Biden Cabinet & Officials
Joe Biden News January – February 2021
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2020-11-22 Biden to Name Longtime Aide Blinken as Secretary of State President-elect Joe Biden intends to name his longtime adviser Antony Blinken as secretary of state, according to three people familiar with the matter, setting out to assemble his cabinet even before Donald Trump concedes defeat.
In addition, Jake Sullivan, formerly one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is likely to be named Biden’s national security adviser, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield will be nominated to serve as Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-to-name-longtime-aide-blinken-as-secretary-of-state/ar-BB1bgaNd
*2020-11-20 New ‘No Corporate Cabinet’ Campaign Pushes Biden to Pick People Who Will Advance Public Good “Joe Biden should not let corporate interests run the government—and, if needed, senators must hold him accountable.”
2020-11-20 ELECTION 2020: Biden Will Fail to Bring Back ‘Normal’ Politics President Donald Trump improved his share of the overall vote compared to his 2016 win, and he surprised even his own team by increasing his share of minority voters and women. But most significantly, he almost held his own against Democratic challenger Joe Biden at a time when the U.S. economy – the incumbent’s “trump” card – was in dire straits after eight months of a pandemic. Had it not been for Covid-19, Trump – not Biden – would most likely be preparing for the next four years in the White House.
Of course, much of Trump’s appeal was that he is not Biden. The Democratic Party decided to run pretty much the worst candidate imaginable: an old-school machine politician, one emphatically beholden to the corporate donor class and unsuited to the new, more populist political climate. His campaigning – on the rare occasions he appeared – suggested significant cognitive decline. Biden often looked more suited to a luxury retirement home than heading the most powerful nation on earth.
But then again, if Trump could lead the world’s only superpower for four years, how hard can it really be? He showed that those tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists might be right after all: maybe the president is largely a figurehead, while a permanent bureaucracy runs much of the show from behind the curtain. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/20/election-2020-biden-will-fail-to-bring-back-normal-politics/
2020-11-18 ELECTION 2020: Biden Appointee Advocated Using Propaganda Against Americans Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.
“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.” https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/18/election-2020-biden-appointee-advocated-using-propaganda-against-americans/
2020-11-17 Biden’s initial White House appointments prompt mixed reactions from progressives. (corporate media) After Mr. Biden named several White House aides on Tuesday, the response from the left — which has urged the president-elect not to name lobbyists and corporate executives to key positions in his administration — was somewhat less enthusiastic. Their disappointment centered on two people in particular: Steve Ricchetti, a close adviser to Mr. Biden, who will be a counselor to the president; and Representative Cedric L. Richmond of Louisiana, who will oversee public outreach.
Progressives were unhappy with Mr. Ricchetti because he is a former pharmaceutical industry lobbyist. Some were unenthusiastic about Mr. Biden’s selection of Mr. Richmond, who has represented his district since 2011, because he has received donations from oil and gas companies. The Sunrise Movement, a group of young climate organizers, was especially public with its displeasure. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/17/us/joe-biden-trump#bidens-initial-white-house-appointments-prompt-mixed-reactions-from-progressives
2020-11-16 Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal Lay Out Progressive Desires for Biden Administration (corporate media) Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) insisted the Democrats must show unity under Biden’s leadership—while also stating the election results showed a desire for “something different” as well as “social and economic justice.” “There was a movement that happened this summer. That movement delivered this victory. The rise of the amount of people that registered to vote. We owe it to the movement to make sure that the chaos they voted against does not follow us to our caucus and to make sure that the justice they seeked is implemented in the policies that we advocate for.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ilhan-omar-pramila-jayapal-lay-out-progressive-desires-for-biden-administration/ar-BB1b3krn?
2020-11-13 Julie Hollar on Moving Democrats to the Right, Josh Bivens on Pandemic Unemployment Trump presidency, it’s sad to see corporate Democrats leap to blame the left, including activists, for denying the party a landslide—and call for immediate, compensatory overtures to the right. Sad, but not surprising, as that’s been the practice of elite Democrats and their media abettors for decades. https://fair.org/home/julie-hollar-on-moving-democrats-to-the-right-josh-bivens-on-pandemic-unemployment/
2020-11-13 Progressive Coalition Demands ‘No Corporate Nominees’ for Biden Cabinet “Biden will need to appoint high-energy, creative officials who wake up every morning determined to do all they can to advance the public interest, not those who remain beholden to corporations and private profit.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/13/progressive-coalition-demands-no-corporate-nominees-biden-cabinet
2020-11-13 Biden Will Fail to Bring Back ‘Normal’ Politics. What’s Needed Now Is a Populism of the Left The neoliberal “normal” isn’t coming back because the economic circumstances that generated it—the post-war boom of seemingly endless growth—have disappeared. But most significantly, he almost held his own against Democratic challenger Joe Biden at a time when the US economy—the incumbent’s “trump” card—was in dire straits after eight months of a pandemic. Had it not been for Covid-19, Trump—not Biden—would most likely be preparing for the next four years in the White House.
Of course, much of Trump’s appeal was that he is not Biden. The Democratic party decided to run pretty much the worst candidate imaginable: an old-school machine politician, one emphatically beholden to the corporate donor class and unsuited to the new, more populist political climate. His campaigning—on the rare occasions he appeared—suggested significant cognitive decline. Biden often looked more suited to a luxury retirement home than heading the most powerful nation on earth.
Biden must avoid returning to the old “normal”, the one that existed before Trump, because that version of “normal” was exactly what delivered Trump in the first place.
Trump was right about the need for the US to stop interfering in the affairs of the rest of the world under the pretence of humanitarian concern and a supposed desire to spread democracy at the end of the barrel of a gun. In practice, however. Equally, Trump looked all too right in berating the establishment media for promoting “fake news”, especially as coverage of his presidency was dominated by an evidence-free narrative claiming he had colluded with Russia to steal the election. Trump’s appeal was further bolstered by styling himself a self-made man. Democratic party leaders like Clinton and Biden who gave every appearance of having abjectly sold their principles—and their souls—to the highest-bidding corporate “donors.”
Today’s globalised wealth elite prefer neoliberal, technocratic politics that keep borders open for trade; that treat the labouring poor as human chattel, to be moved around on a global chess board as a way to force wages down; and that ensure the elite can stash its ill-gotten gains away on island sanctuaries far from the tax man. If the corporate elite can no longer find a way to foist a neoliberal technocrat like Biden on the public, they will choose the populism of a Trump over the populism of a Sanders every time. And as they own the media, they can craft the stories we hear. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/13/biden-will-fail-bring-back-normal-politics-whats-needed-now-populism-left
2020-11-13 Julie Hollar on Moving Democrats to the Right, Josh Bivens on Pandemic Unemployment Trump presidency, it’s sad to see corporate Democrats leap to blame the left, including activists, for denying the party a landslide—and call for immediate, compensatory overtures to the right. Sad, but not surprising, as that’s been the practice of elite Democrats and their media abettors for decades. https://fair.org/home/julie-hollar-on-moving-democrats-to-the-right-josh-bivens-on-pandemic-unemployment/
2020-11-13 Biden Given Roadmap to Revitalize Rural America The plan “lays a foundation for bringing economic vitality to rural communities in the face of racial injustice, economic decline, climate change, and a devastating pandemic.”
Family Farm Action, a coalition of farmers and workers fighting to reverse rural economic decline, on Thursday released a comprehensive plan that outlines how the Biden administration can revitalize rural communities throughout the United States. Along with 16 other organizations who endorsed the plan, Family Farm Action pointed out that “our food system is a key intervention point to bring about a more inclusive economy that addresses discrimination and respects our land, natural resources, and neighbors here and around the world.” The transition paper (pdf)—Build Back Better: Our Call to Action and Roadmap for Rural America—was co-signed by several progressive organizations including People’s Action, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and National Housing Law Project.
“Today, a handful of corporations and their CEOs have the power to dictate who gets to farm, what they farm, and who gets to eat.” “Addressing increasing corporate consolidation in our food systems,” they said, “requires a robust federal response that revives rural communities and includes them in the decision-making process, letting them know they have not been forgotten.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/13/biden-given-roadmap-revitalize-rural-america
2020-11-13 47 Groups Back Rep. Joaquin Castro for House Committee Chair Post to ‘Build a More Restrained and Progressive Foreign Policy’ “Rep. Castro embodies a progressive vision for the U.S. in the world, one that prioritizes diplomacy and multilateralism over militarism.” Castro is competing with Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) for the position, which is opening up because the current chair, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), was defeated by progressive challenger Jamaal Bowman in a June primary race. Bowman easily won the seat last week.
As Black, indigenous, and other communities of color face increased militarism at home, and as U.S. militarism abroad has led to disastrous endless wars, we are impressed with Rep. Castro’s transparent and engaging campaign for HFAC chair, that focuses on the root causes of militarism. We hope to build with Rep. Castro towards a U.S. foreign policy that centers the perspectives and solutions of communities who have experienced harm as a result of U.S. policy, and that tackles the rise in right-wing authoritarianism around the world, which disproportionately impacts women, girls, the LGBTQ+ community, and communities of color.
Signatories—including CodePink, Friends of the Earth, IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, Justice Democrats, Peace Action, and the Sunrise Movement—praise his “commitment to support war powers reform legislation that would appropriately strengthen Congress’s role in authorizing and overseeing the use of force.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/13/47-groups-back-rep-joaquin-castro-house-committee-chair-post-build-more-restrained
2020-11-13 Biden’s free childcare plan is a worthy feminist reform According to the Biden-Harris transition website, the administration plans to make it “far easier to afford child care and to ensure aging relatives and people with disabilities have better access to home and community-based care.” The new administration also promises to “elevate the pay, benefits, and professional opportunities for caregivers and educators; to create millions of good-paying new jobs in these areas with a choice to join a union; and to free up millions of people to join the labor force and grow a stronger economy in return.”
Notably, the pandemic’s economic affects are seriously setting back gender equality, as I’ve previously written. Large swaths of women in America left the workforce or cut down their hours to be a stay at home caregiver during the pandemic. This is all to say that the Biden-Harris administration’s focus on reviving the economy will largely hinge on whether it prioritizes making it easier to get women back to work, and that means universal childcare.
The inclusiveness and intersectionality of the Biden-Harris plan makes it effectively a feminist reform. Three-fourths of American teachers are women, while over half of the country’s family or informal caregivers are women. Meanwhile, women are more likely to sacrifice their careers when a crisis hits home, as they generally make less money than men. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/joe-biden-child/
2020-11-13 Who’s in Labor? potential candidates to become President-elect Biden’s labor secretary. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is lining up unions’ support for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. Walsh is a solid liberal who previously headed the Boston AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Council.
Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, who’s heir to the Michigan Levin dynasty and positioned in the heart of what remains of unionized American manufacturing.
Bill Spriggs, an African American economist who’s the AFL-CIO’s chief economist and a professor at Howard University. (Bill is also a member of the Prospect board.)
Other potential candidates who would better personify labor’s new face include Julie Su, the stellar commissioner of labor in California, and Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO’s former trade economist and deputy chief of staff, and currently the president of the Economic Policy Institute. Should neither Su nor Lee be Biden’s labor pick, there are still important administration posts that each could fill supremely well.
If Biden is for some mysterious reason inclined to blow off the union movement, he could choose Seth Harris, who was deputy labor secretary in the Obama administration, for his top labor post. Harris’s writings arguing for a special, nonemployee status for Uber and Lyft drivers infuriated many worker rights advocates, not least organized labor.
It’s no secret that Bernie Sanders also wishes to become Biden’s labor secretary—probably more so now that any Sanders-authored legislation isn’t likely to make it through the next Congress, and any pro-worker initiatives are likely to be confined to the executive branch. Precisely because I love Bernie, however, I’m reluctant to see him lose his independence and capacity to keep building an explicit left, which he’d have to forfeit if he went into the administration. Moreover, with control of the Senate teetering on a knife’s edge, it may not be the better part of valor for Biden to appoint any sitting senators to administration posts. I love Elizabeth Warren, too, but the same logic applies to her bid to become Treasury secretary. https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/whos-in-labor-biden-options-for-labor-secretary/
2020-11-13 Why 2020 was the ‘precarity election’ “It wasn’t supposed to be this close. Against the backdrop of an ineptly managed pandemic, depression-like levels of unemployment, and a president whose approval rating never rose beyond 50 percent during his entire time in the White House, 2020 created what should have been the ideal conditions for a so-called ‘blue wave,’ both nationally and in the statehouses.” The disappointment to Democrats is rooted in a failure to accurately diagnose the nature of the working class and its grievances. “the coattail effect… [was] minimal (ironic, considering that this was one of the ostensible rationales for Democrats selecting a moderate like the former vice president, as opposed to a progressive, such as Bernie Sanders).
Today, the Democrats are losing a lot of what is left of what we understood to be the traditional working class. They are losing what remains of these voters, at the same time that this label is losing its meaning: The traditional working class is disappearing, having been eviscerated through a combination of automation, globalization, attacks on private-sector unions and cuts in public services. Until the party realizes that work is nothing like what it was, and increasingly won’t be, it will be hard for them to offer credible solutions.https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/economy-2020/
2020-11-13 Biden health adviser has a plan to get pandemic under control and revive economy: Pay people to stay home for 4-6 weeks The government “could pay for a package right now” to cover economic losses—making it possible to curb COVID-19 transmission without increasing the financial suffering associated with shutting down commerce, said epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.
The coronavirus crisis is entering an extremely dangerous phase that has some epidemiologists worried about whether the U.S. has a sufficient number of mobile morgues. Yet, at precisely the moment when the ongoing catastrophe warrants a stronger, more effective response, President Donald Trump is engaging in what journalist David Dayen on Wednesday called “the world’s worst coup attempt.”
By hampering Biden’s ability to get a head start on facilitating a well-coordinated response to the COVID-19 emergency and its economic fallout, Dayen explained, Trump is relegating even more Americans to “death and suffering.” “The next three to four months are going to be, by far, the darkest of the pandemic,” http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31300
2020-11-12 Biden’s Mandate Is for Deep Solutions, Not Donor-Class Fetishism of Bipartisan Compromise Biden and the Democrats should put principles first and rally the nation around a serious vision: an agenda not simply to “restore the soul of America” but to expand that soul, make this country a true global leader as Planet Earth faces its treacherous future. The essence of the Biden agenda, as presented so far, seems to be pulling the good old USA back into what we never were: one united country, free of racism, hatred, fear of one another. And to cooperate with the Republicans.
