The Topsy Turvy World of American Democrats or Alice Kafka in Bidenland

What is truly bizarre is that some of the Democrat faithful decry the ever increasing inequality that has arisen in the US in the era after the age of "consensus" from the New Deal to the 1970s ended. At the same time, however, they support corporate or neoliberal Democrats like Joe Biden. This is, I think, rather bizarre because Sanders, and to a lesser extent Warren, are the only true Democrat New Dealer like politicians in the Democratic primary race. Sanders and Warren are the politicians who talk extensively and passionately about current inequalities in the US, inequalities that rival those of the 1920s. Sanders and Warren are the Democrats who talk extensively and passionately about the consequences of these inequalities. It is Sanders and Warren who seem, among all the Democrats vying to be the Democrat candidate for president, to genuinely want to do something about these inequalities.

Biden, on the other hand, certainly isn't a New Dealer (nor are the other "moderate", translation, corporate, neoliberal Dems. in the race). Rather Ol Joe is a corporatist neoliberal from a corporatist state that gave corporations tax breaks and, I think still does though globalisation has changed the relationship between the state and corporations. Biden is a Reagan Democrat. He is what Republicans used to be like ideologically--he is a conservative liberal--before the party was conquered by the John Birch right in the wake of the Tea Party movement.

Biden, like others of his conservative liberal ilk, supported dropping taxes on the wealthy. Under Republican Dwight Eisenhower tax rates on the wealthy were 90%. Today they are officially in the 20% range but many of the rich actually pay less than that in federal taxes. All conservative liberals want to do is stop taxes on the rich from falling further or raise them a bit but nowhere near the level they were under Eisenhower or JFK. Biden has, like that other chicken hawk expansionist Hillary Clinton, supported numerous wars and numerous rumours of war. Biden supported, along with virtually all Democrats and Republicans, getting rid of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal act that put a firewall between commercial FDIC insured banks and casino capitalist investment banks. These are the same investment banks, incidentally that almost brought down the economy in 2007 and 2008. Democrat big money man Sandy Weill, after all, was pushing for eliminating Glass-Steagall and never let it be said that politicians in the US do not do the bidding of the big money men who support their candidacies. Thanks to Biden and other corporatists of both parties, taxpayers are now on the hook for bailing out a casino capitalist banking system as well as commercial banks.

That bought and paid for corporate Joe, the same Joe whose kid leveraged Biden's social and cultural capital for political and economic advantage, will bring about greater equity in the US is laughable given that the past is indeed prologue. With career politician Joe Biden it will be more of the same if with a kinder and gentler face. Let's not forget that the Obama administration Biden served in did not, unlike Iceland, gaol/jail any of the politicians and bankers who blew up the economy. The only thing Ol Joe has going for him is that he isn't Trump. But then so are the other Democratic candidates save for Bloomberg who is clearly the Democrat Mini-Drumpf.