After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama
administrations orchestrated the bailout of
Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts,
particularly in mortgage-backed securities,
that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of
speculation. As a result, social inequality
increased to record levels. Corporate cash
hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion
was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced to pay for the economic consequences of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale. Once again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity to restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
Bernie Sanders threatens delegates with removal if they criticize Biden
Senator Bernie Sanders’ political team has asked some of his delegates to sign an agreement preventing them from criticizing Democratic Party leaders on social media, including the presumptive presidential candidate Joe Biden, or talking to reporters without approval.
The rules for Sanders delegates to this summer’s Democratic convention, which were leaked to the Washington Post, include a social media policy, a nondisclosure agreement and a delegate code of conduct.
Sanders and Biden
Delegates were told that they “are expected to follow” the guidelines, and that “failure to do so may result in disciplinary action, including but not limited to your removal from the delegation.” The orders, five pages long, are designed to stifle any opposition to the Democratic presidential nominee and prevent any exposure of divisions within the party.
The most significant and controversial rule explicitly prohibits delegates from criticizing the Biden campaign. It reads: “Refrain from making negative statements about other candidates, party leaders, Campaigns, Campaign staffers, supporters, news organizations or journalists.” Instead, delegates are encouraged to share “campaign-approved content.”
The document continues: “If a member of the media contacts you about a posting of any kind: do not respond.” Delegates are instructed to refer all inquiries to the Sanders press office.
In one particularly ominous passage the document advises delegates to think twice about posting anything controversial: “Before tweeting or posting from your personal social media accounts, ask yourself these questions: If this appeared on the front page of The New York Times, would it compromise Bernie Sanders’s message, credibility, or reputation? Could it potentially risk your standing as a delegate?”
The move to suppress free speech among his delegates marks a new low for Sanders and further exposes his fraudulent “political revolution.” The essential function of the Sanders campaign has, since its beginning in 2015, been to contain mass opposition among workers and youth to the entire political establishment, Democratic and Republican, and funnel it back into the Democratic Party.
At the onset of both of his presidential bids, Sanders won support among sections of workers and youth on the basis of his class appeal. He regularly railed against the “billionaire class” and insisted that workers had basic human rights such as health care. He made lofty claims and promises to his followers regarding the purpose of his campaign. In his 2016 book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe, he wrote that his campaign was “never just about electing a president of the United States” but rather it was about “transforming America.”
What has been the actual outcome of the Sanders experience?
In 2016, Sanders worked to channel support behind Hillary Clinton, the widely despised candidate of Wall Street and the CIA, providing Donald Trump with the opportunity to posture as the only candidate opposed to the status quo.
Sanders, who had obtained the votes of 13 million youth and workers in the Democratic primaries, endorsed Clinton and actively campaigned for her. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, he berated his own delegates for not supporting Clinton. Amid boos, Sanders scolded a section of supporters, admonishing them that “this is the real world we live in,” i.e., the “real world” of capitalism and the capitalist two-party system. The next evening Sanders rose from the floor of the convention to motivate the nomination of Clinton by acclamation.
Despite Sanders’ efforts to whip up support for Clinton, many of his supporters remained vehemently opposed to her campaign. Democratic Party leaders, including Clinton herself, largely blamed her 2016 loss to Donald Trump on Sanders, accusing him of delaying his withdrawal from the primary race and refusing to rein in his dissident supporters.
Now, under conditions of a combined public health and economic-social-political crisis of the capitalist system without precedent in American history, Sanders is pulling out all the stops in his defense of the capitalist status quo. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, the United States had been in the grips of an escalating crisis of capitalist rule, with the Democratic impeachment drive and Trump’s open incitement of fascistic forces coinciding with an upsurge of working class strikes and protests on a scale unseen for decades.
This is what has driven Sanders even further and more openly to the right, and dictated his naked effort to police and muzzle left-wing opposition to Biden.