I believe Biden’s actual mandate from the American people—at least the 77 million-plus who voted for him—is to undo Trumpica and pursue a deeply principled agenda. The one specific agenda item Biden addressed in his acceptance speech, complete with a plan of action, was getting Covid-19 under control. Biden’s actual mandate begins with the fact that most of the people who voted for him were primarily voting not for him but against Donald Trump.
The vision the Democrats should embrace includes eco-sanity and development of the Green New Deal. It includes Medicare for All. It includes a dismantling of the horrific prison-industrial complex and not so much a defunding of the police as a re-envisioning of what social order actually means and diverting funding away from hair-trigger, armed policing and a system based on punishment to one based on healing. The vision would also include compassion at the border rather than cruelty and absolutely no more separation of parents and children. And the vision would include demilitarization: a slashing of the trillion-dollar-plus annual military budget; an end to the country’s endless wars; nuclear disarmament and an embrace on the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, leading the way for other NATO nations to embrace it as well and begin a true global process of disarmament. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/12/bidens-mandate-deep-solutions-not-donor-class-fetishism-bipartisan-compromise
2020-11-12 Democrats — and the U.S. — won’t have a future if Biden adopts a centrist agenda President-elect Joe Biden has called the November 2020 U.S. election a “battle for the soul of the nation.” In offering himself up as a contrast to President Donald Trump, Biden made a clear distinction between his political agenda and statesman-like behavior, and that of Trump.
Biden’s victory was possible in large part due to an alliance between Bernie Sanders–backing progressives and the centrist liberals who longed for a return to the Obama years. Now begins a battle for the soul of Joe Biden. In 2016, there were three blocs of eligible voters: those who voted for Trump, those who voted for Clinton, and those who didn’t vote. While Trump’s share was the smallest of the three, the latter was the largest grouping.
Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives and failed to win an outright Senate majority as they had hoped. The centrists wasted no time in blaming progressives for those losses. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) countered with cold hard facts: “Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker.” Indeed, the ranks of young progressives of color in Congress increased.
Biden needs to ensure that millions of Americans do not fall through the financial fissures wrought by the devastating pandemic, that climate catastrophe can be avoided, that the torture of immigrants can end, that devastating wars are terminated and more. He can protect both his party’s political future and his people’s well-being by moving decisively to the left, not to the right (which is often erroneously labeled “the center”). It is progressive policies like Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, taxing the wealthy and corporations, adopting the Green New Deal, legalizing immigration, and ending wars that are actually popular. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/joe-biden-agenda/
2020-11-12 “Shredding The Fabric Of Our Democracy”: Biden Aide Signals Push For Greater Censorship On The Internet We have been discussing the calls for top Democrats for increased private censorship on social media and the Internet. President-elect Joe Biden has himself called for such censorship, including blocking President Donald Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting. Now, shortly after the election, one of Biden’s top aides is ramping up calls for a crackdown on Facebook for allowing Facebook users to read views that he considers misleading — users who signed up to hear from these individuals. Bill Russo, a deputy communications director on Biden’s campaign press team, tweeted late Monday that Facebook “is shredding the fabric of our democracy” by allowing such views to be shared freely.
Russo tweeted that “If you thought disinformation on Facebook was a problem during our election, just wait until you see how it is shredding the fabric of our democracy in the days after.” Russo objected to the fact that, unlike Twitter, Facebook did not move against statements that he and the campaign viewed as “misleading.” He concluded. “We pleaded with Facebook for over a year to be serious about these problems. They have not. Our democracy is on the line. We need answers.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55857.htm
2020-11-11 Fighting for Socialism Under a Biden Administration: Join Us for Post Election Discussion Joe Biden is one of the architects of the neoliberal order that led to the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Over his four decades in D.C., he’s built his record as a racist, imperialist war hawk. He wrote the 1994 crime bill and was a champion of the war on drugs, both of which disproportionately targeted and locked up Black and Brown people. Internationally, he supported both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and was Vice-President in an administration that droned and decimated the Middle East. He was a vocal supporter of NAFTA, supported and implemented corporate bail-outs while working people lost their jobs and homes, and continues to oppose Medicare for All in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed over 200,000 people in the U.S. alone.
This is no lesser evil for the working class and the oppressed, both in the U.S. and across the world. There is only evil with a more respectable face — that of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. https://www.leftvoice.org/the-fight-for-socialism-under-a-biden-administration-join-us-for-post-election-discussion
2020-11-11 Webinar – Biden, Foreign Policy, and the Role of Feminists What Do Feminists Have to Say About Biden’s Foreign Policy? Watch a discussion with four leading feminists — Medea Benjamin (CODEPINK), Gloria Steinem, Diana Duarte (MADRE), and Cindy Wiesner (Grassroots Global Justice Alliance) moderated by Christine Ahn — on the role of feminist movements to advance a US foreign policy grounded in feminism, internationalism, and peace. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=355432088887688&ref=watch_permalink
2020-11-11 QUESTIONS MOUNT ABOUT CONTROVERSIAL HUNTER BIDEN-CHINA DOSSIER
The provenance of the Typhoon Investigations report matters because of concerns that it was part of a coordinated right-wing campaign to tip the election to Donald Trump.
The 64-page document, which is styled as a confidential “intelligence report,” claims to reveal new links between the Chinese government and Hunter Biden, the son of then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. It also alleges Chinese influence operations aimed at “cultivating” Hunter Biden and, without giving concrete evidence, accuses the elder Biden of altering his stance on China as a result of his son’s work there. “BIDEN shifted his view from hawkish to dovish after HUNTER began receiving entrée into Chinese elite political and financial institutions,” the dossier alleges.
In late October, disinformation researcher Elise Thomas discovered that both the firm whose logo appears on the China dossier, Typhoon Investigations, and an associated analyst named Martin Aspen were fake. Martin Aspen is not the only invention in this strange saga, however, The Intercept has learned. Online bios describing the blogger who first published the dossier misrepresent significant aspects of his background.
The blogger, Albert Marko, has variously presented himself as a pollster, an international relations buff, and a U.S. congressional expert. Public records show that he is a Florida resident who has launched a variety of mostly inactive businesses, including in software, painting, and cosmetics.
Bannon, a former Trump adviser who is out on bail after being indicted for wire fraud and money laundering, told newspaper staff in September about the existence of the Hunter Biden-associated laptop; the paper ultimately published emails and other materials from a copy of the laptop’s hard drive provided by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. GTV Media Group, the company Bannon recently started with Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, has also promoted salacious stories about Hunter Biden. Bannon, who once said that the way to counteract the media is to “flood the zone with shit,”
On the first page of the report, the author is listed as “M A.” Thomas connected these initials with fake analyst Martin Aspen. The fake analyst’s Twitter photo turned out to have been computer-generated. Other parts of his identity, including a LinkedIn profile, also appear to have been fabricated. “That kind of deceptive behavior about the origins of a report which makes such significant allegations about the family of a presidential candidate, weeks before the presidential election, is completely unacceptable,” https://theintercept.com/2020/11/11/hunter-biden-china-dossier/
2020-11-11 Biden state media appointee advocated using propaganda against Americans and ‘rethinking’ First Amendment Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.
“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, “Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.”
The Biden transition team’s selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government.
As the state-backed censorship dragnet expands, independent media outlets increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. In the past year, social media platforms have purged hundreds of accounts of foreign news publications, journalists, activists, and government officials from countries targeted by the United States for regime change. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/11/richard-stengel-propaganda-usagm-biden/
2020-11-11 Progressive message to Joe Biden: Don’t you dare ‘cooperate’ with Mitch McConnell If Biden chooses to ‘cooperate’ with Mitch McConnell, that choice is likely to set off a political war between the new administration and the Democratic Party’s progressive base. Let’s be clear: The extent to which Biden goes along with such a scenario of craven capitulation will be the extent to which he has shafted progressives before his presidency has even begun.
And let’s be clear about something else: Biden doesn’t have to defer to Mitch McConnell on Cabinet appointees. Biden has powerful leverage—if he wants to use it. As outlined in a memo released days ago by Demand Progress and the Revolving Door Project, “President Biden will be under no obligation to hand Mitch McConnell the keys to his Cabinet.”
The memo explains that Biden could fill his Cabinet by using the Vacancies Act—which “provides an indisputably legal channel to fill Senate-confirmed positions on a temporary basis when confirmations are delayed.”
In addition, “Biden can adjourn Congress and make recess appointments”—since Article II Section 3 of the Constitution “gives the President the power to adjourn Congress ‘to such time as he shall think proper’ whenever the House and Senate disagree on adjournment”—and after 10 days of recess, Biden could appoint Cabinet members.
In other words, if there’s a political will, there would be ways to overcome the anti-democratic obstructionism of Mitch McConnell. But does Biden really have the political will? http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31276
2020-11-11 Tell Joe Biden: Reject Heidi Heitkamp for the Next Secretary of Agriculture Heitkamp’s voting record demonstrates a solid allegiance to corporate agribusiness. In 2016, she voted in favor of the DARK Act, joining all the Republicans and just two other Democrats in the Senate Committee on Agriculture in an effort to drastically weaken GMO labeling requirements, a bill which was heavily supported by Big Food industry groups.
Heitkamp was also the first Democratic Senator to endorse Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue. Perdue has deep ties to Big Food and Big Ag and has done the bidding for these pro-GMO, pro-pesticide and pro-industrial agriculture groups throughout his tenure.
In fact, before Perdue’s nomination for the position, Heitkamp herself had been one of Trump’s top picks for the position—a fact that couldn’t be more telling about what she truly stands for.
That’s just the beginning. Heitkamp has a long list of anti-environment votes as well. In 2015, she voted in favor of a bill that would overturn a key EPA clean water rule and thereby undermine the Clean Water Act. Heitkamp also voted in favor of the Keystone XL oil-sands pipeline. https://advocacy.organicconsumers.org/page/23107/petition/1?
2020-11-11 Will the Biden team be warmongers or peacemakers? For progressives everywhere, the knowledge that “another world is possible” has sustained us through decades of greed, extreme inequality and war, as U.S.-led neoliberalism has repackaged and force-fed 19th century laissez-faire capitalism to the people of the 21st century. The Trump experience has revealed, in stark relief, where these policies can lead.
Joe Biden has certainly paid his dues to and reaped rewards from the same corrupt political and economic system as Trump, as the latter delightedly trumpeted in every stump speech. But Biden must understand that the young voters who turned out in unprecedented numbers to put him in the White House have lived their whole lives under this neoliberal system, and did not vote for “more of the same.” Nor do they naively think that deeply-rooted problems of American society like racism, militarism and corrupt corporate politics began with Trump. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31278
2020-11-11 John Bolton accuses GOP of ‘coddling’ Trump while he ‘trashes the US electoral system’ Bolton wrote “But this coddling strategy is exactly backward. The more Republican leaders kowtow, the more Trump believes he is still in control and the less likely he will do what normal presidents do: make a gracious concession speech; fully cooperate with the president-elect in a smooth transition process; and validate the election process itself by joining his successor at the Jan. 20 inauguration,” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/john-bolton-accuses-gop-of-coddling-trump-while-he-trashes-the-us-electoral-system/ar-BB1aVkXy?
2020-11-11 Joe Biden’s Victory is Still a Loss for Humanity The Biden-Harris administration is good news for corporations, cops, war profiteers and banks too big to fail, but offers nothing to save the people and planet from multiple rises. https://www.blackagendareport.com/joe-bidens-victory-still-loss-humanity
2020-11-11 Biden’s First Appointees Are a Mixed Bag The transition’s agency review teams look good for financial regulation; they look bad for the agency that controls practically all regulations. On Tuesday, the Biden presidential transition announced the formation of agency review teams. I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of these groups, sometimes known as “landing teams,” but I don’t want to underemphasize them either. They are intended to study the federal agencies, work with the existing officeholders on the transfer of power, and recommend policy changes for the Biden-Harris administration. The incoming Cabinet official, and Biden himself, can take them or leave them. You could see this as make-work for people who want a say in policy for the president-elect’s White House. https://prospect.org/economy/bidens-first-appointees-are-a-mixed-bag/
2020-11-11 Can Biden Heal America When Trump and His Allies Don’t Want It Healed? Republican leaders and right-leaning media must acknowledge the legitimacy of the election for the country to move forward. Sen. Lindsey Graham warned on Sunday that Trump shouldn’t concede because “if Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.”
In other words, despite zero evidence of voter fraud, the GOP should attack the outcome of the election because a Democrat was elected president. The nation was already divided when Trump became president. But Trump exploited our divisions to gain and try to keep power. He didn’t just pour salt into our wounds. He planted grenades in them. And now he and his enablers appear willing to pull the pins. https://prospect.org/politics/can-biden-heal-america-when-trump-and-his-allies-dont-want-it-healed/
2020-11-10 Ten Executive Actions Biden Can Make for the Climate on Day 1 Our job between now and Inauguration Day is clear: Put as much pressure on Biden to use the full power of the Presidency in his first 100 days to combat the climate crisis. If Congress remains divided, climate legislation will be difficult to pass. That’s why we’re focusing on the measures that Biden can take immediately to keep fossil fuels in the ground and build a just transition.
But without loud and vocal pressure, climate justice could once again be put on the back burner. Every signature helps us build public pressure for these actions. https://350.org/10-executive-actions-biden-can-make-for-the-climate-on-day-1/?
2020-11-10 Joe Biden Pleads for Use of Face Masks as U.S. Cases Top 10 Million https://www.democracynow.org/2020/11/10/headlines/joe_biden_pleads_for_use_of_face_masks_as_us_cases_top_10_million
2020-11-10 Donald Trump’s Terrible Coup Attempt Is Killing Americans It’s pulling focus from the most dangerous moment of the crisis. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for Veterans Day, 2020.
