As Vice President, Biden Was Still Bragging About His Racist Crime Bill

Presidential contender Joe Biden cynically co-opted Martin Luther King Day this year to express the very mildest of regrets for his draconian 1994 Crime Bill, which sentenced record numbers of mainly Black men to long prison terms for possession of even tiny amounts of drugs, especially crack cocaine.

“It was a big mistake when it was made,” he said. “We thought, we were told by the experts, that crack you never go back, it was somehow fundamentally different. It’s not different, but it’s trapped an entire generation.”

Biden pleaded that he was practically forced into drafting the legislation (originally called the Biden Crime Bill, but later somewhat unfairly renamed the Clinton Crime Bill) in his capacity as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This pleading, as well as his use of the passive voice, sounds eerily similar to his recent excuses about how powerless he was to protect Anita Hill from the abuse she suffered during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

It was the crack that trapped and imprisoned people, not Biden. It was the Republican crackpots on Biden's panel who victimized Anita Hill all over again, not Biden.

But whenever the occasion demands it, Uncle Joe admits that regrets, he has a few. But then again, too few to mention -- unless and until he is practically forced into uttering them.  

Even during his tenure as Barack Obama's vice president, and long, long after other "experts" had correctly called out the racial bias inherent in his Crime Bill,  Biden was still doubling down on the false and debunked narrative that drug use is the primary cause of violence in poor communities.

He was still gung-ho for the racist War on Drugs, or what Michelle Alexander has aptly identified as The New Jim Crow.

One occasion was the nomination of former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske in the spring of 2009 as the Obama administration's new "drug czar." Speaking to a room full of municipal police chiefs, Biden fondly reminisced about his direct role in the creation of the White House drug czar position as well as his authorship of his post-Crime Bill COPS legislation, which allocated federal funds for cities with large black and brown populations to hire more police officers and make more drug arrests and send more black and brown individuals to prison, often for decades, for minor drug possession offenses.

We know we needed tough laws, and we have tough laws. But that wasn't enough. We needed a balanced approach in combating drugs -- one that included prevention, treatment and enforcement.

And that's why when I wrote what used to be called the Biden Crime Bill back in the '90s -- and quite frankly, many of you in this room literally sat and wrote that bill with me; it had my name on it, but you all wrote it -- when we wrote that back in 1994, I felt so strongly about the need to create specialized Drug Courts -- so we could have an alternative to incarceration and the traditional probation that included treatment and a way forward.

That's why I fought so hard for the Drug Free Communities Support Program, so we could bring together parents, teachers, business leaders, police, medical profession to prevent drug abuse and addiction in local communities.

 And that's why I, along with many of you, worked so hard for the COPS program -- because quite frankly more cops on the street is one of the best ways to keep drugs off the street.

Biden was actually to the right of President George W. Bush when he pushed, in 2002, for the addition of 50,000 police officers in America's cities, on top of the 100,000 cop positions originally funded under his 1994 Crime Bill. Biden complained, without evidence, that violent crime in inner cities had gone up as a direct result of Bush's cuts to his tough drug enforcement programs.

Biden also ran on a "tough on crime" platform during his failed 2004 presidential primary campaign. Correlating drug users with post-09/11 terrorism as well as with violence, he wrote on his website:

"Our police officers who walk the beat in every city and town across America are the backbone of homeland security  Whenever we need them, our police officers never hesitate to respond. Now they need us, and we should not hesitate to respond to law enforcement by giving them the tools they need to protect our communities. Let's save the COPS program, and, in so doing, say thank you to every cop on the street."

With Biden's crime legislation later widely criticized as the racist policy that it was, he burnished it with the "balanced approach" rhetoric that was a hallmark of other Obama policies, such as the imposition of austerity on the struggling middle and working classes and the poor coupled with paltry tax increases on the wealthy. Thus was added the cosmetic gloss of an ounce of prevention and treatment in the racist Drug War, ostensibly to "balance out" the continuing mega-tons of cruel and unusual punishment -- and to feebly camouflage the ongoing and underlying racism.

It's the same propaganda tactic Biden had used 15 years earlier to "arm-twist" his fellow Democrats into passing his Crime Bill which, besides putting 100,000 new cops on the streets, allocated $9.7 billion for the construction of new prisons, expanded the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty to 52, discouraged prison paroles and rewarded prisons with federal grants based upon increased parole-denial rates, criminalized gang membership, denied Pell educational grants to convicts, and imposed mandatory drug testing for released prisoners (practically guaranteeing a return to prison, because released prisoners have a very hard time getting work, finding housing and paying for food, given that they're denied housing and food stamp benefits because most applications forms contain a box to check for even minor convictions and,or  arrests).

 To all that cruelty he cynically tacked on the Sunset Law-prone Violence Against Women Act and a similarly temporary assault weapons ban in order to give his reactionary agenda that all-important cosmetic liberal gloss. These were sweeteners enough to convince even then-Rep. Bernie Sanders to reluctantly vote for the package.