Since ending his second bid for the presidency last month, Sanders has carried out an aggressive campaign to browbeat his supporters into backing Biden. Sanders and Biden have gone to great lengths to promote party “unity” under the explosive social and political conditions of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The “unity” campaign started with Sanders’ groveling endorsement of Biden, in which he made no criticisms and placed no demands on the Biden campaign. This was followed by an interview with the Associated Press in which he slandered as “irresponsible” any of his supporters who failed to campaign for Biden. Former top advisors to the Sanders campaign moved quickly to launch a new super PAC, “Future to Believe In,” to direct resources to electing Biden.
Biden and Sanders established phony “task forces” composed of leading members of their respective campaigns to promote party unity ahead of the Democratic convention. This included a friendly agreement over the number of delegates Sanders would be permitted to keep for the convention. The idea was to create the illusion that Sanders supporters had representation and could push the veteran right-wing political operative Biden to the “left.”
Sanders’ silencing of delegates with threats of removal proves all the more clearly the purely ornamental character of the delegate deal and his role more broadly. Sanders is well aware that Biden, who personifies the Democratic Party as a party of Wall Street and the military, has no intention of adopting any of his mildly reformist policies.
When asked in an interview Friday morning if he would “govern as an economic progressive,” Biden evaded the question, saying, “I have a record of over 40 years, and I’m going to be Joe Biden. Look at my record.” Even the most superficial look at Biden’s record reveals a nearly fifty-year history of servitude to big business, including his role in the Wall Street bailout, the expansion of war in the Middle East and austerity against the working class during the Obama administration. If elected, Biden will carry out a pro-corporate domestic policy and a violently militarist foreign policy.
The coming together of Sanders and the Biden campaign underscores the fraud of Sanders’ central claim: that the Democratic Party, the oldest capitalist party in the world, can be transformed into an instrument of progressive change. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the Democrats, including Sanders, have voted unanimously for the CARES Act multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, and are now working with Trump to force workers back to work under unsafe conditions even as the pandemic continues to spread.
They are implementing the back-to-work drive knowing full well that it will lead to the deaths of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.
BLOG:
DURING THE EIGHT YEARS OF THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME WE NEVER HEARD GROPER
JOE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE LOOT HANDED OVER TO THEIR BANKSTER DONORS OR A COMMENT
ON SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (ENDORSED BIDEN) AND HER CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS
FARGO!
Biden
repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the
second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of
managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo
that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large
corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small
businesses.
Biden wants a new
stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion
By Michael Grunwald
Joe Biden wants a more progressive approach to
economic stimulus legislation than Washington has taken so far, including much
stricter oversight of the Trump Administration, much tougher conditions on
business bailouts and long-term investments in infrastructure and climate that
have so far been largely absent from congressional debates.
In a fiery half-hour interview with POLITICO,
the presumptive Democratic nominee sounded a bit like his angrier and less
moderate primary rivals, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, though
in unexpurgated Biden style. The former vice president said that the next round
of coronavirus stimulus needs to be “a hell of a lot bigger” than last month’s
$2 trillion CARES Act, that it needs to include massive aid to states and
cities to prevent them from “laying off a hell of a lot of teachers and cops
and firefighters,” and that the administration is already “wasting a hell of a
lot of money.”
Biden has been running a low-profile campaign
during the pandemic, tweeting, filming videos and appearing on Sunday shows
from his Delaware home while President Donald Trump has briefed the nation
daily from the White House. Biden has let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speak for the Democratic Party during the debates
over economic relief, offering supportive public statements that have faded
into the background.
But stimulus is a subject close to his heart,
and he passionately contrasted his own management of President Barack Obama’s
$800 billion Recovery Act in 2009 with President Donald Trump’s approach to the
trillions of dollars flowing out of Capitol Hill.
The Obama stimulus was wildly controversial,
but it won bipartisan praise for its strict oversight and unusually low levels
of fraud. In the interview, Biden was at his most indignant when he recounted
how he recruited a gruff law enforcement veteran and government watchdog named
Earl Devaney to oversee the Recovery Act in 2009, and how President Donald
Trump fired the Pentagon inspector general who had been selected to oversee the
CARES Act almost immediately after he signed it.