It’s now clear that Donald Trump is trying to pull off the world’s worst coup attempt. With Joe Biden in a small but measurable and likely insurmountable lead in multiple states, Trump’s lawyers are using bogus voter fraud claims with no evidence behind them to try to jump to a lead in the courts. He’s claiming that the sequence of the counting—something mandated by Republican legislatures and telegraphed by Trump before the election—proves the fraud. He’s relying on the testimony of convicted sex offenders and postal workers who recant their stories upon questioning. On multiple occasions, lawyers have admitted to judges that there’s no proof behind their claims.
The point is to muddy up the results just enough so they can carry out another telegraphed strategy: invalidating the certified results and having Republican legislatures deliver a slate of Trump electors, overturning the results.
Every moment Donald Trump tries to steal the election is a moment that he’s not paying any attention to the most harrowing moment of the coronavirus crisis. Cases are now completely out of control; we could easily hit 200,000 a day soon. Hospitalizations are at an all-time high, and we’re approaching triage conditions in several states. The medical profession has been able to save lives as they learn more about the disease, but if they cannot attend to all the patients, many people will die unnecessarily. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-donald-trump-coup-attempt-killing-americans/
2020-11-10 Give ’Em Hell, Joe What Joe Biden needs to learn from Harry Truman In 1948, Harry Truman was in an even worse fix. The Republicans had won control of both houses in the 1946 midterms, and Truman was being compared unflatteringly to his giant predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. Republicans were obstructing everything Truman tried to do, and no serious person expected him to win re-election in November. So that summer, Truman discovered his inner FDR. He traveled the country by train, and his rhetoric became more potent as he went. His nemesis was the “Do Nothing” 80th Congress.
As the size of crowds increased, people would shout, “Give ’em hell, Harry.” Short of stature and ordinary looking, he became the emblem of the forgotten man and woman. In November, in defiance of all the predictions, Truman won. He took back Congress with him, an astonishing 54 to 42 in the Senate, and 262 to 171 in the House.
If McConnell sets himself up as obstructionist in chief, Biden needs to make McConnell the face of all that the American people need and are being denied. Adequate economic relief? It’s the do-nothing McConnell Senate. Reliable health coverage? Massive investment in modern infrastructure? McConnell and the do-nothing Senate. https://prospect.org/politics/give-em-hell-joe-biden/
2020-11-10 The Day One Agenda: Now More Than Ever The election result brings new prominence to executive actions. But in reality, it was always going to be a necessary facet of a Democratic presidency. Without signing a single new law, the next president can lower prescription drug prices, cancel student debt, break up the big banks, give everybody who wants one a bank account, counteract the dominance of monopoly power, protect farmers from price discrimination and unfair dealing, force divestment from fossil fuel projects, close a slew of tax loopholes, hold crooked CEOs accountable, mandate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, allow the effective legalization of marijuana, make it easier for 800,000 workers to join a union, and much, much more.
The Day One Agenda, or the regulatory state if you prefer that name, explains why Donald Trump was such a consequential president, even though he really passed just one consequential law (the Trump tax cuts). Everything else was done through executive branch agencies, and yet he transformed America, on immigration and border policy, on climate and environmental law, on healthcare, on just about everything. Joe Biden can have just as much of an impact simply by using the laws on the books to reach his priorities and goals. https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/election-executive-actions-democratic-presidency/
2020-11-09 Corporate Democrats Are Rural America’s Biggest Losers Recent defeats make clear that being close to Big Ag is no way to win elections. Tuesday marked an important turning point on the national political scene: the complete obliteration of corporate Democrats’ supposed “rural strategy.”
U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), the chair of the powerful House Agriculture Committee and a 30-year incumbent, lost by a large margin. This follows the 2018 loss by Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota. Even Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-IL), who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, barely survived a nail-biter last week.
All these Democrats had something in common: the playbook of former Obama administration Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Joe Biden’s so called “rural whisperer.” The strategy focuses on cozying up to corporate agribusiness, seeking endorsements from the Republican-aligned Farm Bureau, embracing Republican approaches to slashing environmental regulation, and supporting extractive rural industries. https://prospect.org/politics/corporate-democrats-are-rural-americas-biggest-losers/
2020-11-09 Biden Poised to Name Ron Klain, Janet Yellen to Key Positions Klain favored as White House chief of staff; Yellen as Treasury secretary
One qualification that gives Klain the edge is that he served as President Obama’s Ebola response coordinator in 2014–2015, not a bad qualification during the current pandemic. Another is that Klain is far more acceptable to progressives than Wall Street–afflicted members of Biden’s inner circle such as Steve Ricchetti or more conservative senior advisers like Jeff Zients, CEO of the Cranemere holding company, or former Democratic Leadership Council leader Bruce Reed.
Yellen would be an interesting choice on several grounds. She was nearly reappointed as Fed chair by Donald Trump, who liked her policy of very low interest rates. Yellen is just liberal enough for the liberals, just conservative enough for Wall Street; and as a former Fed chair, she would be hard for Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to block. She came to the Fed chairmanship in 2014, appointed by Barack Obama after a successful struggle by Senate progressives to get Obama to choose Yellen over Larry Summers, to whom the president had all but promised the job. At the time, Yellen’s selection was a clear win for the party’s left. https://prospect.org/economy/biden-poised-to-name-ron-klain-janet-yellen-to-key-positions/
2020-11-09 Ro Khanna: Progressives Helped Biden Win. We Can’t Stop Push for Green New Deal & Medicare for All A debate is growing over the future of the Democratic Party as progressive lawmakers push back on Biden’s centrist policy proposals and consideration of Republicans for Cabinet positions. Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California says progressive policies, such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, have popular support. “The policies that we are advocating are not just for deeply blue districts,” Khanna says. “They are policies that will help people in the Midwest, in the South, across this country. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/11/9/ro_khanna_2020_election_progressives?
2020-11-08 What Can Progressives Accomplish in A Biden Administration Now that the election is over, we discuss why it was so close, why Trump did as well as he did, how Biden intends to govern and how progressives can best influence him and get our programs and policies passed. With Branko Marcetic, staff writer for Jacobin and author of “Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden, Ross Barkan, columnist for The Guardian and Jacobin and writer for The Nation and Jennifer Epps-Addison, President and Co-Director of The Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive advocacy organization . https://www.facebook.com/Lauren.Steiner.LA/videos/10224329778768926
2020-11-06 LIVE UPDATES: ELECTION 2020—Biden Lays Out Plans, While Trump Still Disputes Result Biden aides have revealed that he plans a series of executive orders upon assuming power that would reverse numerous Trump policies, The Washington Post reported. Biden will have the U.S. rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord, lift the ban on travel from numerous Muslim countries and he’ll put back in place the Dreamers program, that allows children of undocumented aliens to remain in the United States.
Biden said in his victory speech on Saturday that he would set up a coronavirus task force with top scientists to presumably reverse Trump’s policy on the pandemic. Trump’s handling of the health emergency was cited in opinion polls as the issue most on Americans’ minds. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/06/live-updates-election-2020-biden-lays-out-plans-while-trump-still-disputes-result/
2020-11-06 ELECTION 2020: ‘Sleepy Joe’s’ Task Is to Put Liberal America Back to Sleep Four years ago, however, they were forcibly roused from their languor to protest against Donald Trump. They grew enraged by the symptom of their corrupt political system rather than by the corrupt system itself. For them, “Sleepy Joe” was just what the doctor ordered.
But it won’t be Biden doing the sleeping. It will be the liberals who cheerlead him. Biden – or perhaps Kamala Harris – will be busy making sure his corporate donors get exactly what they paid for, whatever the cost to the rest of us.https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/06/election-2020-sleepy-joes-task-is-to-put-liberal-america-back-to-sleep/
2020-11-06 Did Media Spiking the Ukraine-Burisma Story Win Joe Biden the Election? Whatever one thinks about Biden or Trump, or the veracity of the Burisma story, the way in which corporate media and social media giants unilaterally decided that Americans would not be able to decide for themselves raises profound questions about the nature of power and freedom of speech in society.
It was the classic October Surprise. Just weeks before the presidential election, conservative newspaper the New York Post released a bombshell report claiming that Joe Biden’s son Hunter had introduced his then vice-president father to top executives at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, just months before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor investigating the company. The report was allegedly based on information from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, who, despite not having any relevant qualifications, sat on Burisma’s board, earning $50,000 per month for doing so.
Whatever corporate media’s response, the reaction from the social media giants was far more extreme. Both Facebook and Twitter users from sharing or linking to the New York Post story. Indeed, Twitter locked the Post out of its account for two weeks. https://www.mintpressnews.com/did-media-spiking-the-ukraine-burisma-story-win-joe-biden-election/272943/
2020-11-06 The Black Nebraska Lawmaker Who May Have Delivered the Presidency to Joe Biden Biden has Ernie Chambers to thank for getting one electoral vote out of the Cornhusker State. The nation has a lot to thank Ernie Chambers for, in fact. If Biden falls short in the states where he’s trailing right now, but holds onto Nevada and Arizona, he will have 270 electoral votes in his corner—the bare minimum required to win the presidency. That would mean that the single electoral vote in NE-02 would provide the margin of victory, avoiding a 269-269 tie that would throw the election to the House of Representatives (where because of the peculiar rules for resolving such ties, Trump would likely be chosen president even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats). https://prospect.org/politics/nebraska-lawmaker-ernie-chambers-may-have-delivered-presidency-to-biden/
2020-11-04 Can Biden Govern With a Republican Senate? If Mitch McConnell is leader of a Republican majority again, what then? For starters, Biden will have to govern as a more centrist president. It will take some doing for him to get a Cabinet confirmed. The most important players will be the three Republican Senate moderates: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Susan Collins of Maine. Biden will need to reach out to them and see if they will occasionally break Republican caucus discipline and vote to pass crucial legislation and confirm nominees.
One ray of hope: There is a very vulnerable class of GOP senators up in 2022. But in the meantime, Biden has to deliver something to an anxious electorate. https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/can-biden-govern-with-a-republican-senate/
2020-11-02 Political consultant predicts a blowout: ‘We’re going to know the winner of this election by 10pm tomorrow night’ Even when it comes to voter suppression efforts and legal challenges like the Texas Biden bus assault and the police pepper-spraying Black voters, Carville said that it’s only going to turn people away from Trump and motivate more Biden supporters to come to the polls.
“Look, that bus thing in Texas, yes, I’m mortified,” continued Carville. “I’m not mortified by the outcome of the election, I’m mortified by potential violence. Look at the early vote. People waiting in line for 11 hours to vote. 10,000 people in line in Harris County, Texas, in the middle of the night. When you tell people you can’t do something or you try to make it harder for them to do, it aggravates the dickens out of them and makes them want to do it more. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/political-james-carville-predicts-a-blowout-were-going-to-know-the-winner-of-this-election-by-10pm-tomorrow-night/
2020-11-01 Turning Out the Young How the Sunrise Movement is mobilizing the youth vote—with a mix of reluctance and enthusiasm—for Biden https://prospect.org/politics/turning-out-the-young/
2020-10-31 The Facebook Group That Could Flip Pennsylvania Boasting more than 120,000 members, it’s one of the largest pro-Biden online communities, and a source of camaraderie and support. “We are 124k in this group and I’m hoping that at least more than half of us (62k+) have voted! Please only respond if you have already voted! Let’s GO!!” posted Ernestine Epouhe in the Facebook group Pennsylvania Women for Biden/Harris on October 29. The question, pasted on a backdrop of swirling blue and red stars and stripes, received more than 25,000 comments and 13,000 reactions—almost all likes, loves, and Facebook’s “caring” reaction. https://prospect.org/politics/biden-facebook-group-that-could-flip-pennsylvania/
2020-10-30 Young voters backing Biden could shift gears soon after the election — here’s why The Sunrise Movement has been at the center of the progressive movement with a dominant focus on bringing the Green New Deal to fruition in an effort to combat climate change. Almost immediately after the election, they will be gearing up to present their proposals to Biden if he wins the election. The group’s first actions will likely be similar to their move to lobby Democratic lawmakers in 2018. Not even a week after Democrats regained control of the house, the group staged a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office in hopes of shifting her focus to climate control. https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/biden-climate-plan/
2020-10-30 Biden Doesn’t Have A Popularity Problem. That Might Help Him Win. But it is increasingly looking like Democractic primary voters might have been right about Biden’s electability argument. In the face of relentless attacks from the Trump campaign, Biden hasn’t dipped in the polls; in fact, he’s actually become better liked, and has built a formidable favorability advantage over Trump.https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/biden-doesnt-have-a-popularity-problem-that-might-help-him-win/
2020-10-29 Democrats Have Proven They Can Compete on Small-Dollar Donations Alone So why does Joe Biden keep doing big-money fundraisers? Going into the race’s final days, Democrats—and Joe Biden in particular—enjoy a massive cash advantage all over the map. For a presidential challenger to outraise an incumbent is almost unheard of; even unpopular incumbents like George W. Bush enjoyed monster war chests in re-election bids. Meanwhile, the campaign of President Trump, whose major legislative accomplishment has been a leviathan of a tax cut for the rich, is now being referred to in the race’s final week as “cash poor.”
But what makes Biden’s fundraising juggernaut historic is not just its eye-popping dollar amounts, but how he’s bringing those dollars in. According to a recently released quarterly report, Democratic candidates and left-leaning groups raised $1.5 billion through the online campaign donation site ActBlue over the last three months. Biden, predictably, is the beneficiary of a large chunk of that total, after announcing that $203 million of his $383 million haul in September was raised online. That’s by far the most money ever raised for an individual presidential candidate in a month in American history, rivaled only by the totals in October that we don’t have yet. Small-dollar donors, giving in minor installments, have, by themselves, put up enough money to keep pace with the entire Trump fundraising machine, which going into the year was thought to be a daunting and historically high-powered engine. https://prospect.org/politics/democrats-compete-on-small-dollar-donations-joe-biden/
2020-10-29 Note to Biden: A President Can Do a Lot Even Without the Senate What Trump has done inside the administrative state has been more critical than his public persona. For almost four years, the breathtaking cruelty, mismanagement, and corruption of the Trump administration have kept the pundits yapping, the printing presses running, angry congressional letters flying, and the Twittersphere ablaze. Depending on the results of next Tuesday’s election, however, Joe Biden may soon be in a position to actually do something about it all. As Biden and his advisers survey the rubble, it will be important that they not get distracted by the nonsense (“I will tweet less” is not a compelling administrative pillar), but rather home in on those features of the Trump administration that have made life worse for millions. https://prospect.org/politics/note-to-biden-a-president-can-do-a-lot-even-without-senate/
2020-10-28 This Is Joe Biden’s Moment Project Lincoln makes their closing argument for Joe Biden https://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2020/10/joe-bidens-moment
2020-10-28 Times Editorial Lets Slip Joe Biden’s Latin America Policy: More Obama-Style Coups Figures on both the right and the left are presenting Biden as a progressive champion, the reality though, is that he has always represented the right-wing of the Democratic Party, and his Latin America policy is no exception.