As Michelle Alexander pointed out in a recent New York Times op-ed, the problem of violence is actually correlated not with drug use per se, but with the permanent effects of long-term incarcerations of mainly men on entire families and communities. A cop on every corner has done nothing, for example, to curb violent crime and gang activity in cities like Chicago. 

Moreover, with an epidemic of opioid addiction now affecting mainly white people, the racist War on Drugs is rapidly losing its effectiveness as a wedge issue and fear-spreading tool for right-wing politicians like Joe Biden.

Michelle Alexander wrote:

Drug law reform has never been an easier sell — especially now that opioid addiction is perceived as ravaging primarily white communities, generating far more compassion than black communities ever experienced during the crack epidemic in the late 1980s. The opportunity to curb the drug war is critically important for many communities of color, especially in places like Chicago where it has caused catastrophic harm. Nationally, the drug war helped to birth our system of mass incarceration, which now governs not only the 2.2 million people who are locked in prisons and jails in this country, but also the 4.5 million people that are under correctional control outside prison walls — on probation or parole. More than 70 million people now have criminal records that authorize legal discrimination against them, relegating them to a permanent second-class status. The overwhelming majority ensnared by this system have been convicted of nonviolent crimes and drug offenses.

This relegation of millions of people to permanent underclass status is reason enough to deny Joe Biden the Democratic presidential nomination. For one thing, there is virtually no distance between him and Trump as regards their disdain for black and brown people. I can just envision Trump patting Uncle Joe on the back during one of those televised corporate debates and claiming to be the real inspiration for the Crime Bill, what with the fear-mongering full page ad he'd taken out in the New York Times, calling for execution of the Central Park Five (who were later exonerated) just a few years before its passage.

 I guess Biden would only respond that at least he's mouthed a few convenient platitudes and words of regret for the national hysteria that he was instrumental in fomenting, while Trump has never offered any. 

 Trump, though, would then be able to one-up Biden by bragging about his commutation last year of the sentence of a grandmother serving life in prison on a cocaine trafficking charges: a sentence that was the direct result of the cruel Biden Crime Bill.

Denying Biden the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency has never been an easier sell. 

But try explaining that to the Party leadership and the donor class. 

Status Joe For the Status Quo

It's official. Joe Biden has finally repurposed his wandering hands into throwing his hat into the presidential ring for what is about the seventh lucky charming time in his career. Let the party-splitting begin in earnest!

The campaign motto I have assigned to him ("Status Joe For the Status Quo") is, I admit, a bit misleading. It might be more proper for Uncle Joe to roar "Status Joe For the Status Quo-Ante!" given that he wants to return us to the Golden Age of Obama. On third thought, Uncle Joe crowing for Ante might remind voters what a groper and sniffer of women and girls he is - and that will never do in this age of #MeToo.

Biden has such a long sordid history of corruption and cruelty that it would take hours to copy and paste all the lists that have thus far been compiled. For a crash course in his depravity, you should read Norman Solomon's excellent synopsis over at Truthdig, which in its own turn, links to several other excellent synopses of Biden's awfulness.

It'll be interesting to see how his primary opponents treat him, given his exalted Status. If they are polite and deferential, if only to show that they are not as mean and petty as Trump,  then beware - especially if it comes from candidates who've conveniently latched on to the progressive agenda.

Even Trump is not acting as overtly nasty as he could be, only taunting Biden as "Sleepy Joe" in a morning tweet. This actually renders Biden hapless and harmless, which is exactly the opposite of the truth about him.

Forget about the Democratic Party dividing itself in two. I think it should be at least a three-way division. A  five or six-way division would be even better, because then collapsing under its own corrupt weight would come sooner rather than later.

 So far, we can probably divide the several dozen or so candidates among those who will shamelessly grovel before the former V.P.;  those who mildly disparage his political history without engaging in the "politics of personal destruction"; and those who take off the gloves and immediately start punching him in his many vulnerable spots. I predict that "moderates" like John Hickenlooper and Pete Buttigieg will be in the first group, Bernie Sanders in the second,  and Elizabeth Warren in the last. She has never been shy about expressing her withering disdain for Uncle Joe, largely because of his authorship of bankruptcy reform legislation. Bernie, on the other hand, is loath to personally attack anybody, except maybe Trump.

There is also a fourth group, one that is thus far occupied only by former President Barack Obama. Cautious and pragmatic as always, he has as much as endorsed Biden without being "seen" to endorse him. To make his choice of Biden known, he used a paid spokeswoman to praise Uncle Joe, sending the additional subtle message that the enlightened women in Obama's orbit are far from disgusted by Biden's roaming hands and overactive nostrils.

“President Obama has long said that selecting Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008 was one of the best decisions he ever made,” Obama spokeswoman Katie Hill said. “He relied on the vice president’s knowledge, insight and judgment throughout both campaigns and the entire presidency. The two forged a special bond over the last 10 years and remain close today.”

Out of sycophantic duty, Politico refers to this glowing endorsement as "cryptic," allowing Obama to be seen as not interfering in the race. O.K. then.

