime appointment of a right wing ideologue and sexual predator. This is a another example of Biden’s misguided attempts at bipartisanship.
www.newyorker.com/...
Biden failed to acknowledge that, as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, he set many of “the rules” that damaged Hill and determined the over-all fairness of the process. As Jill Abramson and I reported in our 1994 book about the Thomas confirmation fight, “Strange Justice,” several of Biden’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate later acknowledged that, in his eagerness to be impeccably fair to all sides, Biden got outmaneuvered by the Republicans. That left Hill and, ultimately, the truth undefended. As Howard Metzenbaum, a crusty Democrat from Ohio, later admitted, “Joe bent over too far backwards to accommodate the Republicans, who were going to get Thomas on the Court come hell or high water.” An adviser to Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts liberal whose own womanizing eroded his credibility, was more critical still, saying, “Biden agreed to the terms of the people who were out to disembowel Hill.”
Crime and Punishment
Trump has done little to reform our criminal justice system. But he orchestrated a high profile photo-op pardon with Kim Kardashian. It was a one-off but got lots of positive press coverage.
Biden will be on defense here. He helped write the 1994 Crime Bill that disproportionately incarcerated people of color.
If you ask some criminal justice reform activists, the 1994 crime law passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, which was meant to reverse decades of rising crime, was one of the key contributors to mass incarceration in the 1990s. They say it led to more prison sentences, more prison cells, and more aggressive policing — especially hurting black and brown Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated.
If you ask Biden, that’s not true at all. The law, he argued at a recent campaign stop, had little impact on incarceration, which largely happens at the state level. As recently as 2016, Biden defended the law, arguing it “restored American cities” following an era of high crime and violence.
www.vox.com/...
Corruption:
Trump has a long history of corruption. Russian money, the mob, lying on tax forms, money laundering, you name it he’s done it. Unfortunately Mueller decided that was all off-limits for his investigation but that’s another story.
Any attack launched by Biden on the grounds of Trump’s corruption will be blunted by Biden’s support of the Bankruptcy Bill of 2005. It was a massive giveaway to Credit Card companies and Banks, headquartered in Biden’s home State of Delaware (aka the Company State). They returned the favor with campaign contributions. The Bill led to skyrocketing student debt, estimated at over $1.5 trillion, and made it so average people were unable to declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debt. To make matters worse, this legislation was passed right before the Great Recession. The negative effects of this legislation are still felt to this day.
business.time.com/...
Two decades of further tweaks to the bankruptcy code ensued until 2005, when Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which made it so that no student loan — federal or private — could be discharged in bankruptcy unless the borrower can prove repaying the loan would cause “undue hardship,” a condition that is incredibly difficult to demonstrate unless the person has a severe disability.
www.theguardian.com/…
The Republican-led bill tightened the bankruptcy code, unleashing a huge giveaway to lenders at the expense of indebted student borrowers. At the time it faced vociferous opposition from 25 Democrats in the US Senate.
But it passed anyway, with 18 Democratic senators breaking ranks and casting their vote in favor of the bill. Of those 18, one politician stood out as an especially enthusiastic champion of the credit companies who, as it happens, had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions – Joe Biden.
Biden's interests were so aligned with MBNA's that in 1999 he was forced to defend himself by declaring, "I am not the senator from MBNA."
Corporate Consolidation and Monopoly Power
Trump and Republicans could be attacked for taking no action to reduce corporate consolidation. This concentrated wealth presents a danger to our economy as we found out during the Great Recession, and in general they produce higher prices, less competition and innovation, lower wages, and their concentrated wealth allows for political influence.
Biden’s record on these issues is awful. The unique laws in Delaware are a clue to how the ordinary guy from Scranton became a foot-soldier for the Banks and Credit Card companies. Here’s just one of many examples of Biden siding with powerful financial companies to the detriment of ordinary citizens.
Biden supported a baby-step deregulatory effort in the early 1980s, and then, in 1994, he backed a very big one: the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, which eliminated the remaining barriers to where banks could operate. The law passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was fairly innocuous in some respects, codifying changes that were already happening at the state level. But it opened the floodgates to an era of corporate consolidation. Delaware’s financial institutions got another big boost in 1999, when Biden voted for the Financial Services Modernization Act, which repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law barring banks from owning securities and insurance businesses. By 2016, there were almost 5,000 fewer banks in the United States than there were two decades earlier, and the 10 largest firms controlled half of all banking assets.
www.motherjones.com/...
Nepotism:
Trump uses his office to financially benefit his kid’s businesses.
This category of potential attack lines is blunted by Biden’s record. Republicans have been going after Hunter Biden and the sweet job he landed in Ukraine. Let’s ignore that for the moment. Biden’s son is hardly the first to get a job due to their parent’s status. But look back even further to the passage of the Bankruptcy bill and you’ll see Hunter’s involvement again. This one to me is more troubling.