Yet buried deep in the article is perhaps the most eye-opening sentence: Mr. Biden’s advisers say they would seek to revive the anti-corruption campaign that set off political earthquakes across the Americas starting in 2014, but largely stalled in recent years.”
What the authors are referring to is a continent-wide campaign to unseat progressive leaders that ended in the jailing of Brazilian president Lula da Silva, the impeachment of his successor Dilma Rousseff, and the rise of the far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro.
Yet since Lula’s election in 2002, Brazil had also been a thorn in the side of Washington, acting as a barrier to American regime change operations against leftist governments in the region. Lula, a self-described socialist and anti-imperialist, forged close ties with leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers, while also refusing to support a U.S.-backed right-wing secessionist movement in Eastern Bolivia aimed at undermining President Evo Morales.
Biden’s advisors have also laid out their plans for Central America, which include a $750 million package tied to privatization drives and austerity measures that might perpetuate the very economic and political conditions that led migrants to flee in the first place. His team also doubled down on his commitment to regime change in Venezuela https://www.mintpressnews.com/joe-biden-latin-america-policy-more-obama-style-coups/272720/
2020-10-23 Top 10 People to Blame if Joe Biden Loses (It’s Not The Left) Right now, even though the polling does not account for the millions of voters who have been unceremoniously booted from the voter rolls, many people believe Biden is going to become the next drunken pilot of the American Empire — a position which has less power than most people imagine as the Military Industrial Complex and Wall Street roll on undeterred due to their unimaginable inertial force like boulders in an avalanche.
But there are countless reasons Biden could still lose, and even though I generally think the two corporate parties consist of sham snake-oil salesmen dancing with their asses out, I just want to preemptively make it clear who Democrats should blame IF Joe Biden snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/23/top-10-people-to-blame-if-joe-biden-loses-its-not-the-left/
2020-09-29 Joe Biden, The Republican The last two Democratic presidencies provide a good indication of what a Biden Administration would look like. Like Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama hail from the centrist party establishment. If personnel is policy, the three men hang out with many of the same advisors, businesspeople and elected officials. They’re not identical: Clinton is a charismatic retail politician, Obama is aloof and professorial, and Biden is an LBJ-style buttonholer minus Johnson’s secret idealism. But they’re ideologically and temperamentally similar to a remarkable extent.
I remembered Clinton and Obama as deeply disappointing to voters with traditional liberal Democratic values. I remembered that most of their major legislative accomplishments would not have been out of place under a Republican administration. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/29/joe-biden-the-republican/
2020-09-18 Austerity at Home and Imperialism Abroad: What a Joe Biden Win Would Mean for America The only thing preventing Trump from self-destructing come November 3 is none other than the Democratic Party. Of all the potential candidates that could have walked over Trump – particularly Sanders with universal healthcare in a time of pandemic or even Warren with taxing corporations in a time of record profits amidst a recession – they chose the one candidate who could lose.
The former senator from Mastercard has already assured Wall Street that their privileged position will be protected on his watch. The warmongers have been assuaged with the promise that the military budget can only go up. The insurance parasites know that government-imposed private health policies are set in stone. The Zionists needn’t fret about the U.S. recognizing Palestinian rights or of reversing recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Worse than the climate deniers, Biden believes in the science of global warming and knows its catastrophic consequences. Yet he will do little about it and has already opposed a fracking ban. Fossil fuel subsidies will continue under the Democrats.
Democrats, with the Obama-Biden administration and since, have leap-frogged Republicans to the right on foreign policy issues in important respects regarding Afghanistan, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, etc. Democrats even oppose drawing down U.S. troops abroad. https://www.mintpressnews.com/austerity-wars-abroad-joe-biden-foreign-policy/271304/
2020-09-00 How Green Is Joe Biden’s Green New Deal? The Wall Street Journal editors and opinion columnists sure don’t like Joe Biden’s Green New Deal proposals. The editors teed off on Biden’s moderate proposal, released in June 2019 during the Democratic presidential primary, which would have made $1.7 trillion in clean energy investments over the next 10 years, calling it a “green free lunch”. But “good” and “green,” at least in the context of environmental policy, are relative terms
We will need to look closely at Biden’s expanded climate plan, which promises to build much-needed green infrastructure and ensure an equitable transition to renewable energy. The original Green New Deal resolution, which was introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey back in February 2019, set the goal of the United States taking the lead in reducing global carbon emissions from human sources to 40% to 60% below 2010 levels by 2030 and reaching “net-zero global emissions by 2050.” Those goals are consistent with the recommendations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The resolution also called for “high-quality health care” and a federal guarantee of “a job with a family-sustaining wage” for “all people in the United States.” The Biden proposal sets its goal as net-zero carbon emissions by no later than 2050. But there is no call for either universal health care or a federal jobs guarantee in the Biden plan. One might question the strategic wisdom of requiring universal health care in a plan to address climate change. But we know that Biden is no advocate of Medicare for All, whether as part of an environmental program or on its own. http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2020/0920miller.html
2020-09-08 The Long-Term Dangers of Joe Biden’s Terrible Campaigning for President There are Republicans who quietly wouldn’t mind losing this election. Biden, unlike Obama, lacks the gravitas to twice repel them with relative ease. In the meantime, since American politics is dizzyingly cyclical, Republicans will have time to win back seats on the state and county levels, assuming Democrats repeat their mistakes of a decade ago.
The goal of the Democratic Party should be to erect, somehow, an unassailable FDR-style majority (yes, far harder in today’s polarized times) that is built on widely popular government programs that alter, for the better, the very fabric of society, as the New Deal programs and Social Security did in the 1930s, cementing a safety net that has endured more than eighty years of attacks.
If Democrats are the party of real universal health care, not the market-based Affordable Care Act, and introduce a plan to guarantee every American a job, they will have won universalist victories that do more than just shift the political paradigm — they will have made rare, material differences in the lives of the vast working class and poor.
But the worst may be yet to come, especially if Biden proves as insipid and docile a communicator as he is in candidate form. It will not be enough to be the anti-Trump party when Trump is returned to the private sector, frothing on Fox or starting his own network. Democrats will have to start thinking about wielding power again. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/joe-biden-democrats-election-donald-trump
2020-07-28 With His ‘Women’s Agenda,’ Joe Biden Acknowledges That Most Issues Are in Fact Women’s Issues [MEK Note author specifically fails to mention Bernie Sanders name in article while mentioning many of the other candidates with the closest reference to Bernie being “the race boiled down to two white, male frontrunners.” Author mentions a Symone Sanders, a senior advisor to Biden early in article and then finishes the article with quotes from “Sanders” that tends to make most casual readers associate statements with Bernie. Doesn’t bode well for the issues Bernie championed that Democratic supporters don’t even want to mention his name in neither a positive manner or at all!] https://www.glamour.com/story/joe-biden-women-agenda-plan
2020-05-11 Joe Biden is Ridin’ the Pandemic All the Way to the White House A ruling class consensus is coalescing that Trump will be the fall guy, blamed for the increasingly undeniable defects of the neoliberal model. The world is in the midst of a COVID-19 crisis and in our corner of the planet, a presidential campaign has been reduced to a single issue: Trump or not Trump. Pick your poison.
At a time that calls for national leadership, or least debate on the issues, Congress has unanimously passed the two-trillion-dollar Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act handing money to corporations so that they can, among other things, buy up the competition at pandemic prices. Let Trump take the hit for his obvious mismanagement of the crisis while leaving intact the underlying structural imperatives of the neoliberal state’s failure to provide for the public welfare. That is, their solution is to avoid addressing a solution. https://www.mintpressnews.com/opinion-joe-biden-ridin-covid-19-pandemic-to-the-white-house/267372/
2020-05-06 Top-3 Candidates Who Could Replace Joe Biden as Democratic Nominee https://sputniknews.com/us/202005061079218872-top-3-candidates-who-could-replace-joe-biden-as-democratic-nominee/
2020-05-05 Over a Quarter of Democrats Want New Nominee Amid Biden Denial of Tara Reade’s Accusations – Poll https://sputniknews.com/us/202005051079207996-over-a-quarter-of-democrats-want-new-nominee-amid-biden-denial-of-tara-reades-accusations—poll/
2020-05-05 How The Media Has — And Hasn’t — Covered Tara Reade’s Allegation Of the three major cable news channels, Fox News has devoted the most attention to Reade so far.3 Through Friday, May 1, Fox News mentioned Reade in 371 clips collected by the TV News Archive — 344 of them on or after April 24. Many of these mentions were by the channel’s conservative commentators criticizing Democrats and the media for not giving Reade’s allegation more air time.
By contrast, CNN and MSNBC mostly covered the story with on-air interviews of reporters who had investigated the allegation — but these channels also covered Reade much less. Through May 1, CNN had only mentioned Reade in 35 clips, the first of which aired on April 25. And MSNBC barely mentioned her until last Friday, when Biden personally appeared on the network to deny Reade’s claims. (According to what Reade has told The New York Times, neither CNN nor MSNBC has asked to interview her on air, though they have spoken to her off camera.)
But while cable news didn’t mention Reade at all when the sexual assault allegation was first revealed, online news outlets did. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-media-has-and-hasnt-covered-tara-reades-allegation-against-joe-biden/
2020-05-05 I Believe Tara Reade. And You Should, Too. We already knew that Biden is the type. Had we as voters and had the Democratic Party taken this seriously, we wouldn’t be in this mess now. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/tara-reade-biden-allegations/
2020-05-04 How Democrats Are Responding To The Sexual Assault Allegation Against Biden On this week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the team takes a look at how elected Democrats and voters are reacting to the sexual assault allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden. They also discuss what a likely third-party run by Rep. Justin Amash could mean for the 2020 election.https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/how-democrats-are-responding-to-the-sexual-assault-allegation-against-biden/
2020-05-04 You can say the sex claim ain’t so, Joe, but it won’t work. Biden has lost his moral compass in his desperate bid to defeat Trump His supporters will tell you Biden might be a loquacious character – who can “blurt out pretty much anything,” according to the New York Times – but he certainly wouldn’t hurt a fly… blah… blah… blah.
But would it be really out of character, considering Biden himself apparently confessed to being filled with “rage” following the death of his beloved wife Neilia and their one-year-old child Naomi in a car accident in 1972? It’s understandable that Biden was devastated by the tragic loss – but equally, isn’t it deeply troubling how the teetotaller, who turned to booze to ease his pain, had“felt such rage he stalked seedy streets looking for trouble?”
He’s quoted as saying, “I liked to [walk around seedy neighborhoods] at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight… I had not known I was capable of such rage.” Biden’s comments make me wonder if he ever went to anger management therapy – or did his rage fester? It’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that someone who once roamed dangerous neighbourhoods looking for a fight could’ve also committed sexual assault… or is it? https://www.rt.com/op-ed/487759-biden-moral-compas-defeat-trump/
2020-05-04 Unsanitized: Biden and Warren Write an Op-Ed for One Person There’s an attempt made here to conflate Biden and Warren’s oversight experience, between Biden running the stimulus and Warren chairing the Congressional Oversight Panel that scrutinized the TARP bailout. This is amusing to anyone who knows the history of Warren’s fights with the Obama administration and with Biden himself. But this is undeniably true, and the reason oversight is needed: “Americans’ faith in government is undermined when the price of helping everyone else is more giveaways for those at the top.”https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-biden-and-warren-write-an-op-ed-for-one-person/
2020-05-02 Law professor says response to Biden allegation could signal ‘end of MeToo’ movement Many activists, the Post reports, want to ensure President Trump, who is the subject of multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment himself, is defeated in November, but there is also concern that a lack of scrupulous investigation into Reade’s claims against Biden — who has denied them — could be damaging to the movement overall. “I think that this could potentially be the end of MeToo,” said Michele Dauber, a Stanford University law professor who heads the Enough is Enough Voter Project. “The failure to investigate, and the failure to live by our principles, will become silencing.” https://news.yahoo.com/law-professor-says-response-biden-183759434.html
2020-05-02 The angst over Joe Biden’s assault allegation has an easy resolution But getting mad is not going to get Democrats out of their Biden fix. Only one thing can do that — pressuring Biden out of the race and replacing him with someone else.
As I have previously written, Reade’s story about Biden is credible. It would never meet the courtroom standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but given that Reade is now known to have privately told at least five people what happened at the time or in the years following, it can’t be dismissed out of hand. Biden has a track record of behaving creepily around women and has a long history of ridiculous exaggeration and telling bald-faced lies. At bottom, it is quite similar to many other #MeToo stories.
The plain fact is that this accusation is going to dog Biden for the rest of the campaign. Trump has already started talking about it. The right-wing media will cover the story for purely political reasons. Fox News does not care about #MeToo, but the story damages Biden, demoralizes Democrats, and makes liberals look like egregious hypocrites. The sight of nearly every Democratic-aligned women’s rights group queasily keeping silent about the story is simply delicious for the likes of Sean Hannity (though a few have started speaking out). https://theweek.com/articles/912121/angst-over-joe-bidens-assault-allegation-easy-resolution
2020-05-01 If Trump is a Pathological Liar, What Type of Liar is Biden? When I began researching this piece, I knew that Joe Biden told lies, but my expectation was that I would be able to make a clear distinction between Biden and Trump with respect to the type of liar each is. With the exceptions of the staggering amount of Trump falsehoods, and the fact that Biden has admitted to some of his lies, I can’t find much difference between them. Sorry, Blue Team.
