Someone put this article on my FB feed today, and reminded me of one of Biden's worst policy moves. It is easy to see Biden as Senator Payne in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But the implications of this have become politically unbearable for too many of us.
As we reach the end of December 2019, and the election year 2020 is upon us, our nation's corporate owned (and corporate subsidized, as in PBS) broadcast media are trying to find a way to resurrect Biden. Biden continues to lead in polls among people who must truly be outside of most reasoned and informative discourse for whatever reason. It is a stubborn fact Biden continues to lead in many state polls and national polls. Yet, the frustrating part is, if Biden became the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, we would be confronted with remembering his actions, starting with bankruptcy "reform" in 2005, the subject of the article in GQ magazine from October 23, 2019.
It is important to stress Biden could not have achieved bankruptcy reform, from his perch as a minority chair of multiple Senate committees, without the strongest push from Republicans, starting with Republican leadership still in power today, and a Republican presidency in the form of Bush the Younger-Cheney. This is something to remind Republican friends especially, because Democrats largely did not vote with Biden on bankruptcy reform, especially the liberals and leftists Republican voters love to hate. Biden's political crimes in supporting the Iraq War II, bankruptcy reform or corporate dominated trade deals are not examples of Biden's liberalism or certainly not any leftism. Each of these policy decisions represented a "bi-partisan," elitist approach to governance, which maintains or gives more power to the corporate executive classes, which continue to dominate our country. The Republicans, since the late 19th Century, have been most adamant in supporting corporate domination of our lives, and only with the move of the civil rights movement from the Republican to Democratic Parties, did the Republicans seize upon cultural conservatism for votes. Under Trump, the fealty to, and striving for even more, corporate power and domination has continued, while the Republican Party specializes in even more powerfully poisonous appeals to diminishing white working class people's worst prejudices on cultural issues from abortion to gays to guns and immigration. And when that is not enough, they have nearly perfected voter suppression.
After spending the period of 1993-2004 outside the Democratic Party, except for a brief return in more state and local politics in 1998, and seeing the nation was not ready for a third party or any new party, I have worked, and will continue to work, inside the Democratic Party to re-animate a labor movement and help put our nation back on a track to complete the New Deal. This time, however, we must make no compromises over race, ethnicity, or religion that would disenfranchise anyone. If this project does not prove feasible, I expect to follow the younger people in our nation away from both the Republican and the Democratic Parties, and seek new ways to argue for the policies Bernie Sanders has presented to our nation. I will continue to stand with the young, as long as the young want to fight for economic, environmental, and social justice. That remains to be seen, as sometimes, as one ages, one loses hope and, worse, the further one gets away from one's education, the less one reads and thinks about anything other than day-to-day survival.
Biden, Mayor Pete, Klobuchar, Booker, Castro, and even Yang and Warren to varying degrees, represent the duopoly's stranglehold on our discourse. Yang thinks outside the political box on technology and universal basic income (UBI), but, sadly, on most other issues, he shows he is a child of the Clintons and Obama--and Biden. Warren appeared to be a person who understood the New Deal, but has shown no understanding about political mobilization and grass roots movements. She is limited by her technocratic worldview she developed as a Republican in the 1980s and early 1990s, in a time when, considering her roots and then her high level of education, I frankly think she should have known better. However, Biden represents and personifies what has been wrong with the Democratic Party's leadership since the late 1970s. Biden is truly Senator Payne, and truly been on the wrong side of monumental decisions (every time with the majority of Republican office holders, which we must stress even to Democrats who still whine that Bernie Sanders is not a "Democrat"), decisions which continue to negatively reverberate in our society. Biden is a decent man in many ways, to be sure, and would represent an improvement over Trump and the Republicans. However, as The Son has said to me, and I paraphrase rather than quote him directly, Do we really have time for this type of dithering at this point in the planet's life and in a time of grossest wealth inequalities?
My hope is we eventually reform and reestablish political parties and coalitions, such that if the system still has to rely on only two parties, let them be in the realm of, and ideas emanating from, the Greens and Libertarians. With such a different set of parties or reformed parties, the consensus which would arise from that duopoly would be one where the majority of Americans can be more effectively against, and therefore beginning to tame, the military-industrial complex, including ending endless wars; pushing for personal civil liberties; and against drug "wars" that decimate minorities far more often than white folks. To Millennials and Gen Zers, I am counting on you both to lead us out of the Democratic Party if we find the Clinton forces and aging white Baby Boomer liberals continue to act like they have since the mid 1980s and prevail in this primary season. In the 1990s and early 2000s, I tried, much more alone, and isolated in that pre-Internet and early Internet age, and I miserably failed. This time around, I think we have some momentum, but I am frankly too old to begin to lead any charge. Bernie Sanders has been around and built up a movement over time. I am a nobody. And I don't have his excellent health. The problem of the current duopoly is the one that ultimately has to be overcome, and we are still not ready as a nation to break from that duopoly. As Bernie Sanders represents a promise of hope and structural change for the better for the vast majority of Americans, and the world, Biden represents an existential threat to that hope, even as Trump remains the most immediate existential enemy to all that remains of our Republic.
Biden, Mayor Pete, Klobuchar, Booker, Castro, and even Yang and Warren to varying degrees, represent the duopoly's stranglehold on our discourse. Yang thinks outside the political box on technology and universal basic income (UBI), but, sadly, on most other issues, he shows he is a child of the Clintons and Obama--and Biden. Warren appeared to be a person who understood the New Deal, but has shown no understanding about political mobilization and grass roots movements. She is limited by her technocratic worldview she developed as a Republican in the 1980s and early 1990s, in a time when, considering her roots and then her high level of education, I frankly think she should have known better. However, Biden represents and personifies what has been wrong with the Democratic Party's leadership since the late 1970s. Biden is truly Senator Payne, and truly been on the wrong side of monumental decisions (every time with the majority of Republican office holders, which we must stress even to Democrats who still whine that Bernie Sanders is not a "Democrat"), decisions which continue to negatively reverberate in our society. Biden is a decent man in many ways, to be sure, and would represent an improvement over Trump and the Republicans. However, as The Son has said to me, and I paraphrase rather than quote him directly, Do we really have time for this type of dithering at this point in the planet's life and in a time of grossest wealth inequalities?
My hope is we eventually reform and reestablish political parties and coalitions, such that if the system still has to rely on only two parties, let them be in the realm of, and ideas emanating from, the Greens and Libertarians. With such a different set of parties or reformed parties, the consensus which would arise from that duopoly would be one where the majority of Americans can be more effectively against, and therefore beginning to tame, the military-industrial complex, including ending endless wars; pushing for personal civil liberties; and against drug "wars" that decimate minorities far more often than white folks. To Millennials and Gen Zers, I am counting on you both to lead us out of the Democratic Party if we find the Clinton forces and aging white Baby Boomer liberals continue to act like they have since the mid 1980s and prevail in this primary season. In the 1990s and early 2000s, I tried, much more alone, and isolated in that pre-Internet and early Internet age, and I miserably failed. This time around, I think we have some momentum, but I am frankly too old to begin to lead any charge. Bernie Sanders has been around and built up a movement over time. I am a nobody. And I don't have his excellent health. The problem of the current duopoly is the one that ultimately has to be overcome, and we are still not ready as a nation to break from that duopoly. As Bernie Sanders represents a promise of hope and structural change for the better for the vast majority of Americans, and the world, Biden represents an existential threat to that hope, even as Trump remains the most immediate existential enemy to all that remains of our Republic.