“I wanted to bring in the toughest
son-of-a-b***h in the country—I really mean it, I’m not joking—because we
wanted to make sure we did it by the numbers with genuine oversight,” Biden
said. “Right now, there’s no oversight. [Trump] made it real clear he doesn’t
have any damn interest in being checked. The last thing he wants is anyone
watching that $500 billion going to corporate America, for God’s sake.”
The Trump campaign said it would not comment on
the firing of Pentagon inspector general Michael Atkinson beyond the
president’s public comments on April 4, when he attacked Atkinson for giving
Congress the original whistleblower report about his call with the Ukrainian
president that eventually led to his impeachment. “I thought he did a terrible
job. Absolutely terrible,” the president said at the time. “He took a fake
report and brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay? Not a big Trump
fan—that, I can tell you.”
Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and
big banks, noting that “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,”
accusing the Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit.
He railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the
American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot at CARES
Act aid intended for small businesses. Over the last month, 26 million Americans have
lost their jobs, and Biden said many of those jobs could be gone for good if
mom-and-pop operations get left behind.
“We knew from the beginning that the big banks
don’t like lending to small businesses,” Biden said. “I’m telling you, though,
if Main Street businesses don’t get help, they’re gone.”
The CARES Act and three smaller coronavirus
relief bills have all passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and
Biden was careful to avoid criticizing Pelosi and Schumer even as he criticized
the results of the compromises they negotiated. He said he’s “in constant
conservation” with both Democratic leaders, letting them know his priorities
without interfering with their negotiations; he credited them with securing
major increases in unemployment benefits and other improvements to Republican
proposals that were initially skewed even further towards big business.
He was clearly disappointed that Pelosi and
Schumer failed to secure any new aid to states in this week’s $484 billion
package, but he suggested that could work out politically, because in the next
round they’ll be able to blame Trump and other Republicans for looming state
budget cuts and layoffs of first responders.
“They got what they could get,” Biden said.
“I’ve been in too many negotiations to second-guess anybody else’s.”
Still, Biden suggested that after four rounds
of legislation designed primarily to stanch the economic bleeding, the next
round should include more forward-looking investments that could help the
economy start to recover and grow once the virus is contained. He suggested a
“trillion-dollar infrastructure program that can be implemented really
rapidly,” as well as “dealing with environmental things that create good-paying
jobs.”
Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell have suggested that “green stimulus” would be a non-starter with
Republicans, but Biden said investments in light rail, clean drinking water,
and half a million electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s highways could
help retool the economy for the future.
Biden also argued that long-term growth
initiatives are America’s only hope to rein in a budget deficit that has
suddenly ballooned to an unprecedented $4 trillion, and is sure to continue to
expand as Washington continues to spend. He said that repealing the bulk of
Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut would help limit the red ink—“It wasn’t worth the
powder it will take to blow it to hell”—but ultimately, restoring jobs and
investing in the future is “the only thing that grows the economy back so the
deficit doesn’t eat you alive.”
Biden has loved talking about stimulus ever
since he ran the Recovery Act, and he sounded comfortable returning to the
topic from his Delaware home, although there were a couple of typically
hard-to-follow tangents, and one brief coughing interruption that he attributed
to swallowing a peanut the wrong way.
His main theme was the contrast between his
legendary harassment of the Cabinet secretaries, governors and mayors in charge
of spending Recovery Act dollars—he reminded me that he spoke with every
governor except Alaska’s Sarah Palin, most of them repeatedly—and “the
malpractice of this administration.”
“There’s no coordination. There’s no
accountability. Come on, the guy waits to hold up money because he wants to
make sure his name is on the checks!” Biden said.
Biden has been firing off a steady stream of
tweets attacking Trump for failing to make sure America has enough tests and
protective equipment, for complaining about his media coverage, and most
recently for suggesting that drinking bleach might help cure the virus. But
while Biden clearly hopes to persuade some 2016 Trump voters to back him in
November, he also needs to make sure that progressive Sanders and Warren
supporters don’t stay home.
BLOG: HERE’S GROPER JOE’S NEW PERFORMANCE OF
THE WEEK. THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY IS NOW A ‘POPULIST’
This week, Biden has taken flak from the left
for including the corporate-friendly Democratic economist Lawrence Summers on
internal calls. But on Friday night, he denounced corporate America as “greedy
as hell,” echoing the structural critiques of the modern economy that fueled
the Sanders and Warren campaigns.