Biden’s well-publicized record of lying should be well-known to those who pull the strings of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—those who have been orchestrating Biden’s nomination. This compels several questions: Is the DNC so stupid so as to not realize what a gift a Biden candidacy is to Trump, who can easily use the facts of Biden’s lying to suppress the Blue Team vote? Is it not obvious that many Blue Team voters will stay home rather than vote to replace one liar with another? Or is the DNC and its masters so evil that they really don’t mind having Trump win again? So evil that opting for an alternative to Biden who could beat Trump but who is slightly less oligarchy-friendly than Biden was out of the question for them?https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/01/if-trump-is-a-pathological-liar-what-type-of-liar-is-biden/
2020-05-01 Joe Biden Denies Sexually Assaulting Tara Reade in First Interview Addressing Accusations https://www.democracynow.org/2020/5/1/headlines/joe_biden_denies_sexually_assaulting_tara_reade_in_first_interview_addressing_accusations
2020-05-01 Tara Reade’s Ex-Neighbor on Biden Sexual Assault Allegation: I Believed Her Then & I Believe Her Now https://www.democracynow.org/2020/5/1/lynda_lacasse_tara_reade_joe_biden
2020-04-30 Et tu? Progressive Boomers Are Now Preaching Pro-Biden Lesser-Evilism At a time when an independent progressive movement is needed more than ever, the sheepdogs of a bygone era are trying to herd a new generation of activists into the Democratic Party. https://www.mintpressnews.com/?s=Joe+Biden
2020-04-29 “We are so F****d”: Joe Biden Town Hall Sparks Fears of a Clinton Rerun Throughout the conversation, where Biden positioned himself as a champion of women and an ally to the #MeToo movement, neither Clinton or Biden addressed the multiple women who have accused the former vice-president of inappropriate touching, nor the newest allegations by his former staffer, Tara Reade, who claims he sexually assaulted her in the Capitol Building in 1993.
Biden has been adamant that he will select a woman as his running mate and that he will choose someone from the right of the party (even floating the idea of choosing a Republican VP). Yesterday’s event fueled speculation that Clinton is in the running to return to the White House. The former senator from New York famously blew an enormous lead over Donald Trump – enjoying a 15-point advantage over the businessman and TV show host as late as the last week of campaigning. In October, a Morning Consult poll found that continued apathy and ill will towards her meant that a Clinton endorsement would be a net negative for any of the candidates in the running. Thus, some described the latest announcement as a “kiss of death” for the Biden campaign. https://www.mintpressnews.com/we-are-so-fd-biden-town-hall-sparks-fears-of-a-clinton-rerun/267105/
2020-04-28 2 More People Corroborate Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Accusations Against Joe Biden https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/28/headlines/2_more_people_corroborate_tara_reades_sexual_assault_accusations_against_joe_biden
2020-04-27 “Larry King Live” Tape from 1993 Supports Tara Reade’s Assault Allegation Against Joe Biden https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/27/headlines/larry_king_live_tape_from_1993_supports_tara_reades_assault_allegation_against_joe_biden
2020-04-27 Trump and Biden Trade Hit Pieces: Distinctions without a Difference The US imperial ship of state is set on a collision course with China and both Democrats and Republicans are on board. Behind the blame game between the Democrats and the Republicans is a bedrock consensus, for example, on identifying China as not just a commercial rival but as a future enemy in a nuclear war. The U.S. imperial ship of state is set on a collision course with China. Democrat Obama “pivoted” to Asia; Republican Trump seamlessly followed course. The RAND Corporation, a quasi-governmental think tank created to provide intelligence to the U.S. Armed Forces, published a position paper that spells it out: War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. The corporate media echo the meme of China as the sinister enemy.https://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-biden-trade-hit-pieces-china/266997/
2020-04-27 There’s Another Way for Joe Biden to Expand Health Care: Medicare for Kids A “Medicare for Kids” program would give automatic government-provided health insurance to all Americans from birth up until some defined age in early adulthood (perhaps 26, the current cutoff for young adults to remain on a parent’s health care plan). In fact, not only would this do more for Sanders’s core supporters than lowering the eligibility age incrementally, but it also enjoys broad public support, according to a new poll. https://prospect.org/health/another-way-for-joe-biden-to-expand-health-care/
2020-04-27 Progressives Demand Ouster of Larry Summers as Joe Biden’s Economic Adviser https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/27/headlines/progressives_demand_ouster_of_larry_summers_as_joe_bidens_economic_adviser
2020-04-24 New Evidence Supporting Credibility of Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden Emerges A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police. https://theintercept.com/2020/04/24/new-evidence-tara-reade-joe-biden/
2020-04-22 Biden Accuser, Tara Reade, Allegedly Stole from Non-Profit Organization Interview with the owner of a Watsonville, California-based non-profit horse rescue exposes allegations of theft and deceit on the part of Tara Reade. https://medium.com/@eddiekrassenstein/biden-accuser-tara-reade-allegedly-stole-from-a-non-profit-organization-e276cac68a2b
2020-04-18 Joe Biden Is Not a Decent Man Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee to face off against Donald Trump in the general election. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and many other so-called ‘progressives’ have endorsed him. Sanders has even gone so far as to call him a “decent man” — but Joe Biden is anything but. https://www.leftvoice.org/joe-biden-is-not-a-decent-man
2020-04-17 Mehdi Hasan and Noam Chomsky on Biden vs. Trump The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan speaks with world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky on the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Now that Bernie Sanders has dropped out and endorsed Biden, does the progressive left have a moral obligation to hold their noses and vote for the former vice president, despite his many sins? Chomsky thinks so! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39902cn5lX8
2020-04-16 Sen. Elizabeth Warren Endorses Joe Biden, Says She Would Serve as Vice President https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/16/headlines/sen_elizabeth_warren_endorses_joe_biden_says_she_would_serve_as_vice_president
2020-04-14 Bernie endorses Joe Biden: So how will disgruntled Sanders supporters vote in 2020? Joe Biden can only hope that Sanders voters will opt differently in 2020 than they did in 2016. https://www.salon.com/2020/04/14/bernie-endorses-joe-biden-so-how-will-disgruntled-sanders-supporters-vote-in-2020_partner/
2020-04-14 System Update with Glenn Greenwald Special – Bernie, Biden and the Left In this special episode of The Intercept’s weekly show, host Glenn Greenwald talks to progressive activist and journalist Benjamin Dixon and former national press secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign Briahna Joy Gray about the relationship between Sanders supporters, Joe Biden and the left. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do0RxWNm6LA
2020-04-13 Not Me, Biden Joe Biden is repulsive: a racist, capitalist, imperialist. Today, Sanders papered over their many differences to give a full-throated endorsement. What does this mean? Biden saying (and Sanders nodding in agreement) that they “don’t disagree in any substantive ways.” And Joe Biden, a war criminal, a racist, and an accused sexual assaulter, is Bernie Sanders’s “good friend.”
Biden made only small concessions to Sanders’s base but he said nothing about Medicare for All — one of Sanders’s main campaign promises. In fact, Sanders didn’t even mention Medicare for All. This endorsement comes as an almost explicit betrayal of everything that Sanders had run on. This betrayal is particularly egregious in the midst of a horrible pandemic that has killed 23 thousand and left well over 16 million people unemployed — and that doesn’t even count undocumented people.
Sanders refused in the livestream to even denounce the billion dollar corporate bailout, opting for the it “wasn’t my first priority” approach. Of course, Sanders did vote for this bill a few weeks ago, but he made it clear at the time that he was holding his nose to vote because it didn’t do enough for working class people. Even that fiery rhetoric is entirely gone now, and Sanders espoused the Pelosi-Biden line that the primary issue with the massive corporate bailout is the lack of oversight.
To make the endorsement worse, Joe Biden is among the most repulsive candidates in the Democratic Party, if only because he’s had decades in Congress for us to know exactly who he is and what he is about. He wrote the 1994 Crime Bill that helped create mass incarceration, voted for the war in Iraq, pushed for Obama’s drone program, and to this day — even in the midst of a pandemic! — opposes Medicare for All. While the Supreme Court is often cited as a key part of the “lesser evil” argument, it was Biden that helped confirm Clarence Thomas and silenced Anita Hill. He also fought against integration, supported Obama’s immigration policies, and was a proponent of the corporate bailouts. Joe Biden is among the most right-wing figures in the Democratic Party. And Bernie Sanders just endorsed him, with no criticisms of Biden or of the Democratic Party establishment that put their thumbs on the scales to ensure Biden’s victory. https://www.leftvoice.org/not-me-biden
2020-04-13 I Literally Wrote the Case Against Joe Biden. But I’ve Got Some Free Advice for Him Pundits are panicking about whether the Left will help Joe Biden defeat Trump. The former vice president probably doesn’t want it, but here’s some advice for him from the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
As exit polls attest, and as Biden’s own wife seems to understand, Democrats didn’t vote for Biden because they found his policy ideas or vision particularly compelling, but because they believed he was the most likely candidate to win over non-Democrats and beat Trump. Now that the primary’s over, the party needs to, at least privately, acknowledge that was a myth, given that in nearly every state, Sanders beat Biden among independents, the nation’s largest voting bloc, who also tend to be younger.
There are many things about Sanders’s appeal to independents that Biden can’t replicate. But he can adopt some of the policies he championed, first among which should be Medicare for All, which is surging in support as millions lose their employer-based health insurance with every week of lockdown. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/joe-biden-presidential-campaign-democratic-party
2020-04-08 Joe Rogan Wanted Bernie, Now He Prefers Biden Lose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAoqhBeCLJ4
2020-04-08 Leaders of Youth Movements Say Biden Must Earn Their Support “With young people poised to play a critical role deciding the next President, you need to have more young people enthusiastically supporting and campaigning with you to defeat Trump,” reads the letter signed by Alliance for Youth Action, Justice Democrats, March for Our Lives Action Fund, NextGen America, Student Action, Sunrise Movement, and United We Dream Action. “Exclusively anti-Trump messaging won’t be enough to lead any candidate to victory. We need you to champion the bold ideas that have galvanized our generation and given us hope in the political process.”https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/04/08/leaders-youth-movements-say-biden-must-earn-their-support
2020-04-08 The Media’s Loudest #MeToo Champions Are Ignoring Biden Sexual Assault Accuser Tara Reade The silence from the media’s loudest #MeToo champions has been deafening. There has been exactly zero coverage of sexual allegations against Joe Biden on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC or CBS. Likewise, The New York Times and USA Today and have failed to discuss it. https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-metoo-champions-ignoring-joe-biden-sexual-assault-accuser-tara-reade/266439/
2020-04-07 The Inconvenient Truth of Rape And, yes, allegations of sexual assault or rape against the current leader in the Democratic primaries are inconvenient. But rape is even more inconvenient. The recent allegations of rape against Joe Biden have created a firestorm online. The accuser, Tara Reade, spoke with Katie Halper on her podcast last month and described in grim detail how Joe Biden violated her when she was a staffer in his office in 1993. Her story was graphic, detailing how she was digitally penetrated by Mr. Biden as he pinned her up against a wall.
