Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I’m a day late, just catching up with Joe Biden’s speech in Pittsburgh, yesterday, and after having watched his 3.5 minute Announcement speech.
I left the following comment at YouTube at the speech site today, here at:
I thought this was a pretty good speech. It should have been given many, many Labor Days ago; he's had 16 Labor Days under President Clinton and Obama to deliver the loss of standing, labor dignity speech, but neither he, those two presidents or indeed, the AFL-CIO has ever given it. It seems too late, sadly and cruelly late to me, as I indicated in a previous posting: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/3/13/1841829/-Where-Have-You-Been-All-These-Years-Joe-Biden
And it is blurry, as the American Dream is blurry between the Middle Class and Working class: were the old peak America unionized workers in steel and autos working class or middle class? We've always had trouble with that, and even the Unions speak in Middle class terms, that the unions built the middle class, meaning being a blue collar worker has never been a resting place, it was a place you left after putting in your time and then rising to the middle class.
Blue collar people have been destroyed by 40 years of Neoliberalism, and I include Carter, Clinton and Obama in that grouping - and Joe Biden. Sounds like he has regrets, but it’s too late. It's the Green New Deal that's a building, and Bernie Sanders said it early and consistently, not the Democratic Centrists like Biden. It's the old two step: talk working class/middle class progressive, but act centrist and upper middle class. That's the trajectory of the Dem Party as Thomas Frank has shown us...Joe has new stripes to fit the populist revolt on the left, but the truth of his career is he's done well as the Democratic Party has become an upper middle class professional party, and alienated blue collar folks have gone right on the culture wars, become Republican, because no Dem since FDR or Truman has stood, (and spoken) the way Biden sounded today in terms of policy, not even LBJ, whose obsession with Vietnam was built on the deaths and maiming of the working class for Cold War illusions, and began the destruction of this country, its downward spiral. The same illusions as our crusades in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. Still draining the country. It's Sanders and the Green New Deal for me, had enough of the Clintons, Obamas and Bidens.
And I will add a policy note which I didn’t post at the You Tube speech site: that aside from the combative emotional tone, at times, of this speech, which I liked, pain and anger mixed, on how working people have been diminished, Joe Biden is now well behind the curve of climate disruption and working class disruption, solutions, remedies, far, far behind the policies outlined in the Green New Deal resolution. A job guarantee, a decent job guarantee, a Climate Conservation Corps, regional green banks for lagging rural America...and on and on…
Editor’s Note: Some readers/commentators are clamoring for more substance in the criticisms here of Joe Biden: I offer these links in an edit of the post: inthesetimes.com/… (by Branko Marcetic on Biden’s bid to cut Social Security and Medicare in the grand bargains placed on the table under the Bowles-Simpson “bipartisan” hopes; and by the same author at Jacobin, “Joe Biden is a Disaster Waiting to Happen,” here at www.jacobinmag.com/… and “Joe Biden, Neoliberal,” also at www.jacobinmag.com/… and a “Bernie isn’t McGovern, but Biden might be Humphrey” here www.jacobinmag.com/…