He called for stronger assurances that
small-business loans will go to small businesses, and that aid to larger
corporations will come with strings prohibiting stock buybacks, executive
bonuses or worker layoffs. But he also went beyond policy prescriptions, saying
the pandemic might convince Americans that grocery clerks “and all the other
folks out there saving our rear ends and risking their lives for eight bucks an
hour” deserve a better deal. He thinks there could be a backlash against big
corporations who have poured their profits into buybacks and dividends rather
than worker training and research and development. He thinks the virus could
deal a blow to short-term economic thinking and anti-government political
thinking.
“I think there’s going to be a willingness to
fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time,”
Biden said. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
Amid simmering crisis over sexual assault
charges Nancy Pelosi endorses Biden
28 April 2020
On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
formally endorsed Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party candidate in the
2020 presidential election. In an eleven-minute video, Pelosi lavished praise
on the pro-war, pro-corporate long-time senator and vice president under Barack
Obama, the most right-wing of the major contestants for the nomination.
Pelosi called the 77-year-old,
semi-senile political hack a “voice of reason” in the coronavirus crisis and
absurdly described him as “a leader who is the personification of hope and
courage, values and integrity.” In the midst of the greatest corporate
bailout in world history, she specifically praised Biden for his role in the
multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street during the 2008–2009 financial
crisis.
Pelosi’s endorsement followed
endorsements earlier this month by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, marking the line-up of the so-called “progressive”
wing of the party behind the candidate of the party apparatus, whose official
imprimatur was signaled by the endorsement the same week by Barack Obama.
But the unity at the top has not
resolved the party’s deep crisis. Biden is despised by broad sections
of the working class and especially youth and younger workers, and there are
many indications that large sections of those, especially young people, who supported
the Sanders campaign may not accede to Sanders’ post-capitulation demand that
they vote for Biden.
Their disquiet has been increased by the
news last week that Biden’s chief economic adviser is Larry Summers, a key
architect from the 1990s to the present of the policies of deregulation and
economic parasitism that have enabled the financial aristocracy to monopolize
ever greater portions of society’s wealth.
This has been compounded by a simmering
scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse against Biden by Tara Reade, a
one-time staffer in Biden’s Senate office, who filed a complaint with
Washington DC police in March accusing the then-senator from Delaware of having
assaulted her in 1993.
The alleged incident occurred 26 years
ago, there were no other witnesses, Reade did not file a complaint with the
police at the time, and the statute of limitations has long since expired.
Biden himself has said nothing, but his campaign has denied the charges.
has no way of knowing whether Reade’s allegations
are true. One thing is clear, however. The response of the Democratic Party and
media organizations aligned with it, such as the New York Times and
the Washington Post, which have spearheaded the #MeToo witch hunt
and reveled in the “take down” of dozens of prominent men on the basis of
unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, has exposed their rank
hypocrisy.
The Times and
the Post failed to report Reade’s allegations for weeks
after the story was broken by Sanders supporter Katie Halper on her podcast in
March. In mid-April they posted articles emphasizing inconsistencies in Reade’s
story and insisting that it had to be carefully examined and Biden given the
presumption of innocence before reaching any conclusion as to his guilt.
The Democratic National Committee has
said nothing, nor has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sanders, Warren or
most of the dozen or so women on Biden’s short list for his vice presidential
running mate. Pelosi has spoken publicly only once on the matter, telling MSNBC
on April 17 that she was “satisfied” with Biden’s denial. She appeared Sunday
on CNN’s “State of the Union” program and was not asked by moderator Jake
Tapper about the issue.
The contrast between the treatment of
Biden by the Democratic Party and the pro-Democratic media and the treatment of
a host of targets of #MeToo sex charges could not be more blatant. The mantra
“believe women” that was proclaimed repeatedly, including by Biden himself
during the September 2018 Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has been supplanted by a sudden (dishonest)
affirmation of the democratic principles of due process and the presumption of
innocence.