The response has been sadly partisan, with those who support Joe Biden and want to see him as the eventual nominee of the Democratic Party roundly dismissing Ms. Reade’s charges as baseless and motivated by politics. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/22/biden-under-fire-telling-immigrant-rights-activist-demanding-end-deportations-vote
2020-04-05 Why Should Teachers Endorse Joe Biden? They shouldn’t. The National Education Association (NEA) has endorsed Joe Biden. The leadership of the teachers’ union says Biden has “a deep connection to the work of educators.” A young teacher and NEA member has ten questions about that. https://www.leftvoice.org/why-should-teachers-endorse-joe-biden
2020-03-31 Penn Dems and Penn for Bernie urge investigation into Biden sexual assault allegation https://www.thedp.com/article/2020/04/biden-sexual-assault-penn-democrats-bernie
2020-03-31 “It Shattered My Life”: Former Joe Biden Staffer Tara Reade Says He Sexually Assaulted Her in 1993 https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/31/tara_reade_joe_biden_sexual_assault
2020-03-29 A Look Back at Uncle Joe’s Questionable Judgement https://www.leoashe.com/biden
2020-03-29 Electability Defeating Trump https://citizensagainstplutocracy.org/2020/03/29/is-joe-biden-fit-for-high-office
2020-03-28 Biden consolidates support, but trails badly in enthusiasm: Poll https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-consolidates-support-trails-badly-enthusiasm-poll/story?id=69812092
2020-03-28 Joe Biden Faces Sexual Assault Allegations From a Former Staffer https://oyetimes.ca/news/north-america/304793-joe-biden-faces-sexual-assault-allegations-from-a-former-staffer https://conservativemedia.com/news/joe-biden-faces-new-sexual-assault-allegation-former-staffer/
2020-03-27 Eight women have come forward against Biden making sexual harassment claims & at least one sexual assault. Say their names: -Lucy Flores -Amy Lappos -D.J Hill -Caitlyn Caruso -Ally Coll -Sofie Karasek -Vail Kohnert-Yount -Tara Reade https://twitter.com/PepperOceanna/status/1243552107430580224
2020-03-27 A sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden has ignited a firestorm of controversy https://www.vox.com/2020/3/27/21195935/joe-biden-sexual-assault-allegation
2020-03-26 Katie Halper interview as Tara Reade Actual alleged sexual assault from Biden claimed by Tara https://soundcloud.com/katie-halper/tara-to-post
2020-03-25 Joe Biden’s Opinion-Shaping Machine And Race https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/25/joe-bidens-opinion-shaping-machine-and-race/
2020-03-24 Time’s Up Said It Could Not Fund a #MeToo Allegation Against Joe Biden, Citing Its Nonprofit Status and His Presidential Run https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/joe-biden-metoo-times-up/
2020-03-20 As #WhereIsJoe Biden Trends, Sanders to Host Coronavirus Roundtable to Address Pandemic https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/20/whereisjoe-biden-trends-sanders-host-coronavirus-roundtable-address-pandemic
2020-03-16 Krystal Ball debunks Biden’s parade of lies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciXaP26TJBg
2020-03-16 Saagar Enjeti: Biden makes definitive case for why he’ll lose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFf3HTo8Kzw
2020-03-16 Joe Biden said he would pick a woman as his running mate. Here’s who could be on his list https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/politics/biden-potential-running-mates/index.html
2020-03-14 Only Bernie Beats Trump | Bernie vs Biden vs Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WUzvzQ2DWI&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3gFvYN7zSFgTk1VTMAs-Ws0hm_Ozg2uGsxjqcYHnp1zrfvM9eXixo_yto
2020-03-13 Joe Biden Isn’t the Safe Bet to Beat Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders Is. Joe Biden is a weak candidate who is more likely to lose to Donald Trump than Bernie Sanders. The best chance we have at ousting Trump is voting for Sanders in the rest of the primaries. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/joe-biden-donald-trump-bernie-sanders-electability
2020-03-12 ‘Biden’s cognitive issues can no longer be ignored’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-GoeFGyIc
2020-03-11 Joe Biden and the Legacy of White Liberals Exploiting the Black Vote https://www.blackagendareport.com/joe-biden-and-legacy-white-liberals-exploiting-black-vote
2020-03-11 The Corporate Media Celebrates After Handing Joe Biden Another Win Biden has deliberately refrained from public or media appearances due to his propensity for making egregious errors, but that hasn’t stopped the media from paving the way for a Biden vs Trump contest https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-bias-hands-joe-biden-another-win/265654/
2020-03-11 Never forget: Anti-union attorneys also love Joe Biden https://www.salon.com/2020/03/11/never-forget-anti-union-attorneys-also-love-joe-biden_partner/
2020-03-10 Joe Biden Is No Friend of Public Education We deserve a presidential candidate who will eradicate high-stakes testing, champion teachers and public schools, and help free students from the shackles of student debt. Joe Biden is not that candidate. https://portside.org/2020-03-10/joe-biden-no-friend-public-education
2020-03-10 Joe Biden Tells MSNBC Viewers He Would Veto Medicare For All Former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, told MSNBC viewers that he would veto Medicare For All if he was elected to the White House. https://shadowproof.com/2020/03/10/joe-biden-tells-msnbc-viewers-he-would-veto-medicare-for-all/
2020-03-09 Forget the Gaffes, What About Biden’s Lies? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvOjlfRpXHQ
2020-03-09 Super PACs Are Pouring Millions Into Backing Joe Biden https://truthout.org/articles/super-pacs-are-pouring-millions-into-backing-joe-biden/
2020-03-09 Democrats, You Do NOT Want To Nominate Joe Biden Healthcare 13:12
Finance / Bankruptcy Bill 15:17
Women’s Rights 20:17 / Inappropriate Touching Allegations 21:40
Criminal Punishment 23:54
Civil Liberties 29:32
Immigration 31:18
Climate Change 32:42
CHARACTER:
A Pattern Of Egregious Lies 36:16
Aiding Right-Wing Segregationists and the GOP Agenda 40:48
Anita Hill 50:55
“No Empathy” Joe, “Nothing Will Change” 53:55
WHY BERNIE INSTEAD 56:13
THE “ELECTABILITY” QUESTION 1:05:34
The Hillary of 2020? 1:09:40
The Hunter Biden Problem 1:12:25
Biden’s Problem With Voters 1:14:58
Is He Even Up For It? 1:18:25
An Electoral Disaster 1:24:47
CONCLUSION: THE DEMOCRATIC DON QUIXOTE 1:29:14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSu3khaJunE
2020-03-07 Biden on Social Security and Medicare: ‘Put All of It on The Table’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np37I1Clubw
2020-03-04The Case Against Joe Biden: Former VP’s Long Career Shows a Recurring Theme of “Appeasing the Right” Following his Super Tuesday wins, we look closely at the record of former Vice President Joe Biden, from his central role in supporting the Iraq War to expanding the so-called war on drugs. We speak with Branko Marcetic, the author of “Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.” Biden’s approach to politics is based on “appeasing the right” and “taking the platform of his Republican opponent and trying to make it his own,” Marcetic say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSiCycXx3MM
2020-02-29 Joe Biden Has a Long History of Giving Republicans Exactly What They Want For Republicans, Joe Biden has long been the ideal negotiating partner — because he’s so willing to cave in on most anything Republicans want. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/joe-biden-history-republicans-tax-cuts-barack-obama-yesterdays-man
2020-02-27 Joe Biden Is the Forrest Gump of the Democratic Party’s Rightward Turn From crime to privatization to Wall Street, the story of Joe Biden’s career has been the story of the Democratic Party’s forty-year-long right turn. Every step of the way, he was there urging the party to push the rightward shift even further. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/joe-biden-bill-clinton-middle-class-triangulation
2020-02-26 Joe Biden Was a Leader in Building Up the Carceral State These days, Joe Biden likes to tout his civil rights credentials. But he was central to the racist drive to lock people up and throw the key. At first ambivalent about having to work with Thurmond, Biden would come to think of him as an “old buddy,” the two men brought together by their shared views on crime. Thurmond called crime “the number one threat to organized society” and believed the courts had “become laughing stocks in criminal circles because lawbreakers fully realize that the system is balanced in their behalf.” Biden and Thurmond dropped the drug-czar provision while reintroducing the controversial provisions of the earlier bill into what would become the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (CCCA). Biden eulogized the 48-year Senate racist as a “brave man” whose “lasting impact” was a “gift to us all.”
Through the late 1970s to the 1990s, those racist lawmakers would become some of Biden’s most reliable allies in erecting today’s US carceral state, one whose prison population continues to dwarf the rest of the world’s, including even the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia and the one-party state of China. Those prisons would be filled disproportionately with the African Americans who bore the brunt of middle America’s increasing hysteria over crime — and who would often be forced to do backbreaking, dangerous work for no pay, the only version of slavery the Thirteenth Amendment still allowed.
The long-term triumph of the right-wing Reagan “revolution” lay not just in legislation and rhetoric but in the nation’s courts. For decades, conservatives had been grinding their teeth over the liberal direction of the Supreme Court, as its justices overturned long-standing local laws and “traditions,” appeared to invent new rights out of thin air, and seemed, in the eyes of conservatives, to generally be acting as a second legislative branch. Beginning in the 1970s, the Right walked the long road to take them back. As ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and later its chairman, Biden would preside over the start of the right-wing takeover of the federal courts that continues today.
n 1991, Reagan’s vice president and successor George Bush picked appeals court judge Clarence Thomas to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Unbeknownst to Biden, the battle over Thomas’s nomination would become one of the defining moments of his career. Vowing to turn the hearings into a referendum on Thomas’s conservative ideology and the concept of “natural law,” Biden was ultimately deemed “one of the worst questioners” by the Washington Post’s Supreme Court reporter John MacKenzie.
“Unfortunately, I do not share the certainty of some who are voting against Judge Thomas that he will be as extreme as some of the statements could lead one to believe he might be,” Biden said after the deadlocked committee sent the nomination to the Senate with no recommendation. “As a matter of fact, my heart tells me he won’t. My heart tells me he’ll be a solid justice.” A little over a week later, 35-year-old law professor Anita Hill came forward to accuse Thomas of having sexually harassed her.
Biden’s legendary mishandling of these allegations would haunt him for the rest of his career. As Hill’s charges brought Washington to a standstill and focused the nation’s attention on an issue then rarely spoken about, Biden used his position as chairman to shield Thomas from their full brunt while undermining his accuser. It was not just a case of egregious insensitivity about a pernicious and all-too-common injustice suffered by women, but a grave tactical blunder: after voting against Thomas, Biden had warned that a “fervent minority” in the GOP was “engaged in an open campaign to shift the court dramatically to the right”; his failure to hold Thomas to account helped lead that campaign to victory.
Politics, and more specifically, the Republican Party, was rapidly changing. But Biden and many other Democrats wouldn’t notice this transformation until too late; their view of the US political system would remain frozen in time, rooted in the clubby, honor-bound and compromise-focused Senate culture of Biden’s early years. It would make them useful patsies for an ever-more ruthless and right-wing team of Republicans. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/joe-biden-yesterdays-man-racism-crime-prison
2020-02-26 Is Joe Biden Really More Electable? An examination of Biden’s record explains why he would have such strong appeal to racist white voters. From 1984 to 1988, Joe Biden partnered with segregationist Strom Thurmond on a series of ‘tough on crime’ legislation passing a law which created the disparity in penalties between those caught with crack cocaine (black people) and those caught with powder cocaine (white people). Additionally, Biden actually wrote the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill ever passed. This legislation originated as the “Biden Crime Bill” before it became known as “Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill.” Cumulatively, these black-targeted and black community enforced laws led to the incarceration of a generation of black Americans, devastated black families and laid the groundwork for mass incarceration.
Biden’s record of anti-black legislation explains why he would also be appealing to Trump supporters. Voters who want to put an end to the relentless racist attacks on poor people of color, understand that this has been turbocharged by Trump — the textbook example of racism. The American people deserve a better leader whose record represents that they have foresight, understanding and compassion for the type of outcomes produced by legislation. Biden’s record demonstrates that he fails in that understanding and his so called electability panders to racist tendencies in white voters – – these are the very reasons not to support his candidacy. https://www.blackagendareport.com/joe-biden-really-more-electable
2020-02-23 Joe Biden Helped Pull the Democrats to the Right Ronald Reagan successfully dismantled the New Deal order and pulled liberals rightward. Reagan transformed the Democratic Party — and he was aided by Democrats like Joe Biden. Asked where Democrats should draw the line with Reagan’s cuts, Biden singled out agencies like NASA, Conrail, the Export-Import Bank, and energy research and development. “They’re finding new answers to old problems,” he said. “Instead of social programs, give the Northeast a rail system that works.”
Despite claiming that “the Reagan program will be economically disastrous for most of us in this country,” Biden voted for the new president’s first budget, one of thirty Democrats to do so. The budget was “a triumph for conservatives rivaling the liberal triumphs of” Roosevelt and Johnson, the New York Times wrote: scores of federal programs for health, education, and social services drastically cut back, weakened, or outright eliminated. The cuts threw countless lives into chaos, with 270,000 public service workers losing jobs, more than 400,000 families thrown off the welfare rolls, and more than one million workers ineligible for extended unemployment benefits, just to name a few. The Reagan onslaught marked “the reversal,” wrote the Washington Post, “of two great waves of government intervention, the New Deal and the Great Society,” a verdict shared by lawmakers on both sides of the issue.
Biden and the many other Democrats who began talking like Republicans were gently prodded into it by the 1981 tax cut, the other keystone measure in Reagan’s plan to overhaul Americans’ relationship to their government. Biden also voted for this measure, despite calling it “inequitable and inflationary.” The Reagan tax cut, the largest in postwar US history, was a lopsided giveaway to the very richest that led almost instantly to ballooning deficits and widening economic inequality. Over time, the super-rich would parlay their economic gains into growing political power by exploiting an ever-more corrupt political system — and use that power to roll back much of what had been built under New Deal presidents, creating a growing class of disillusioned, fed-up Americans. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/yesterdays-man-case-against-joe-biden-new-deal-reagan
2020-02-22 The Making of Joe Biden’s Conservative Democratic Politics It is no small irony that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born in the cradle of the New Deal order he would later help dismantle. Neither Biden nor the United States is unique in this respect. Look at just about any developed country’s generous postwar welfare state, and among its rich and powerful foes, you’ll find many who benefited most from its generosity, only to turn against the system that created them, convinced they had done it all on their own. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/yesterdays-man-case-against-joe-biden-busing
2020-02-15 Biden Finally Admits He and Obama Put ‘Kids in Cages’ but Only to ‘Keep Them Safe’ https://pjmedia.com/trending/biden-finally-admits-he-and-obama-put-kids-in-cages-but-only-to-keep-them-safe/? (2016-01-28 Obama administration placed children with human traffickers, report says https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/obama-administration-placed-children-with-human-traffickers-report-says/2016/01/28/39465050-c542-11e5-9693-933a4d31bcc8_story.html )
2020-01-21 Joe Biden’s Social Security Record Is Cause for Concern “Vice President Joe Biden recently claimed that the Bernie Sanders campaign ‘doctored’ a clip of a 2018 speech, to make it appear that he supports cutting Social Security. The truth is that the clip is in no way doctored. Indeed, the full speech is worse than the clip, because it includes Biden saying that Social Security ‘needs adjustments.’ That’s well known DC insider speak for ‘cut benefits.’ https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/01/21/joe-bidens-social-security-record-cause-concern
2020-01-20 Joe Biden Tried to Cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare for 40 Years Biden’s own freeze proposal in 1984. Acknowledging it would be labeled “draconian”, Biden’s plan [would] cut $239 billion from the deficit over three years, almost $100 billion more than even Reagan’s proposal, and proposed doing it partly by eliminating scheduled increases for Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. It would, he said, “shock the living devil out of everyone in the US Senate.”
Biden’s antipathy to government spending and deficits found its most radical expression in the form of the balanced budget constitutional amendment, which he had viewed as laughable and dangerous in previous decades. But with the advent of the 1990s, he now warmed up to it. To the relief of progressives and hundreds of economists, the amendment never passed under Clinton. But with the help of a wavering Biden, it came perilously close. With the backing of Biden, its chairman, the Judiciary Committee started the decade by endorsing the amendment two years in a row. A 1991 report he issued warned that “the spree of deficit spending by our federal government must be curbed.” All the while, Biden acknowledged it would be a disaster.
The 1995 version of the amendment, which required the prohibitively high threshold of three-fifths of both chambers of Congress to either raise the debt limit or pass a non–balanced budget, was sponsored and championed by Illinois’s Paul Simon, one of the Senate’s stalwart liberals, and backed by prominent Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and, of course, Biden. After several Democratic attempts to make it more forgiving failed, Biden and the rest of the committee, on a 15–3 vote, once more sent the amendment to the Senate. In the end, a sufficient number of Democrats were spooked by the threat posed to Social Security and other programs to defeat the amendment, including Daschle and even California’s conservative senator Dianne Feinstein, both of whom had been on board with the idea in 1994. But the decisions of Biden and two other Democrats to switch their votes in favor of the amendment brought it a mere two votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed for passage.
Whatever economic motivation Biden may have had to support the amendment was undercut when more than one thousand economists, including eleven Nobel Prize winners, signed a letter pleading with Congress not to adopt it. One economist, Nobel laureate James Tobin, cautioned it would “put the federal government into a fiscal straitjacket” during economic crises; another compared its insistence on keeping spending strictly below revenue to “telling the Atlantic Ocean not to cross a line in the sand.”
