Joe Biden Likes Republicans So Much Because He's So Much Like Them

By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

08 May 19

ecent criticism of Joe Biden for praising Dick Cheney as “a decent man” and Mike Pence as “a decent guy” merely scratches the surface of what’s wrong with the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. His compulsion to vouch for the decency of Republican leaders – while calling Donald Trump an “aberration” – is consistent with Biden’s political record. It sheds light on why he’s probably the worst Democrat running for president.

After several decades of cutting corporate-friendly deals with GOP legislators – often betraying the interests of core Democratic constituencies in the process – Biden has a big psychological and political stake in denying that the entire GOP agenda is repugnant.

At the outset of his Senate career, Biden lost no time appealing to racism and running interference for huge corporate interests. He went on to play a historic role in helping to move the Supreme Court rightward and serving such predatory businesses as credit card companies, big banks and hedge funds.

Biden’s role as vice president included a near-miss at cutting a deal with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill to slash Medicare and Social Security. While his record on labor and trade has been mediocre, Biden has enjoyed tight mutual alliances with moneyed elites.

The nickname that corporate media have bestowed on him, “Lunch Bucket Joe,” is wide of the mark. A bull’s-eye is “Wall Street Joe.”

With avuncular style, Biden has reflexively used pleasant rhetoric to grease the shaft given to millions of vulnerable people suffering the consequences of his conciliatory approach to right-wing forces. Campaigning in Iowa a few days ago, Biden declared that “the other side is not my enemy, it’s my opposition.” But his notable kinship with Republican politicians has made him more of an enabler than an opponent. Results have often been disastrous.

“In more than four decades of public service, Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now animate his party,” HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter recounts. Biden often teamed up with Senate Republicans to pass bills at the top of corporate wish lists and to block measures for economic fairness.

In the mid-1970s, during his first Senate term, Biden repeatedly clashed with Senator Edward Kennedy, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, who wanted to rein in runaway corporate power. “Biden became an advocate for corporate interests that had previously been associated with the Republican Party,” Carter reports. As he gained seniority, Biden kept lining up with GOP senators against antitrust legislation and for bills to give corporations more leverage over consumers and workers. “By 1978, Americans for Democratic Action, the preeminent liberal watchdog group of the time, gave Biden a score of just 50, lower than its ratings for some Republicans.”

Opposing measures for racial equity and economic justice, Biden’s operational bonds with GOP leaders continued. Carter reports that “on domestic policy – from school integration to tax policy – he was functionally allied with the Reagan administration. He voted for a landmark Reagan tax bill that slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and exempted many wealthy families from the estate tax on unearned inheritances, a measure that cost the federal government an estimated $83 billion in annual revenue. He then called for a spending freeze on Social Security in order to reduce the deficits that tax law helped to create.”

Biden came through for corporate power again in November 1993 when he joined with 26 other Democrats and 34 Republicans to win Senate passage of NAFTA, the trade agreement strongly opposed by labor unions and environmental groups. In mid-1996, when Congress approved President Clinton’s “welfare reform” bill, Biden helped to vote the draconian measure into law. It predictably had devastating effects on women and children.

Throughout the 1990s – from tax-rate changes that enriched the already-rich to deregulating banks with repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to loosening government curbs on credit default swaps – Biden stood with the Senate’s Republicans and the most corporate-aligned Democrats. Carter sums up: “Biden was a steadfast supporter of an economic agenda that caused economic inequality to skyrocket during the Clinton years…. Biden voted for all of it.”

Biden led the successful push to pass the milestone 1994 crime bill, engaging in racist tropes on the Senate floor along the way. By then, he had become a powerful lawmaker on criminal-justice issues.

In 1991, midway through his eight years as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden ran the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas that excluded witnesses who were prepared to corroborate Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment. “Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights,” feminist author Rebecca Traister writes.

Early in the new century, Biden wielded another weighty gavel, with momentous results, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2002, congressional Democrats were closely divided on whether to greenlight the invasion of Iraq, while Republicans overwhelmingly backed President George W. Bush’s mendacious case for invading. Biden didn’t only vote for the Iraq invasion on the Senate floor in October 2002. Months earlier, he methodically excluded dissenting voices about the looming invasion at key hearings of the Foreign Relations Committee.

While his impact on foreign policy grew larger, Biden’s avid service to financial giants never flagged. One of his top priorities was a crusade for legislation to undermine bankruptcy protections. Biden was a mover and shaker behind the landmark 2005 bankruptcy bill. Before President Bush signed it into law, Biden was one of just 14 out of 45 Democratic senators to vote for the legislation.

The bankruptcy law was a monumental victory for credit-card firms – and a huge blow to consumers, including students saddled with debt. As happened so often during Biden’s 36 years in the Senate, he eagerly aligned himself with Republicans and a minority of Democrats to get the job done.