What has been exposed is the role of the
#MeToo campaign as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Its proponents have
changed their tune because the McCarthyite methods of #MeToo in this particular
case cut across the interests of the Democratic Party and substantial sections
of the ruling class that are backing Biden in the contest with Trump.
There are, however, forces aligned with
the Democratic Party that are pushing Reade’s allegations and calling out the
party apparatus for seeking to quash them. The Intercept has
published a number of articles as have some pseudo-left Sanders promoters,
including Jacobin magazine.
This opposition has increased since the
posting Friday by Newsbusters of a video clip from an August 1993 CNN “Larry
King Live” program in which a woman, identified by Reade as her mother, calls
in and cites the case of her daughter, who was “working for a prominent senator
and could not get through with her problems at all.” The caller does not
identify the senator and does not mention sexual harassment, but the clip seems
to confirm Reade’s claim that she told her mother of the incident with Biden at
the time.
The video has been widely reported by
Fox News and other right-wing media, but largely suppressed by the rest of the
corporate media.
Fox News reported Monday that the
hashtag #dropoutbiden was trending on Twitter on Sunday, until it was allegedly
removed. Nick Brana, Sanders’ former national outreach coordinator, tweeted
over the weekend that the Democratic National Committee should either force
Biden to drop out or “admit that suppressing progressives is the true purpose
of your party.”
Another former Sanders senior adviser,
Winnie Wong, tweeted: “The video of Tara Reade’s late mother calling into Larry
King to blow the whistle about Tara’s sexual assault is being met with relative
silence from a cadre of progressives right now and I want you all to know that
I see you. We all do.”
Within this context, Pelosi’s abrupt
endorsement of Biden appears to be an effort to contain and silence the voices
calling for him to step aside and make explicit the party’s demand that the
matter be dropped. Pelosi’s video appears to be part of a circling of the
wagons around Biden.
On Monday, the co-chair of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal (Democrat from
Washington state), endorsed Biden, after having served as the Sanders
campaign’s national chair for health policy. Biden was the most
strident opponent of Sanders’ call for “Medicare for all” during the primary
contest, repeatedly denouncing it on the grounds that it would cost several
trillion dollars. Of course, both he and Sanders are now supporting a bailout
of the corporate-financial elite that has already reached some $10 trillion.
“I am ready to work with him [Biden] to
craft and then implement the most progressive agenda of any candidate in
history,” Jayapal said in a statement.
Her endorsement followed that of two
other former Sanders campaign officials. The Progressive Congressional Caucus’s
other co-chair, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, endorsed Biden last week, as did
Representative Ro Khanna of California. Pocan and Khanna served as co-chairmen
for Sanders.
There is nothing progressive in the
efforts of disaffected Democrats and their pseudo-left allies to dislodge Biden
on the basis of unsubstantiated sex allegations. Even assuming that Reade is
telling the truth, in which case Biden should be held to account, the fact is
that Biden and his party are guilty of far greater crimes.
The wars Biden supported in Afghanistan
and Iraq alone killed hundreds of thousands of people, including women and
children. The Obama administration, in which Biden served as second-in-command,
made drone assassination a major instrument of US foreign policy, asserting the
right to murder US citizens and carrying out the assassination of at least
three Americans. In 2010, Biden himself declared persecuted journalist Julian
Assange to be a “hi-tech terrorist.”
It is not a question of replacing Biden
with some other servant of American imperialism and Wall Street and promoting
the middle class politics of racial and gender identity. The crisis requires
the mobilization of the mass of workers, who are increasingly fighting back
against the return-to-work campaign of both big business parties, and behind
them all genuinely progressive elements in the middle class, on the basis of a
revolutionary socialist program in opposition to the entire two-party system
and the ruling class it defends.
After the 2008
crisis, the Bush and Obama
administrations
orchestrated the bailout of
Wall Street,
buying up all the bad debts,
particularly in
mortgage-backed securities,
that had been
used as vehicles for an orgy of
speculation. As a
result, social inequality
increased to
record levels. Corporate cash
hoards rose to $2
trillion. Some $4 trillion
was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced to pay for the economic consequences of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale.
Once again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity
to restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
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