Despite dithering in the days leading up to the vote, Biden voted for the third straight year to approve the amendment that even he — along with just about everyone outside of antigovernment, right-wing circles, including his local newspaper — had warned would bring economic catastrophe. He joined all fifty-five of the Senate’s Republicans and just ten other Democrats. The amendment failed by just one vote. Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/60905-focus-joe-biden-tried-to-cut-social-security-medicaid-and-medicare-for-40-years
2020-01-17 Joe Biden Doubles Down On A Racist Myth About Black Parents https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-racist-myth-black-parents_n_5e2215a9c5b674e44b980327?guccounter=1
2020-01-17 Joe Biden has a disastrous history on Social Security that Democrats should fear Recently, a newsletter from the Bernie Sanders campaign laid out Joe Biden’s long record of supporting cuts to Social Security. In a 2018 speech, Biden says, “we need to do something about Social Security and Medicare” and that Social Security “needs adjustments.” Biden did not elaborate on what these “adjustments” were, but a look at his long history on Social Security is telling.
In the 1980s, Biden sponsored a plan to freeze all federal spending, including Social Security. In the 1990s, Biden was a leading supporter of a balanced budget amendment, considered a catastrophe for Social Security by two left-center think tanks. Biden led “grand bargain” negotiations with Republicans as vice president that” would have given Republicans structural, permanent cuts to Social Security in return for tax increases on the wealthy that would be rolled back as soon as a Republican president got elected to office.
When corporate-friendly politicians like Biden use those words “change,” “adjust,” or even “save” , they are trying to signal to elite media and billionaire donors that they are “very serious people” who are open to cutting Social Security benefits, without giving away the game to voters. That’s because cutting Social Security is incredibly unpopular with voters of all political stripes. https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/joe-biden-has-a-disastrous-history-on-social-security-that-democrats-should-fear/
A Bolton-Biden Witness Deal? It could be bad for Trump, and even worse for Biden. As more Republicans are open to calling witnesses, McConnell could demand for the sake of party unity that they go along with the Biden for Bolton deal, as Hawley has suggested. He’d probably prevail. And that would be bad for both Biden and President Trump. https://prospect.org/politics/a-bolton-biden-witness-deal-impeachment-trial/
2020-01-14 Fact Check: Bernie vs. Biden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-upzatcefYg
2019-12-17 Joe Biden’s Campaign Co-Chair Is a Big Oil and Gas Booster https://truthout.org/articles/joe-bidens-campaign-co-chair-is-a-big-oil-and-gas-booster/
2019-11-26 Betrayed by Joe Biden: a Personal History When President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to “replace” my idol, Thurgood Marshall, I was disgusted. To me, Thomas seemed unfit to even carry Thurgood Marshall’s briefcase.
Apparently, other lawyers agreed. The American Bar Association rated Clarence Thomas “unqualified,” the first time the ABA had rated any Supreme Court nominee unqualified. And the press quoted women recounting vulgar and persistent harassment they’d endured from Thomas when he’d served as Chair of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission – the very agency charged with eliminating workplace discrimination.
I was encouraged when Biden convened the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing of Thomas. I expected Biden would fulfil the promises he’d made in numerous campaigns and speeches and at my high school two decades earlier. The Judiciary Committee seemed to have plenty of ammunition to stop Thomas and force Bush to nominate a more moderate, better-qualified judge who hadn’t abused his power by harassing women. At Biden’s urging, one of the complainants, Anita Hill, agreed to testify.
Well, the rest, as they say, is history. Biden didn’t bother to call witnesses from the ABA to explain their “unqualified” rating or other lawyers who’d worked with Thomas. He didn’t defend Anita Hill from vicious attacks by Republican Senators during the hearing and in the press. And he didn’t bother to call corroborating witnesses to support her. When Thomas (predictably) played the race card, describing the Senate hearing as a “high-tech lynching of an uppity black man,” Biden seemed to fold before the cameras.
The consequences of Biden’s ineptitude are profound and enduring. In case anyone has forgotten, in 2000, Clarence Thomas was one of the five Supreme Court justices who voted to halt the Florida recount. Arguably, if Biden had done his job, Bush might have been forced to nominate a moderate and more qualified judge who didn’t owe quite so much to the Republican Party. And maybe a President Gore would have managed to enact climate legislation. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/26/betrayed-by-joe-biden-a-personal-history/
2019-11-22 Biden Under Fire for Telling Immigrant Rights Activist Demanding End to Deportations to ‘Vote for Trump’ The former vice president also told climate activists that they “listen to Bernie too much” after they demanded he reject corporate cash. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/22/biden-under-fire-telling-immigrant-rights-activist-demanding-end-deportations-vote
2019-11-07 ‘The Answer Is Not Joe Biden’: The Nation Magazine Issues Official Anti-Endorsement “Biden’s long record of poor judgment—on everything from the 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration to his botched handling of Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas to his defense of Bill Clinton’s brutal welfare cuts to his support for the Iraq War to his role as cheerleader for Wall Street deregulation,” argues The Nation editorial, make the candidate a uniquely weak opponent to put up against President Donald Trump, “whose reelection poses a clear and present danger to America’s survival as a constitutional republic.”
“Stumbling through the primaries,” the editorial states, “Biden’s zombie campaign crowds out worthier challengers, handing Trump a free pass on the very issues that should be his Achilles’ heel.”https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/07/answer-not-joe-biden-nation-magazine-issues-official-anti-endorsement
2019-10-16 DC’s Atlantic Council Raked In Funding From Hunter Biden’s Corruption-Stained Employer While Courting His VP Father In mainstream media reports about the Bidens, scarcely any attention is given to the critical role that Joe Biden and other Obama administration officials played in the 2013-2014 Maidan revolt that replaced a fairly elected, Russian-oriented government with a Western vassal. In a relatively sympathetic New Yorker profile of Hunter Biden, for example, the regime change operation was described by reporter Adam Entous as merely “public protests.”
During the height of the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” that played out in Kiev’s Maidan Square, then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland boasted that the US had “invested $5 billion” since 1991 into Ukrainian civil society. On a December 2013 tour of the Maidan, Nuland personally handed out cookies to protesters alongside then-US ay Feb. 2014, the Maidan revolt had succeeded in overthrowing Yanukovich with the help of far-right ultra-nationalist street muscle. With a new, US-approved government in power, Biden assumed a personal role in dictating Ukraine’s day-to-day affairs.
“No one in the U.S. government has wielded more influence over Ukraine than Vice President Joe Biden,” Foreign Policy noted. The Atlantic Council also described Biden as “the point person on Ukraine in the Obama administration.” Addressing the parliament in Kiev, Biden declared that “corruption can have no place in the new Ukraine,” stating that the “United States has also been a driving force behind the IMF, working to provide a multi-billion package to help Ukraine..” That same month, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma.
Hunter Biden was no stranger to trading on his father’s name for influence. He had served on the board of Amtrak, the train line his father famously rode more than 8,000 times, earning himself the nickname “Amtrak Joe.” Somehow, he also rose to senior vice president at MBNA, the bank that was the top contributor to Joe Biden’s senate campaigns.
Moreover, the vice president’s son reaped a board position at the National Democratic Institute, a US-funded “democracy promotion” organization that was heavily involved in pushing regime change in Ukraine. And then there was Burisma, which handed him a position on its board despite his total lack of experience in the energy industry and in Ukrainian affairs.
Hunter Biden tried to repay the $50,000-a-month gig Zlochevsky had handed him by enlisting a top DC law firm, Boies, Schiller, and Flexner, where he served as co-counsel, to help “improve [Burisma’s] corporate governance.” By the following January, Zlochevsky’s assets were unfrozen by the UK. https://popularresistance.org/dcs-atlantic-council-raked-in-funding-from-hunter-bidens-corruption-stained-employer-while-courting-his-vp-father/
2019-09-30 Solomon: These Once-Secret Memos Cast Doubt On Joe Biden’s Ukraine Story Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine. He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.
There’s just one problem. Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.https://popularresistance.org/solomon-these-once-secret-memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story/
2019-09-29 ‘Ukrainegate’ Teaches Us More About Ourselves Than Trump https://popularresistance.org/solomon-these-once-secret-memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story/ Or Biden While Trump is deservedly at serious risk for impeachment, the risk to Biden is also growing. Politico reports that Joe Biden is waging war on the Hunter Biden-Ukraine reporting. The risk to Biden is existential, he needs Democrats to remain silent and for the impeachment inquiry not to examine what Trump was investigating in Ukraine.
In January 2018, Biden bragged on video in his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations how he pressured Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin saying he would not approve a $1 billion dollar IMF loan if Shokin was not fired before Biden left Ukraine during a six-hour visit. On April 1, The Hill published an article that reports: “The prosecutor [Biden] got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.” They report Rosemont Seneca Partners received “regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015,” confirmed by US banking records. Shokin’s file shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer, and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of the money.
The article further reports that Shokin wrote before he was fired that he had made “specific plans” for the investigation that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.” This is consistent with a sworn affidavit of Shokin (see shokin-ukraine-prosecutor-sworn-statement) where he said, “Poroshenko asked me to resign due to pressure from…Joe Biden…who was threatening to withhold USD $1 billion in subsidies to Ukraine until I was removed.” There were no complaints against Shokin at the time. He explains, “The truth is I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe of Bursima Holdings.” Shokin describes how Poroshenko had asked him to end the probe multiple times and he had refused.
Obama named Biden the administration’s point man on Ukraine in February 2014, after the coup and as Crimea was voting to return to Russia. https://popularresistance.org/ukraingate-teaches-us-more-about-ourselves-than-trump-or-biden/
2019-09-11 Joe Biden – 17 Minutes Of Joe’s Melting Brain
2019-07-26 To Defeat Trump, ‘the Resistance’ Must Own Up to Its Own White Supremacy From immigration to climate, the white left’s blind spots have sullied even well intentioned efforts to combat Trump, the far right, and ecological collapse.
Under the Obama administration, the repressive institutional practices of border enforcement accelerated. Border agents destroyed and obstructed humanitarian supplies for migrants with impunity. And family detention was introduced as a cornerstone of Obama’s effort to contain what his administration described as a migrant “crisis.”
In 2014, in a horrifying precursor to Trump’s family separation policy, Hillary Clinton declared: “Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean your child gets to stay.” Living conditions in detention facilities were atrocious, and the authorities received over 5,000 sexual abuse complaints from migrants, including minors.
This July, when families of victims among the roughly 3 million immigrants deported under the Obama administration held a protest sit-in at Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters, six people were arrested by police — but no one from the Biden campaign could be bothered to respond to the group. This is nothing new. Biden previously worked with racist senators to oppose policies that would overturn racial segregation in schools. Make no mistake. Bigotry is bipartisan — and we need to root it out in our own movements if we want a hope of taking out the Trump administration.
No wonder Rep. Rashida Tlaib has said that “Islamophobia is very much among the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.” While the Republicans have an overt history of racism that has intensified under Trump, the Democrats have a long track record of institutional racism that goes largely unchallenged. https://fpif.org/to-defeat-trump-the-resistance-must-own-up-to-its-own-white-supremacy/
2019-07-24 The 5 Biggest Lies Joe Biden is Telling about Medicare for All Joe Biden keeps lying about Medicare for All and won’t stop anytime soon — he has to, to sell his own Bidencare plan. But Medicare for All will always win on the merits. https://portside.org/2019-07-24/5-biggest-lies-joe-biden-telling-about-medicare-all
2019-07-14 Immigration Rights Demonstrators Sit-In At Biden’s Headquarters Movimiento Cosecha, an immigrant rights organization, organized a sit-in protest at Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters Wednesday in search of an apology for the deportation of 3 million immigrants during President Barack Obama’s presidency. https://popularresistance.org/immigration-rights-demonstrators-sit-in-at-bidens-headquarters/
2019-07-11 Joe Biden Was One of the Iraq War’s Most Enthusiastic Backers Joe Biden didn’t just vote to invade Iraq — he worked hard alongside George W. Bush to persuade the public to back it. Biden holds significant responsibility for the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq and the surrounding region since the invasion. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/07/joe-biden-iraq-war-hawk-presidential-candidate
2019-07-10 Joe Biden: Protector of the Deep State During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Biden sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was established upon recommendation of the 1975/1976 Pike committee to provide “vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Biden himself admitted that the Senate Intelligence Committee failed at this latter task.
By the 1980s, Biden was supporting increases in intelligence and counterintelligence funding after Jimmy Carter had tried to cut the CIA’s staff by a third. In 1980, he voted to approve as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey, a staunch anticommunist who ramped up covert arms supplies to the Afghan mujahidin, Nicaraguan Contras and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA forces in Angola. Biden supported Reagan’s War on Terrorism, whose double-standards were significant, and was a staunch proponent of the War on Drugs, even though he reviewed DEA reports on the illicit drug trade which would have pointed to the corruption of CIA allies.
In 1978, Biden helped to write the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which permitted electronic surveillance by the President to acquire foreign intelligence information for a period of up to one year without a court order and sanctioned secret court proceedings.
Biden should be judged as part of a generation of lawmakers who failed to reign in the “deep state.” Joe’s conversion from an opponent to a protector of the CIA in the 1970s set the groundwork for his Vice Presidency – and would do so for his presidency.
In the 2009 debate over the “surge” in Afghanistan, Biden characteristically wanted a small troop increase and more air strikes and drone attacks – the approach favored by the CIA. Biden also supported the CIA’s operations in Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, Venezuela and Syria, and backed the expansion of the private military industry under Obama, which is heavily dominated by the CIA. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/10/joe-biden-protector-of-the-deep-state/
2019-06-20 Joe Biden Out of Stonewall Democrats have not been friends or allies of the queer community historically and it is unrealistic to think that they will ever be. In 2012, Joe Biden—and the Democratic Party as a whole—began to rebrand as an ally of the LGBT community. Biden even preceded Obama in publicly supporting gay marriage, causing something of a stir. But, prior to 2012, Biden was anything but a supporter of LGBTQ+ people. Biden voted for both Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), “defending” heterosexual marriage and barring LGBTQ+ people from the military. Both of these discriminatory measures were signed by then President Bill Clinton and voted for by a plurality of Democrats.