It'll also be interesting to see how Biden's claims to be Obama's heir play out. It's as if septuagenarian Prince Charles suddenly announced he was running for King as his more popular son William's heir, rather than Mum's. It's kind of a back-assward approach, if you ask me.

Then again, I am probably being unfair. Because OBiden is not a father-son relationship, or a son-father relationship. What they're really marketing is a Bro-Bro relationship.

When you're a Status Bro, you can rise above groping women. You can show your good intentions by gripping, and being gripped by, a fellow Status Bro who has the added benefit of having melted the hearts and minds of millions of liberals on both coasts. Regaling us with eight whole years' worth of professional, glitzy Bro-marketing also took unwanted attention away from such less appetizing macho behavior as bombing eight countries, drone murders of civilians, and their secret coddling of the Bankster Bros and Corporate Person-Bros.

This is not to say that their Special Relationship was all fun and games and Bro-cheer. OBiden could be serious when the occasion demanded it. Though sitting right next to one another, they very carefully refrained from jokes and PDAs during the private video-streamed execution of Osama bin Laden.

If it had been Trump sitting in that room, you can bet your bottom dollar he would have been crassly tweeting about his killing prowess even as the gruesome murder was happening. He probably would have live-streamed it on Facebook and maybe even superimposed his own MAGA hat-wearing head on a Navy SEAL executioner's body. Obama had the good sense to restrict his own involvement to one still photo, showing him dressed in a tasteful casual-chic golf shirt under a windbreaker. Instead of going into all the gory details, he waited many hours before donning suit and tie and maturely giving the Nation a sanitized, if not downright false, version of how "justice" had finally been done. 

That left the Bro-Joe side of the duo free to incessantly and trumpily bellow at re-election campaign rallies: "We killed Bin Laden and General Motors is Alive!" without ever mentioning that the investors in both enterprises got filthy rich while the actual grunts and auto workers got hammered - in wallet, in body, in mind, and in soul.

As Biden intoned today in the video announcement of his "Let's Go With Joe!" campaign:

"We are in the battle for the soul of this nation. I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”

So I guess impeachment is not gonna happen. Removal of Trump on grounds of obstructing justice would obstruct Uncle Joe from battling aberrant moments. He and his Golden Pitchforks constituency cannot simply stand by and watch Congress perform its sworn Constitutional duty. 

Uncle Joe wants to succeed where Robert Mueller passive-aggressively failed. He wants to advance from mere Status Bro status and market himself as the latest Father of Our Country. 

O.K. then.

Manos: The Hands of Joe Biden's Fate

Finally a woman* had the guts to go public with her disgust about being creepily kissed, gripped, nuzzled or otherwise man-handled by scary presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Photos of Creepy Uncle Joe, long lurking on the Internet for viewing by anyone with a hankering for cheesy horror, have suddenly been rediscovered by The Establishment Media to get the benefit of their careful, nuanced analysis. Is Joe just a loving harmless grandpa who is so old-school or clueless that he never learned about boundaries? Or is he really your typical sexist pig, hiding his malevolence beneath a folksy persona, in the vein of Poppy Bush and his own gross "David Cop-a-Feel" habit?

Biden is a combination of sociopathies. He is the typical powerful ruler who plots and passes neoliberal legislation to punish and harm people. Then he further adds to the horror by touching the bodies of women in order to convey his power to them. Manipulative ministrations of this type make many women feel that if they hadn't been sending out those invisible signals of neediness and vulnerability, they would never have attracted the magical male touch in the first place. It's all their fault if they take Biden-style handsiness the wrong way. Failure to accept it in the loving aggressive spirit with which it was intended will only prove their needy ingratitude and chronic hangups. 

As Lucy Flores, the former Nevada legislator who wrote the New York magazine story about her own experience with Biden in 2014. says, her reaction was all about the power that Biden wielded at the time. As to the defense of Biden written by Stephanie Carter, the wife of Obama's former defense secretary, Flores noted - correctly, I think - that this was a completely different scenario. The Carters and the Bidens are long-time friends, and Flores had only met the creepy veepy a couple of times.

It's about power, and even more, it's about class. Flores is not a member of the ruling class, and the Carters and the Bidens are at its very pinnacle. The class aspect of this new Biden media "wokeness" comes through loud and clear in Stephanie Carter's Medium piece.

Her main complaint about again being the center of attention in "That Picture" is that it has spoiled the joy of starting her very own private equity company. (She is a former Deutsche Bank official and partner at ABS Capital, positions that were briefly thought to be potential conflicts of interest given that her husband was in charge of the Pentagon. but which soon were glossed over in the spirit of class solidarity.) Carter writes:

Last night, I received a text from a friend letting me know that picture was once again all over Twitter in connection to Lucy Flores’ personal account of a 2014 encounter with Joe Biden. Let me state upfront that I don’t know her, but I absolutely support her right to speak her truth and she should be, like all women, believed. But her story is not mine. The Joe Biden in my picture is a close friend helping someone get through a big day, for which I will always be grateful. So, as the sole owner of my story, it is high time that I reclaim it — from strangers, Twitter, the pundits and the late-night hosts.