Now, running for president, Biden has no use for candor about his actual record. Instead, he keeps pretending that he has always been a champion of people he actually used his power to grievously harm.

In ideology and record on corporate power, the farthest from Biden among his competitors is Bernie Sanders. No wonder Biden has gone out of his way to distance himself from Sanders while voicing high regard for the wealthy. (I was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and continue to actively support him.)

Biden’s ongoing zeal to defend and accommodate Republicans in Congress is undiminished, as though they should not be held accountable for President Trump even while they aid and abet him. Days ago on the campaign trail – while referring to Trump – Biden asserted: “This is not the Republican Party.” And he spoke warmly of “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

All in all, it’s preposterous yet fitting for Joe Biden to claim that Republicans like Dick Cheney and Mike Pence are “decent.” He’s not only defending them. He’s also defending himself.

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Criminal Charges Could Be Next for Tax Loser Trump

By David Cay Johnston, The Daily Beast

08 May 19

Congress must investigate fully now that we know Trump was faking his wealth and may have been vulnerable to foreign espionage and fraudulent money-generating schemes.

he myth of Donald Trump the modern Midas who turns to gold all that he touches died Tuesday afternoon.

It was killed by brilliant investigative reporting in The New York Times. Reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig obtained 11 years of detailed Internal Revenue Service records showing that Trump businesses lost $1.2 billion from 1985 through 1995.

For 11 years, every time Trump took a breath he lost more than $3.

Trump is not a wealth creator, but a wealth destroyer on a scale probably never before seen in America. Well, actually he’s at most second to the imprisoned swindler Bernie Madoff, whose investors lost at least $4.5 billion.

Unlike Trump, Madoff at least fessed up when he got caught.

The Trump tax records came from a source who legally had possession of the material, known as tax transcripts, the Times reported. There are others—bankers, employees, regulators and even family members—who have other such material. More of them may be more willing now to feed it to the Times, to me, or some other source known for understanding complex tax and financial documents.

It’s enough to keep Trump up at night, fearing that every secret he has may see the light of day. And he should fret because he has a lot to hide, as I’ve learned from following him for more than 30 years, diligence that made him nickname me “the weird dude.”

So why should you care that Trump is a financial fraud? Beyond basic questions about honesty and integrity, why should you care?

For the same reason that our government looks into the finances of people seeking security clearances. A man or woman in financial stress is just the kind of person spy agencies target. Plying people in desperate need of cash is an ancient and often very successful technique for grooming traitors.

We know that Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have been exceptionally friendly to Russian oligarchs (aka Vladimir Putin’s criminal gang), Saudi royals, and others eager to bend American government policy in their favor. And Trump is always praising Putin, saying he takes him at his word while he dismisses the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Now that we know Trump is a fake business genius, it’s also reasonable to ask what other cons he has run on the American people, especially since his administration says it will fight every effort by House Democrats to engage in oversight of the administration.

The Times exposé, brilliant in its grasp of complex accounting and tax issues and yet told in simple language, also confirms my reporting on why Trump is always trying to do a new deal instead of growing the businesses he has controlled over the years.

A typical business person tries to grow their enterprises. Not Trump. He squeezes cash out of them as fast as possible. Then he abandons them, leaving behind unpaid debts. Trump is a financial locust who flits off to find another sucker whose enterprise he can devour.

This business model, this utterly corrupt business model, works so long as Trump can find another victim. There is no shortage of Americans gullible enough to believe that Trump will make them rich even as he destroys their wealth. And because he does it with a pen, it’s almost impossible to prosecute these schemes thanks to weak laws on fraud and constrained law-enforcement resources.

We also now know another reason that Trump, unlike every president since Richard Nixon, hides his tax returns. He paid federal income taxes in only two of the 11 years. Only one year were his income taxes significant—and even that money he may have recovered in future years because of complex tax rules.

The new reporting by the Times also hints at what may be more Trump tax fraud, on which there is no statute of limitations when it is criminal rather than civil.

In 1989, when the Trump Organization was hurtling toward collapse, he reported $52.9 million of interest income. That was more than 110 times the interest income he had reported three years earlier in 1986.

The more than $1 million per week of interest for 1989 implies that Trump held more than $660 million of 30-year Treasury bonds or more than $350 million of risky junk bonds paying an eye-popping 15 percent interest.

Who paid that interest?—if it was interest. We know Trump was for years deeply entangled with a major international cocaine trafficker, has done squirrely deals with Russians that on the surface make no economic sense, among other strange financial deals. Was what Trump reported as interest actually payment for something else? If so, was it benign or sinister?

From other records we know that Trump did not have such vast holdings in bonds. The Times, always equally genteel and respectful of power, called it a mystery.

It’s a mystery that Congress has the power to investigate. It should. After all, as Richard Nixon told us, “Americans need to know that their president is not a crook.”