Old white male plutocrat: Dems & media have no shame backing Joe Biden, who personifies exactly what they bash Trump for
Do the Democratic Party’s leadership and its many allied mainstream media outlets have no shame? They are determined to run Joe Biden, a presidential candidate who embodies many of the evils for which they condemn Donald Trump.
Corporate Joe
Democrats rightly charge the reputed billionaire Donald Trump with serving the wealthy few. Yes, but what about Joe? His corporatist and pro-Wall Street record in Congress included votes to rollback bankruptcy protections for college graduates (1978) and vocational school graduates (1984) with federal student loans.
He worked with Republicans to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which put “clean slate” Chapter-7 bankruptcy out of reach for millions of ordinary Americans (2005).
Biden voted against a bill that would have compelled credit card companies to warn customers of the costs of only making minimum payments. He honored campaign cash from Coca-Cola by cosponsoring a bill that permitted soft-drink producers to skirt antitrust laws (1979).
He joined just one other Congressional Democrat to vote against a Judiciary Committee measure to increase consumers’ rights to sue corporations for price-fixing (1979).
He strongly backed 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, which led to a massive taxpayer bailout of the rich combined with little for the rest of the population – a policy that Biden backed as vice presidential candidate and as Vice President).
During his time as a US Senator, “lunch bucket Joe” Biden supported the globalist investor rights North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which cost millions of US manufacturing workers their jobs.
Adding neoliberal insult to neoliberal injury, presidential candidate Biden has criticized those who advocate a universal basic income (a fundamental need, in the wake of the current Covid-19 crash) of “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work.
Biden opposes calls for supposedly “too expensive” universal Single Payer health insurance, going so far as to say he would veto a Medicare for All bill as president! He defends Big Business and the rich from popular criticism, mocking those who “want to single out big corporations for all the blame” and proclaiming “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”
Biden even says he has “no empathy” for Millennials’ struggle to get by in the savagely unequal precariat economy he helped create over his 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 two years ago. “No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break.”
Biden has not spoken one critical word about Trump and Congress’s taxpayer-funded bailout for the American capitalist “elite” and its top corporations and financial institutions in the wake of Covid-19 – a massive and largely unaccountable giveaway that puts no caps on executive compensation and elite profits while offering little more than a pittance to the nation’s working-class majority.
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The Democrats and their media rightly accuse Trump of serial deception, misstatement, and lying. Okay, but what about Joe? In a lie told twice, in 2001 and 2007, Biden falsely and viciously claimed that his first wife and baby boy were killed by a drunk truck driver in 1972.
On the campaign trail last year, Biden told a ridiculous tale (a longstanding recurrent Biden fib) about his supposed heroic role in honoring a medal-winning US soldier in a war zone as vice president.
Last February, at a campaign event in South Carolina, Biden tried to win Black votes by falsely claiming to have been arrested while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in jail during the apartheid era in South Africa.
Last January, during a debate, Biden claimed that he argued against George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq immediately after it began. In fact, it took Biden two years to admit that Bush’s war and Biden’s own Senate vote to authorize it were “mistakes” (try ‘crimes’).
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The Democrats and their media raise legitimate questions about Trump’s mental health and fitness. Fine, but what about Joe? Earlier this year, he strangely invaded centrist MSNBC host Joy Reid’s physical space to accuse her of being a radical who wants “a physical revolution.”
As a presidential candidate in the current cycle, Biden has forgotten what state he’s in, confused his wife with his sister, and claimed that he would have “beaten the hell out of Trump” in high school. Last September, he tried to woo Black voters with a bizarre and rambling story about an alleged past adolescent swimming pool confrontation with a young Black tough named “Corn Pop.”
On the campaign trail in Iowa, an unhinged Biden said this to an older white male Elizabeth Warren supporter who dared to ask about the corruption involved in Hunter Biden’s lucrative presence on the board of a gas company in Ukraine: “You’re a damn liar….Look, fat…you’re too old to vote for me.”
Speaking in Texas last March, Biden made audience members cringe when he called Super Tuesday “Super Thursday” and tried to quote from the American Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Biden gaffed: “All men um, are created by the, um, co, …oh, YOU KNOW THE THING!”
Biden responded to a debate question about racial inequality, segregation, and the legacy of slavery last September by smirkng and then awkwardly telling Black parents to “put on the television, I mean the record player” for their children.
Last February, he called a young female voter in New Hampshire “a lying dog-faced pony soldier.” He also said that “150 million” Americans – almost half of the US population – “have been killed” due to gun violence.
In debates and interviews, the 77-year old Biden routinely loses his train of thought in mid-sentence, mis-pronounces his words, forgets basic facts, and generally looks confused while seeming to rave and be on the verge of punching someone.
Bodyguards have had to stand between Biden and voters because he lacks the impulse control to stop himself from touching, sniffing, and massaging women in his vicinity.
It’s not for nothing that the Democratic National Committee and the Biden campaign are keeping “Sleepy Joe” as much out of the public eye – almost literally locked in his basement – as possible.
But just as FOX News looks the other way when it comes to Trump’s mental illness and difficulties, the liberal mainstream media is shockingly silent on Biden’s clearly fading cognitive health.
In 2020 as in previous US elections, Democrats are telling American progressives yet again that they must vote for an inadequate, duplicitous, imperial, and corporate-captive presidential candidate as “the lesser evil.” In reality, however, Lesser Evil-ism is a self-fulfilling prophecy that helps move the narrow American major-party spectrum further to the right while channeling popular political energies into an electoral system that does not represent the nation’s working- and middle-class majority.
Aptly described by the late left political scientist Sheldon Wolin as “the Inauthentic Opposition,” the neoliberal Democratic Party offers no serious resistance, electoral or otherwise, to the corporate and financial class rule advanced by the rightmost of the only two viable political organizations. The mentally declining liar and corporatist Joe Biden is graphic and depressing evidence for Wolin’s thesis.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