Stephanie Carter wants her friends and colleagues to know that she doesn't know Lucy Flores. Why would she know her? But she condescends to allow Flores to speak "her truth" -- rather than, say, "the truth."

Carter goes on to complain that Joe Biden was simply comforting her because she had just slipped on the ice while visiting Arlington National Cemetery with a contingent of the Pentagon officials who personally had sent a fair portion the buried soldiers to war and were there to honor their "sacrifice." She added that Biden sensed her discomfort at being rudely asked by annoying members of the press about her well-being. They apparently went above their station in doing so. It got so bad that one female reporter from the low-class tabloid New York Post even had the gall to later confront her in her own apartment building to ask about That Picture of Joe nuzzling her and squeezing her shoulders.

Yuck. First, they rudely asked if she was O.K. after her slip and fall, then they asked her about That Picture, and now five years later it's all coming back to haunt her. They're asking her about That Picture all over again. The first round of asks completely ruined the "crowning achievement of my husband's career" and the second round of asks are ruining the high of her own crowning career achievement of "entrepreneurial" high finance.

It is absolutely tragic.

Meanwhile, members of the Biden class collective are snarkily criticizing Flores, who is now out of politics, for daring to sell stuff on the Internet. They are also casting subtle doubt on her story. You see, she used to be a Bernie Sanders supporter. Smarmy CNN personality Jake Tapper snidely wondered whether "politics" is at the heart of her motivation for telling her story.

“I want him to change his behavior I want him to acknowledge that it was wrong,” she said, “And I want this to be a bigger discussion about how there is no political accountability structure within our political space, either for instances in which women feel that there was inappropriate behavior, or more serious allegations of sexual assault.”

“We are not protected in politics,” she said. “And frankly, on a much larger scale, we also need to have a conversation about powerful men feeling that they have the right to invade a woman’s space whenever they like. This really is about women feeling like we have agency. If we don’t want you to touch us, then don’t touch us.”

Biden himself has been incommunicado, save for a few written statements pleading that it has never been his intention to intimidate women while nobly acknowledging that his female critics could have a different perspective. The actual attacks on Biden's critics as the only way to defend him are being done by his paid spokespeople and Democratic Party colleagues. The rich and the powerful always have paid spokespeople and colleagues to do their dirty work for them.

Biden should absolutely run for president if he still has the nerve to throw his hat in the ring for one of his many underlings to pick up and dust off for him. And he should absolutely be confronted over his sordid history of incarcerating black people via the infamous Crime Bill which he personally wrote, his treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation debacle, his support of the Iraq War, his championship of the Glass-Steagall repeal that set the stage for the 2008 financial collapse, his poor record on women's reproductive rights, his bankruptcy reform legislation that condemned mainly women to lifetimes of penury and debt to the usurious credit card companies that helped fund Biden's career.... the list goes on and on.

This campaign season is already so crazy that we should probably welcome Biden's hammy hands and cheese to give the class war a little levity for a change. Just when think you can't take any more of Perpetual Campaign Cinema, Joe's hands have been added to the script, and people are suddenly finding they just can't get enough of possibly the worst movie ever made. It's so bad, it's good. 

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't think that Biden's hands should be disqualified from running, as long as they remain firmly attached to his straight arms. Anything to keep the poor and the uninsured from remembering that Medicare For All will never, ever come to be under her interminable binge-watch.

And as Biden's gatekeeper, Bill "Torgo" Russo, reminds us, the horrific images of Biden's hands come from a Cottage of Lies guarded by right-wing trolls located deep within the Forest of the Dark Internet. There is nothing cheesier than those redundant manipulated hands of fate. The movie trailer gets it right: there is no way out.

* Update, 4/3: A total of four women have now come forward to complain about Biden. One of them is a sexual assault survivor who says that when then-V.P. Biden sat next to her at a conference for sexual assault survivors, he rested his hand on her thigh. She was 19 years old. His behavior can no longer be excused as mere cluelessness or friendliness. But just to give him the benefit of the doubt, let's assume that he is, in fact, merely clueless or insensitive. These are not qualities we should tolerate in a president, particularly a president whose job entails interacting and negotiating with women leaders, both foreign and domestic. I have changed my mind. Biden should not run. The fact that some prominent liberals have come to his defense is just as disgusting as his behavior, in my view. Their implicit argument is that because some women have welcomed his touching, there must be something wrong with those who do not. Contrary to the motto for Biden's campaign against college campus sexual assault -- "It's On Us"(men) -- the real message remains "It's On Them" (women).  

The photos of a President Biden nuzzling and stroking women will send the message to boys and men all over the world that such behavior is not only O.K. it is desirable -- just as Trump's hateful rhetoric gives tacit permission to people act out their darkest fantasies.

Some defenders of Biden say he is a saint compared to Trump, who boasted that he can grab women by the pussy and get away with it. To date, there are no photos of Trump grabbing any woman's body part. Although there have been allegations of physical assault, his preferred method of degrading women is with his big fat mouth rather than with his hands. There are many degrees of bad behavior, none of which should be tolerated, particularly if they are tolerated in the big-dollar interests of either of our two deeply corrupt political parties.