Even recently Biden has made statements that caused outrage within the queer community, most notably calling Mike Pence—a man who literally supports the torture of queer youth through ‘conversion therapy’—“a decent man.” The few times where Joe Biden actually voted for nominally pro-LGBTQ+ bills typically involved hate crime legislation which is in-keeping with Biden’s consistent belief that you can solve social problems (domestic violence, bigotry, drug abuse) with the Prison-Industrial Complex. This prison industrial complex is used as a weapon against people of color, and particularly queer people of color. Given that the Stonewall Uprising began with queer people fighting with the police to resist legal oppression, a man who has fought for decades to put more police on the street has no business appropriating the legacy of Stonewall. https://www.leftvoice.org/joe-biden-out-of-stonewall
2019-05-25 BEST 13 BIDEN GAFFES – KnowBiden.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFcRbttIUNk
2019-05-08 Joe Biden Personifies a New “End of History,” This time for U.S. Imperial Rule After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. and Western oligarchs celebrated the “end of history.” The oligarchs assumed that unfettered imperial rule and capitalist exploitation would permanently dominate the globe. Biden is indeed a favorite among the oligarchs to continue this project, but his very essence represents quite the opposite development.
Large numbers of people in the United States desire policies that are anathema to the Biden-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. A new “end of history” is emerging, but this time for the empire. Majorities of voters in both parties want Medicare for All . The same goes for the Green New Deal . There is little support among the population for U.S. military expansionism , which is why it’s been cleverly cloaked as “humanitarian intervention.”https://www.blackagendareport.com/joe-biden-personifies-new-end-history-time-us-imperial-rule
2019-04-26 Joe Biden Launches Campaign with Charlottesville Condemnation after Supporting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine While working behind the scenes to shape the post-Maidan Ukrainian government to their liking, powerbrokers in Washington — Biden included — have done all they could to downplay the U.S. role. https://www.mintpressnews.com/joe-biden-launches-campaign-charlottesville-condemnation-supporting-neo-nazis-ukraine/257891/
2019-03-29 Lucy Flores isn’t alone. Joe Biden has a long history of touching women inappropriately The media gave Biden a pass for years. It won’t in 2020 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/29/18241598/joe-biden-lucy-flores-touching-women-media-history-explained
2020-03-05 Joe Biden Has Built a Career on Betraying Black Voters Joe Biden’s string of primary victories highlights a central paradox of his career: he has secured the loyalty of African American voters while working nonstop to let them down. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/joe-biden-black-voters-african-americans-betrayal
2019-04-26 Joe Biden: An Imperial Corporatist Wrapped in the Bloody Flag of Charlottesville Besides being a grabby old coot who needs to stop joking about complaints over his serially inappropriate touching of females, Joe Biden is a grinning neoliberal sell-out who stands well to the right of majority progressive public opinion.
The media trope that portrays “Lunch-Bucket Joe” Biden as a regular, down-to-earth guy who cares deeply about regular folks is pure, unadulterated bullshit. His real constituents wear pinstripe suits and works on Wall Street and in corporate headquarters. They fly around in fancy private jets. And the supposed “everyman liberal” Joe Biden is their loyal apparatchik. It’s not for nothing that Biden relies on big money backers, not small and working-class donors – and that he is an especially close ally and beneficiary of Washington lobbyists. He has spent decades ripping on progressive “special interests” while joining with Republicans to advance policies harmful to the working-class. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/26/joe-biden-an-imperial-corporatist-wrapped-in-the-bloody-flag-of-charlottesville/
2019-04-25 Joe Biden Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen Joe Biden just announced his candidacy for president. Of all the terrible candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, he is the worst. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/joe-biden-2020-presidential-campaign-record
2019-04-03 Lucy Flores isn’t alone. Joe Biden has a long history of touching women inappropriately The media gave Biden a pass for years. It won’t in 2020 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/29/18241598/joe-biden-lucy-flores-touching-women-media-history-explained
2019-04-03 What Joe Biden Did May Not Have Been Harassment — But That Doesn’t Mean It’s Okay https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/04/228678/joe-biden-women-creepy-touching-allegations-lucy-flores
2019-04-03 Biden responds to allegations of touching: I’ll respect people’s “personal space” https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18294162/joe-biden-touching-allegations-response
2019-03-31 Bill Russo @BillR Mar 31, 2019 Statement from @JoeBiden this morning. https://twitter.com/BillR/status/1112339598699626501
2019-03-29 An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/an-awkward-kiss-changed-how-i-saw-joe-biden.html
2019-01-18 The Biden Band-Aid: Will Democrats Contain the Insurgency? In all likelihood the Democratic establishment will seek a “safe” candidate like Biden, one who would not challenge political conventions like a “democratic socialist” or be an African-American, Hispanic or another woman. Biden is the perfect band-aid candidate, one well-tested in compromise or “bi-partisan” politics.
n 1990, Biden opposed the Gulf War but in 1998 switched positions and supported the Iraq invasion, calling Saddam Hussein a national-security threat. More troubling, he’s been a long-term backer of bank deregulation and – like Clinton and Obama — close to Wall Street financiers. He helped secure the passage of the “new Jim Crow” legislation, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, that Clinton signed. And in 2001 he backed the USA PATRIOT Act – i.e., Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act – that institutionalized the national security state. Biden is an old-hand playing the political hand he’s dealt.
Perhaps most important, Biden’s run – and possible victory — can help the Democratic Party establishment contain the grassroots insurgency that spouted in the mid-term 2018 elections. The U.S. is in the midst of a great restructuring, with globalization superseding the American Century, inequality replacing the American Dream. One of the lessons of the 2018 midterm election was that Trump’s false policies of 2016 are not working, and more and more people, including among his supports, know it.
Unfortunately, Biden and the establishment Democrats are unlikely to admit to the fundamental structural changes remaking the country – or propose meaningful policies to address them. Sadly, Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, will offer only band-aids to stop the bleeding of the symptoms and not deal with the deeper causes sickening the nation. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/18/the-biden-band-aid-will-democrats-contain-the-insurgency-2/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/18/the-biden-band-aid-will-democrats-contain-the-insurgency-2/
2018-11-12 I Watched Joe Biden Give An Award To George W Bush So You Don’t Have To https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/i-watched-joe-biden-give-an-award-to-george-w-bush-so-you-dont-have-to-f780aeb725f9
2018-08-17 Joe Biden, the Unreliable Pro-Choice Advocate Joe Biden’s political career is one of constantly waffling on women’s right to choose. He is an unreliable ally in the fight for abortion rights. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/joe-biden-abortion-president
2017-01-03 Joe Biden Is Running Out of Pickup Lines “What a beautiful smile,” Biden says to a younger woman with dark hair in Sen. Boozman’s family. “You have very good taste,” Biden says to a younger male family member of Sen. Murkowski, apparently about the man’s wife. “Mom I want to know what you’re drinkin’,” Biden says to Sen. Cortez-Masto’s mom. Says she looks more like her sister. https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/joe-biden-senate-swearing-in-chuck-grassley.html
2016-12-07 U.S. First Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals From Prosecution, Now Officially Honors Them President Obama made the decision in early 2009 to block the Justice Department from criminally investigating and prosecuting Cheney and his fellow torturers, as well as to protect them from foreign investigations and even civil liability sought by torture victims. Obama did that notwithstanding a campaign decree that even top Bush officials are subject to the rule of law and, more importantly, notwithstanding a treaty signed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan requiring that all signatory states criminally prosecute their own torturers. Obama’s immunizing Bush-era torturers converted torture from a global taboo and decades-old crime into a reasonable, debatable policy question, which is why so many GOP candidates are now openly suggesting its use.
Along with George W. Bush, one of the speakers in attendance at the unveiling ceremony of a marble bust of former Vice President Cheney was Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke movingly of Cheney’s kind and generous soul: I actually like Dick Cheney. … I can say without fear of contradiction, there’s never one single time been a harsh word, not one single time in our entire relationship. https://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-first-shields-its-torturers-and-war-criminals-from-prosecution-now-officially-honors-them/5560764
2016-04-04 Biden Backs Legislation Preventing $150 Billion of Student Loan Debt from being Discharged or Renegotiated https://www.projectcensored.org/biden-backs-legislation-preventing-150-billion-student-loan-debt-discharged-renegotiated/
2015-03-Continuing the Crackdown on Kids The “Biden Plan” for Central America treats refugee children as a national security threat. Tucked into the administration’s 2016 budget requestthe plan has been christened “Biden’s Billion” for its major promoter and the amount he expects U.S. taxpayers to put up to support it. It divides aid into three “lines of action”: security, economic development, and governance.
Yet in every one of these areas, the response repeats errors of the past. Rather than focusing on a response to the humanitarian crisis of child refugees, it serves as a vehicle for deepening the drug war and “free-trade” agendas that have contributed to the crisis.
The plan requests $300 million for security assistance, a considerable increase over previous regional collaborations like the Merida Initiative and the Central American Regional Security Initiative. The increase goes mainly to the region’s police forces. This essentially rewards known human rights violators.
The United Nations concluded that 58 percent of the child refugees it interviewed had international protection needs, including a staggering 72 percent of Salvadoran children.
Yet for all its fanfare, the Biden plan makes no attempt to respond to this urgent need to keep children safe. In fact, through its border security measures and the likelihood of increased deportations from the United States and Mexico, it exacerbates their plight. The plan actually transfers millions of dollars out of child and maternal health to fund the new security measures.
The policies to deport migrants from Mexico are creating greater perils for them en route and back home. Father Alejandro Solalinde, who runs a migrant shelter in southern Mexico, worries that “They’re sending them right into the arms of the cartels.” That’s just what the plan does.
2015-02-17 Joe Biden Holds, Whispers to Defense Secretary’s Wife https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/joe-biden-holds-whispers-defense-secretarys-wife-29029109
2015-02-17 Joe Biden Got a Little Too Close to the New Defense Secretary’s Wife https://time.com/3712274/joe-biden-whisper/
2015-02-17 New SecDef Can’t Even Defend His Wife From Joe Biden https://dailycaller.com/2015/02/17/new-secdef-cant-even-defend-his-wife-from-joe-biden-military-chief-oblivious-as-vp-nibbles-on-wifes-ear/?
2015-02-17 Joe Biden takes ‘being Biden’ to new heights (or depths) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/17/joe-biden-takes-being-biden-to-new-heights-or-lows/
2015-02-17 Nine Times Joe Biden Creepily Whispered in Women’s Ears https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/02/9-times-joe-biden-whispered-in-womens-ears.html#_ga=2.129793288.509941735.1585337733-1871733666.1585337733
2015-02-15 Joe Biden, We Need to Talk About the Way You Touch Women https://gawker.com/joe-biden-we-need-to-talk-about-the-way-you-touch-wome-1686648038
2013-02 24 FDL Book Salon Welcomes Chad Nackers and Alex Blechman, The President of Vice: The Autobiography of Joe Biden (The Onion) We all know Vice President Joe Biden. But there’s so much we didn’t know about the current Veep…until now. https://shadowproof.com/2013/02/24/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-chad-nackers-and-alex-blechman/
2013-01-07 The Corruption of Joe Biden Biden is a would-be working-man-of-the-people was re-elected US senator from the Moneybags Corporate State of Delaware for over 36 years, a period known for the inexorable slow demise of labor unions. While Biden may scrap with Republicans, he is a classic Cold War Liberal in the Hubert Humphrey mode, pushing moderately progressive legislation while reinforcing the pillars of imperial militarism and the burgeoning police-state that is post-9/11 America.
I submit that that hell is what we’re living through today: Unquestioned, bi-partisan, fiscally irresponsible, mostly-secret militarism accompanied by a highly partisan struggle in congress for the left-over domestic scraps. Another aspect of that partisan struggle is over what is the cause of the nation’s grotesque deficit: Militarism or domestic so-called Entitlements?
The point is, anyone who says there is no bi-partisanship in Congress is wearing blinders. When it comes to military, intelligence, surveillance and police expenditures, bi-partisanship is impregnable. Consider how the recent FISA national surveillance legislation — ie., spying on the citizenry, something that should be controversial — breezed through Congress and the White House two weeks ago.
iden had been on the famous Church Committee in the late ‘70s that investigated intelligence excesses. “The experience convinced him that crime should be viewed as a form of domestic security,” writes Ted Gest inCrime & Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order. Biden’s first effort in this vein was developing the National Security and Violent Crime Control Act. It was an “attempt to put crime in a defense context — getting the armed forces involved in drug interdiction, for example.”
making laws is not always a pretty business. But that doesn’t mean our laws have to be nasty-smelling things forged out of corrupt back-room deals designed to bamboozle tax payers. The only reason the current struggles are so vile is that there is so much secrecy and dishonesty focused on sustaining an American imperial militarism around the world. This militarism, as happens in all cases of declining empire, eats resources that might maintain the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, provide for the social needs of American citizens and the general welfare of the homeland. It’s that simple. https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/07/the-corruption-of-joe-biden/
2012-03-15 Honduras: When Engagement Becomes Complicity Honduran security forces are murdering, raping, beating, and detaining Hondurans — with U.S. aid. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Honduras on March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and reinforce the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster the presidency of Porfirio Lobo. In a March 1 press briefing, U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Blinken cited “the tremendous leadership President Lobo has displayed in advancing national reconciliation and democratic and constitutional order.”
You’d think they were talking about a different country from the one we visited just weeks before on a fact-finding mission on violence against women. What we found was a nation submerged in violence and lawlessness, a president incapable or unwilling to do much about it, and a justice system in shambles. https://fpif.org/honduras_when_engagement_becomes_complicity/
2011-12-11 Joe Biden Drafted the Core of the Patriot Act in 1995 … Before the Oklahoma City Bombing Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of “terrorism” that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review.* The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode “constitutional and statutory due process protections” and would “authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.”
Biden himself draws parallels between his 1995 bill and its 2001 cousin. “I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill,” he said when the Patriot Act was being debated, according to the New Republic, which described him as “the Democratic Party’s de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism.” https://www.globalresearch.ca/joe-biden-drafted-the-core-of-the-patriot-act-in-1995-before-the-oklahoma-city-bombing/28148
2010-09-07 Biden Embraces Myth That Surge Turned Iraq Into Good War In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative. https://fpif.org/biden_embraces_myth_that_surge_turned_iraq_into_good_war/
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