For example, one of the biggest credit card companies in Delaware, MBNA, hired Joe Biden's son Hunter in 1996. Even after Hunter became a federal lobbyist in 2001, he stayed on at MBNA as a consultant at a fee of $100,000 per year, meaning he was pulling in a six-figure salary at the same time his father was pushing for the industry's top priorities. Biden's interests were so aligned with MBNA's that in 1999 he was forced to defend himself by declaring, "I am not the senator from MBNA." But even without the shadows of impropriety, critics of Biden's support for bankruptcy reform had plenty of fodder.
www.gq.com/…
Healthcare:
Trump wants to further dismantle Obamacare and has no plans to improve it.
Healthcare is the number one issue for voters but Biden can’t take full advantage on this issue because he only supports modest tweaks to a broken system.
*note: let me pause for a second and acknowledge Obamacare was a great achievement. That first step breaking inertia is always the toughest and most important. Medicare for All wouldn’t even be in the discussion if not for Obamacare.
Exit polling from Super Tuesday shows a majority of Democratic voters support Medicare for All. Biden is against Medicare for All and attacks it with dishonest portrayals of its cost versus the current system. His healthcare proposal is similar to Buttigiegs but even less ambitious.
He envisions a side by side private and public option. The problem is that private for-profit Health Insurance companies will shift unhealthy (unprofitable) patients to the government while retaining only the healthiest (most profitable). The tax payer foots the bill for the unhealthy while the for-profit Healthcare Industry collects premiums and pays little in care. That money goes to lavish CEO salaries instead of healthcare. It’s corporate socialism. Do most voters really want to give their hard earned money to healthcare CEO’s so they can buy luxury cars?
Here’s Wendell Potter’s take on Pete’s plan, similar but more ambitious than Bidens. Potter is a former executive at a for-profit Health Insurance company and an authority on Healthcare reform.
Moscow Mitch
Mitch is in lockstep with Trump and has a history of opposing everything Democrats want.
Biden thinks he can work deals with Mitch. He learned nothing about modern Republican obstructionism from his term as Vice President to Obama.
www.huffpost.com/...
And so that’ why I think you’re going to see even Mitch McConnell changing some ideas or being more ― how can I say ― mildly cooperative.
Stage Presence
Trump is a performer, a salesman and a con artist.
Biden is unsteady, loses his thoughts and has trouble with recalling facts and figures. Not a good combination for that match-up.
Influenced by Special Interests
Trump has a long laundry list of conflicts of interests and people he owes favors.
Biden has strong ties to the financial industries located in his home State of Delaware as mentioned above. He’s done their bidding and received their contributions. Two Thirds of Biden’s campaign contributions for his Presidential run came from large contributions from wealthy donors. He has been busy collecting Wall Street money at the tune of $2.8 million, so far. This cuts into Biden’s image as average Joe from Scranton on the side of workers.
Climate Change:
Trump doesn’t believe in it. He tore up the Paris Agreement.
Biden has a plan, but it is inadequate. And who are we kidding, he would never do what is required to take action. In his mind it’s too expensive to deal with, and he will never raise taxes on the rich, who funded his campaign. Jay Inslee had probably the most comprehensive plan to deal with Climate Change had this to say to Biden during a debate:
www.motherjones.com/...
“Look these deadlines are set by science,” Inslee said, turning to Biden. “Mr Vice President, your argument is not with me, it’s with science. And unfortunately your plan is just too late. The science says we have to get off coal in 10 years. Your plan does not do that. We have to get off of fossil fuels from our electric grid in 15. Your plan simply does not do that. I’ve heard you say we need a realistic plan,” Inslee continued, “Survival is realistic and that’s the kind of plan I have”
Final Thoughts
Wall Street, the for-profit Health Insurers, Bankers and Big Business got what they wanted on Super Tuesday. Their celebration when Biden took the lead is revealing. They know Biden will never shake up the corrupt system. They win no matter which Party prevails. FDR said of these special interest, “I welcome their hatred”. Biden welcomes their campaign contributions and won’t stand in their way no matter how detrimental their greed is to ordinary people.
www.cnbc.com/…
Wall Street
The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 1,173.45 points higher, or 4.5%, to 27,090.86. The S&P 500 jumped 4.2% to 3,130.12, while the Nasdaq Composite advanced 3.8% to 9,018.09. The Dow posted its second-highest point gain ever, and it was the second time in three days that the 30-stock average swung 1,000 points or higher.
Healthcare Industry
Tuesday’s primary results sent health-care stocks flying. The S&P health care sector surged 5.8%, posting its best day since 2008. UnitedHealth and Centene jumped 10.7% and 15.6%, respectively. Shares of UnitedHealth had their biggest one-day gain since 2008.
Biden has no grand vision for reforms, only a return to the dysfunctional society of 4 years ago. A candidate who supported an expensive disastrous War, but claims there’s no money to invest in our people in the form of popular social programs. Biden’s own troubling record inhibits him from fully prosecuting the case against Trump. There’s still time to vote for a stronger candidate. Bernie Sanders will fight for us. The next generation knows this and support him by large margins. Look to the future and not the past.