The Hypocrisy of Liberal Interventionists

On the very same day that former Vice President Joe Biden tweepily called for legislation to end the gun violence that "tears our families apart," the managing director of his new liberal interventionist think tank published a New York Times editorial calling for even more American guns and violence in the proxy war against Russia in the eastern Ukraine.

Just because the ruling class warriors so easily cry their crocodile tears and tweet their maudlin thoughts and prayers over every pathologically regular outburst of domestic mayhem and death doesn't mean they will ever call a truce in their own international violence - not even for one single day.

There's way too much profit to be made in state-sanctioned death and destruction to ever take a break from it.

Therefore, even as the bodies still littered the Las Vegas killing field, Antony J. Blinken wasted no time trying to manufacture public consent for an even more spectacular theater of blood and gore. A scion of private equity and a product of the Ivy League, Blinken worked for The Atlantic before moving on to speech-writing and national security posts in the Clinton White House, the Obama White House under Biden, and finally in the Clinton State Department before moving through the revolving doors to think tank-land. He even has a side-gig as a regular "contributing op-ed writer" at the Times. 

Blinken argues, in true Best and The Brightest style, that the perfect way to "stabilize" a situation far, far away is for the USA to intervene in it with lots of guns and ammo. Remember how well that worked out in Vietnam and Afghanistan and.... oh, never mind.

Where there's greed, there's hope. Despite the widespread belief (or pretense of one) among liberal interventionists and Neocons that Donald Trump is a stooge of Vladimir Putin, Blinken makes the facile observation that Trump's own cabinet are certainly not puppets. This editorial, of course, is directed more at them than at us.  As a matter of fact, Trump's team of generals and oligarchs is a well-respected and entrenched part of the ruling class establishment. They all belong to the same Club which, as George Carlin so wryly observed, you ain't in. Blinken writes:

It starts with a united front among Mr. Trump’s senior advisers — Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster. They see Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine for what it is: a gross violation of the most basic norms of international conduct that the United States helped establish after World War II. It is not acceptable for one country to change the borders of another by force. It is not O.K. for one sovereignty to dictate to another which countries or organizations it may associate with. It is not all right for Russia to decide Ukraine’s future. Mr. Trump’s team rightly believes that if the United States fails to stand against the abuse of these principles, the international order America built will be weakened.

Translation: it is very much O.K. for the United States to violate international norms as in, say, invading Iraq in an act of unprovoked aggression or maintaining nearly a thousand military bases all over the world. It is O.K. for Blinken and his ilk to dictate to other countries, because the United States has arrogated to itself, and only to itself, the privilege of establishing a "new world order."

Blinken goes on to praise Dick Cheney acolyte Victoria Nuland, who as Hillary Clinton's deputy decided another country's future and orchestrated the coup overthrowing Ukraine's democratically elected president in favor of one willing to be a puppet of the United States. She "gave the Kremlin fits," Blinken gleefully reminisces.

But the economic sanctions that his former boss, Barack Obama, imposed on Russia are not enough. Nor are the US border troops encircling Russia enough. And with the hysterical RussiaGate propaganda campaign faltering badly here at home, the Democratic/Neocon alliance wants to take the last solution left to it in hopes of saving its own faltering imperium: a bloody proxy war against Russia:

For all these continuities in policy, one vital discontinuity would add a timely exclamation point: the senior team’s united recommendation that Mr. Trump lift restrictions on the provision of lethal defensive equipment to Kiev, notably anti-tank weapons.

Not, of course, that these weapons in the hands of strangers (CIA-trained security forces) need ever actually be used. Their mere presence on the battlefield would give Putin pause, Blinken maintains. Everybody knows that guns don't kill people, only people kill people, and that people never, ever arm themselves for bloody aggression, but merely for "protection." That is also the first commandment of the N.R.A., which the Democrats find so easy to malign whenever innocent American citizens become the targets some nut job, or "lone wolf."

Nowhere in his op-ed does Blinken bother reminding readers that Joe Biden, who pays his salary, has a strong vested interest in maintaining an American presence in Ukraine. Even the New York Times was forced to print the news in late 2015 that Hunter Biden, the lobbyist son of Joe, had magically landed a lucrative seat on the board of Burisma Holdings, Ukraine's biggest gas company, right after the US-led coup. Although there were the usual murmurings of corruption and nepotism, these were quelled by the former Veep himself, who arrived in Ukraine to rail against... you guessed it. Corruption! A gas company spokesman also scoffed at the accusations, saying that "strong corporate governance and transparency are priorities shared both by the United States and the leadership of Burisma. Burisma is working to bring the energy sector into the modern era, which is critical for a free and strong Ukraine.”

Blinken's newest job, as noted above, is running the former veep's Biden Penn  Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

Its quasi-religious "mission statement" has such a nice, creepy, Brave New World-ish ring to it. As a matter of fact, it reads suspiciously like a gas company press release. Any ad campaign without freedom and strength and modernity in the script is like transparency without sunshine. (the parentheses contain my own interpretation of the dense doublespeak):

U.S. leadership has sustained (its arrogant supremacy) an open world for more than 70  years, enabling virtually every advantage we (only the extremely wealthy) enjoy as (multinational corporations and plutocratic dynasties)Americans and helping to ensure our (gated communities) safety, our (obscene wealth inequality) prosperity, and our way of life (for the privileged few). Comprised of common norms, rules, and institutions, the American-led liberal international order (reliable state intervention in aid of finance capital, at the sole expense of the world's poor and working classes) has facilitated the free movement of (rich) people, (luxury items and weapons) goods, (military/surveillance state propaganda) ideas, and (deregulated) capital; protected the sovereignty and self-determination of  (client states) nations; and promoted basic human rights (of capitalism and corporations) and fundamental freedoms for all peoples.(the freedom of poor people to adapt to the needs of the ruling class and the liberty to work until they die.)

 Today, this order is under threat.(by both ultraright populism and a resurgence of New Deal-style social democracy, or even socialism) and it is being challenged by authoritarians (Trump, Putin) and extremists (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn) and strained by the pace, scope, and disruptive nature of global change.(deliberate antisocial policies hurting everyday people which we, the Warriors of the Ruling Class, ourselves put into place 40 years ago, and which are now threatening to bite us in the ass) It is in our (self-centered) interest as (privileged) Americans to defend the (neo)liberal international order, even as we work to (viciously quash social unrest and censor free speech on the Internet and stir up fear of Russia) improve it to better (enrich ourselves to the point of bursting) reflect the times in which we live and address the (opportunities for profit at any human cost) new challenges we face.

Second in command at the Penn Biden Center is multimillionaire Steve Ricchetti, whose decades of lobbying for such powerful monoliths as AT&T, the American Hospital Association, Blue Cross & Blue Shield, Eli Lilly, the American Bankers Association and General Motors make him perfectly qualified to conduct foreign policy and ensure that war always stays perpetual and profitable for those privileged few who never have to actually fight in them. As an official in the Clinton Administration, Ricchetti also was instrumental in passing the anti-democratic 1996 Telecommunications Act, which ensured that ruling class power and its relentless propaganda would become consolidated within only six media giants funded by the same corporations which he continues to serve. He is the very epitome of the Revolving Door Continuum.

 And staffer Ariana Berengaut's claim to fame, according to the Penn Biden blurb, was her appointment as the first-ever State Department ambassador (under Hillary Clinton) to the Silicon Valley Empire of billionaires. Yes, Silicon Valley is indeed its own nation-state, requiring the protection and frequent public intervention of the traditional federal government with which it is a full and equal partner.

Biden's think tank is a virtual home away from home for literally dozens of exiled technocrats and propagandists from both the Clinton and Obama administrations.

These kinds of start-ups cost money, so Joe Biden took some precious time out from tweeting his sorrow over the latest gun massacre in order to court and flatter and placate rich people in an in-person speech. Joe is as alarmed as they are over Bernie Sanders's claims that the world's six wealthiest oligarchs (including billionaire Jeff Bezos, owner of the war-hungry Washington Post) are actually cutting the lives of poor people short. Bernie's speaking truth to power was so alarming, in fact, that the Post gave him three Pinocchios for no good reason at all, other than that the rich are different from you and me: they not only have more money, they don't choose to use the Oxfam model for measuring their obscene wealth. 

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research notes that the three-Pinocchio rating dumped on Bernie by the Post is downright hypocritical, given that the newspaper itself is so intent upon whining about the debt and the deficit, and spreading such lies as Social Security is going broke, the old are eating the young, and that austerity and cuts to social programs are really good for healthy economic growth.

But Joe Biden is having none of this reality-checking and truth-telling. In a stump speech in Alabama for Senate Democratic candidate Doug Jones, Biden did his folksy charm reputation very proud. He can co-opt populism in the service of elitism with the best of them:

 “Doug understands about tax fairness,” Biden told the crowd. “Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.” 

The comment comes amidst the debate over tax reform, for which President Trump and congressional Republicans last week unveiled a new plan that would both lower the corporate tax rate and cut the number of individual tax rates. 
Sanders has railed against the Republican tax framework and has historically slammed tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations. Both Sanders and Biden are widely viewed as potential contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

Need we say more? The revolving door of the finance-capitalized Brave New World Public-Private Partnership Empire spins at such a dizzying pace that it's hard sometimes to even discern the bump-stock gunfire it generates. We have become too conditioned into not seeing and not hearing the violence which exists at the very highest echelons of power.

Palace Intrigues

The punditocracy's second-favorite topic this week (after Trumpmania) is whether Joe Biden will run, and if he runs, whether he'll pick Elizabeth Warren as his running mate. Also, rumors are flying that, not so very much behind the scenes, President Obama is doing everything in his power to mess with the Hillary Clinton candidacy. (After all, it is his FBI -- not the GOP -- that has picked campaign season as the optimal time to begin combing through all her emails. As if Obama didn't know that for the whole time that she was Secretary of State she was using a private account.) 

Machiavelli Muses

  Most of this is speculation, of course, and way beyond my investigatory capabilities as a blogger from the sticks. But one speculation is easily debunkable, and that is the possible endorsement of Biden by Elizabeth Warren. Unless she has totally gone over to the dark side, this is not going to happen. The truth is that not so very long ago, he was her Public Enemy #1.

It's all there in a 2003 book she wrote with her daughter Amelia, called The Two Income Trap.

Before she founded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, before Obama threw her under the bus, before she became a politician and a powerful senator, Warren was that rare bird, a Harvard economics professor with a side gig as a consumer advocate. It was her task to go after the credit card industry predators ruining the lives of struggling middle class families -- particularly those headed by single mothers -- and arm-twist congress-critters into keeping the bankruptcy laws working in favor of the families being crushed by usurious debt. She discovered that in the previous 20 years, the number of women filing petitions for bankruptcy had gone up by 662 percent.

"Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in a financial collapse," she wrote in the preface to her book. She found that bankruptcy was becoming the biggest cause of family change: more than death, divorce, heart attacks, cancer, graduations and other disruptions.

She called it the "two income trap" because no longer can a even a married woman go to work to help out in hard times and make extra money for non-essentials, no longer can a mother stay home when a child, spouse or elderly parent gets sick, without fear of financial collapse. Now they were in the workforce just to barely break even. And when finances collapse, it's mainly the women who bear the brunt and take the blame and the responsibility, Warren wrote. 

Long before the 2008 financial collapse, home foreclosures were skyrocketing.

And Senator Joe Biden represented Delaware, the Credit Card Industry Capital of the World. The bankers who were his political donors wanted to make it harder for people to discharge their debts via personal bankruptcy.

Biden, who'd been trumpeting himself as a champion of women's rights in his capacity as sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act, was anything but when it came to championing their economic rights. He was also co-sponsor of bank-friendly reform legislation that has made it difficult if not impossible for families struggling with credit card and medical debt to declare bankruptcy and start afresh.

"And in a statistic with special significance for Senator Biden," Elizabeth Warren wrote, "more women will be victimized by predatory lenders than will seek protection from an abusive husband or boyfriend."

"Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening," she added while scoffing at his campaign literature featuring glossy photos of himself with National Organization of Women (NOW) officials.

That other self-professed champion of women, Hillary Clinton, also voted with Biden and the Republicans in favor of the banks and against debt-ridden mothers, in 2001. This was a total flip-flop from her previous stated position. As Warren wrote, "The bill was the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York's newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton  could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn't coming from families in financial trouble."

Sweet Nothings... Joe and Hillary

I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Warren met Biden at his Naval Observatory digs this past weekend. Her agreeing to become his running mate on a possible Democratic ticket would be as grotesque as her quitting the Senate to become a lobbyist for Citigroup.

Not going to happen. I predict she either stays neutral, or if she endorses anybody, it will be Bernie Sanders, who has joined in her proposal to break up the big banks by introducing legislation to do just that. If Hillary wins the nomination, Warren will be forced to make a token appearance at the convention -- and that should be the sum of her curbed enthusiasm.

Sanders, by the way, just got the endorsement of Cornel West. This should help put a dent into the punditocratic meme that Bernie and black people don't get along.

The Biden Bandwagon

Almost overnight, the presidential candidacy of Joe Biden has morphed from a trial balloon into a high-octane bandwagon.

The unofficial official roll-out of the Biden Balloon With Wheels came in the form of a Maureen Dowd column, published on Saturday. It's a textbook case of inside-the-Beltway influence-peddling told in the form of a sentimental narrative. Dowd, who has long had a soft spot for Biden and a hard spot for Hillary Clinton, comes from the same Irish Catholic working class background as the vice president. So right away there's the affinity, fraudulent or otherwise. Biden, or perhaps one of his inner circle, whispered in MoDo's ear the heart-wrenching story of how the dying Beau Biden begged his father to vanquish Hillary and run for president himself.

And thus is a legend and a candidacy born. As the dangerously maudlin Ronald Reagan once urged us to win one for The Gipper, so too do the moribund establishment Democrats want Joe to win one for the party.

Were it not for for Beau's dying wish, modern legend has it, Joe would never have the gall to challenge the Empress-in-Waiting. So the liberal world reads the Dowd column and weeps as it gets out its handkerchiefs and checkbooks. And the Washington Establishment breathes a sigh of relief as it begins its attempted neutralization of Bernie Sanders. They seem to think that Hillary's problem is mainly one of her robotic speaking style and her scandalous email server. Bernie is out-performing her on the stump, and what the Dems think they need is a barn-burning stump speaker like Regular Joe Biden, who despite his populist rhetoric, presents no real danger to the oligarchy. He is Barack Obama's zany white uncle in style, Obama himself in what passes for substance.

Dowd ineptly tried to disguise her blatant shilling for Biden by also floating a much smaller trial balloon for Howard Schultz,  CEO of Starbucks, and socially liberal billionaire darling of the centrist Washington Establishment. He loves conversations about race that consist of slogans on latte cups, he loves marriage equality, he loves diversity, and he especially loves pathological global corporate coups disguised as "free trade" deals. 

Reader comments to MoDo's article flowed in a torrent, with New York Times editors quickly segregating and highlighting the most fawning "Run, Joe, Run!" accolades. Thus is public opinion manipulated, thus are the ruling class's wishes honored, thus is a legend and a candidacy born. And thus  is Bernie Sanders left in the dust, as the rest of the Sunday Times home-page concentrates on the antics of Donald Trump, (several pieces) Obama's latest legacy-burnishing propaganda pivot, and the angst of millennials being robbed of their futures by greedy geezers on Medicare.

Here is my buried comment on Dowd's piece:

The Draft Biden movement sure is picking up steam in the corporate press. "Washington" is worried that Bernie Sanders is overshadowing unpopular Hillary, and they desperately need one of their own to quash the Bernie-mentum.

Who is more likeable than Joe? His folksy charm, his loveable gaffes, the outpouring of national sympathy after the tragic loss of his son, make him a natural replacement candidate. He is a centrist's dream: he can reach across the aisle and "get things done."

As Elizabeth Warren recounts in "A Fighting Chance," one thing that Biden got done in 2005 was co-sponsoring the bankruptcy reform bill, as dictated by the banks and credit card companies of his home state, Delaware. This bill, originally vetoed by Bill Clinton and signed into law by George W. Bush, makes it much harder, if not impossible, for working families with credit problems to get legal relief.

Despite his working class persona, Biden sold out to the plutocrats years ago. But unlike Bill and Hill, he's been in continuous government service the whole time. He doesn't charge millions for speeches, and he uses a government email server. He is suddenly "electable."

When Obama boasted last week that he could win a third term, it also seemed to be a tacit endorsement of Biden, who despite his grief, has worked overtime (as has Howard Schultz) selling those job-destroying corporate coups euphemized as "free trade" deals.

The fix, as ever, is in.

Incidentally, Warren's memoir glossed over the inconvenient truth that Hillary stabbed her in the back by promising to vote against the later version of the bill she voted for it. One team player cannot diss another team member, I suppose.

However, in her earlier book, "The Two Income Trap," Warren was less circumspect. Not yet a politician herself, she could afford to be blunt. She even went so far as to practically call Biden a misogynist:

Warren describes briefing Hillary Clinton, when she was first lady, about the bankruptcy bill backed by the financial industry. “It’s our job to stop that awful bill,” Warren quotes Clinton as saying. But several years later, when the bill came up for passage, Senator Clinton voted for it. “The bill was essentially the same but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not,” Warren wrote. As senator, “she could not afford such a principaled (sic) position…” When the bill finally passed, in 2005, then-Senator Joseph Biden was one of its biggest backers. “Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening,” Warren said.

And then there was Biden's disgusting treatment of Anita Hill at Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Once Obama picked Biden as his running mate, Democrats became even more squeamishly loath to discuss that inconvenient truth.

And then there was this cringe-worthy moment with the wife of the incoming master of war defense secretary.

Of course, next to Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP circus, Biden looks like a noble Galahad in shining armor.

I've avoided writing about Trump on this blog, because he already has more than his share of publicity. But I did write a response to yet another New York Times "style over substance" political column by the lovely Ross Douthat.  The Times' resident white millennial conservative putz opines that Trump serves to give cover to the "moderate" Jeb Bush. He also thinks the Republican debates will be interesting, if not quite reaching the realm of importance. My comment:

Only to the self-referential Washington leisure/media class is the GOP reality show either interesting or important.

Those of us living in the real world have other things to worry about besides Trump's media-savvy buffoonery and Jeb's equally comedic "Right to Rise" militant preppie tone-deafness. Since billionaires are funding this stage show posing as a political debate, we might as well dispense with the official candidates, and have the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson duke it out with Trump on live TV. Let them fling their thousand-dollar bills at each other in lieu of answering questions. Bill it as the WWF of the Plutocrats, with spectators invited to cast their meaningless votes for which loathsome humanoid can best serve the interests of the .01%.

Ross rightly observes that the longer Trump prevails as ringmaster, the longer Jeb will be able to skulk around unnoticed as he vacuums up the lucre on his stealthy road to the nomination. But it's wrong to cast Jeb as a respectable moderate. He is neither respectable, nor even remotely moderate. He wants to destroy Medicare, invade whatever chunk of global real estate is still unsullied by the military-industrial complex, privatize the earth, and thus complete the radical right-wing revolution started by Reagan.

Scott Walker is the clown who might actually win the nomination. Because as bad as Jeb is, he just can't whine out the aggrieved hatred and the ignorance quite as well as Scottie, the ultimate Koch puppet.

Let's face it, though: the whorehouse known as the American media/political complex is mostly made up of puppets pulling the strings of other puppets.