I’ve been supporting Elizabeth Warren for about a year now, and although I’m incredibly disappointed that she did not get the electoral results that she, I, and her many supporters desired, I could not be more proud to have supported her campaign for president.
She put the spotlight on the issue of how the rich and powerful have corrupted our government which has in turn shattered the public’s faith in government. No candidate in my lifetime has put quite this amount of focus on this issue of the loss of faith in government, which I feel is the central obstacle to a liberal agenda becoming reality.
But it’s unambiguously the case now that Warren does not have a realistic path to the nomination. This race has now come down to a fight to the finish between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. And I choose Bernie Sanders.
At a basic level, I support Sanders over Biden because Sanders is a progressive, Warren is a progressive, and I am a progressive, while Biden is a centrist.
But in addition to that, one important reason why I support Sanders is that the reason why Warren got into politics in the first place was to fight Biden’s efforts to pass bankruptcy reform that the credit card companies who bankrolled his Senate campaigns desired.
In the late 1990s the economy was supposedly booming, yet bankruptcies were skyrocketing. Here’s how Biden along with the credit card companies viewed the problem.
Warren, who had conducted a groundbreaking study on the causes behind bankruptcy, disagreed.
"Those who want to say {that} the way to solve rising consumer bankruptcy is by changing the law are the same people who would have said during a malaria epidemic that the way to cut down on hospital admissions is to lock the door," said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard University law school professor who studies bankruptcies.
"Bankruptcy is only the symptom, not the problem," she said. "The problem is the amount of consumer debt we've got and the way families are failing because of it."
www.washingtonpost.com/...
As for who Warren primarily blamed for the efforts to pass bankruptcy reform, she trained her sights squarely on a certain Delaware Senator.
Banking and credit lobbyists have been trying to change the bankruptcy laws for years. The current bill was stuck in conference between the Senate and House until Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware -- where many banks and credit-card issuers are incorporated -- agreed to vote with Republicans on almost all the issues that were holding up the bill. But Mr. Biden also told his Democratic colleagues that he would support an amendment to stop abortion protesters from using bankruptcy protection to avoid damages they might otherwise have to pay for violating federal law in violent clinic protests.
www.nytimes.com/...
This all culminated in a famous exchange between Warren and Biden at a Senate hearing discussing the bankruptcy bill.
Warren blamed the lenders. Many credit card companies charged so much in fees and interest that they weren’t losing money when some of their customers went bankrupt, she said. “That is, they have squeezed enough out of these families in interest and fees and payments that never paid down principal,” Warren said.
Biden parried. “Maybe we should talk about usury rates, then,” he replied. “Maybe that is what we should be talking about, not bankruptcy.”
“Senator, I will be the first. Invite me.”
“I know you will, but let’s call a spade a spade,” Biden said. “Your problem with credit card companies is usury rates from your position. It is not about the bankruptcy bill.”
“But, senator,” Warren countered, “if you are not going to fix that problem, you can’t take away the last shred of protection from these families.”
At this last remark, Biden smiled and sat back in his chair, according to Mallory Duncan, a lobbyist who was in the room.
“I got it, OK,” Biden said. “You are very good, professor.”
www.politico.com/...
Here’s a video of the exchange:
Unfortunately Warren’s pleas didn’t impress Biden as much as the pleas of the credit card companies did, and in the end Biden and the credit card companies won, as the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act was signed into law by George W. Bush in 2005.
As for what the bill did:
The bill, which was signed in to law by George W. Bush two months after Biden and Warren tangled, made it harder for Americans to discharge the debts they accrue from things like credit cards and medical bills. According to one study, the law “benefited credit card companies and hurt their customers.” Delaware was home to one of the nation’s biggest credit card issuers at the time, and advocates on both sides of the debate saw Biden as trying to represent his state’s interests in Congress. But with emotions still raw about the banking bailouts of the Great Recession, some Democrats see Biden’s vote for the bill as part of a broader record that’s not as progressive as he’d like it to appear.
As for Warren, the experience solidified in her mind what has become her central thesis about what’s wrong with government and the economy:
For Warren, Biden’s successful push to make it harder for struggling people to file for bankruptcy is Exhibit A in her case that big money — in this instance, from credit card companies based in Delaware — corrupts the system, rigging it against regular people.
theintercept.com/...
To be clear, I think Biden is a good man, and obviously I would vote for him and work my ass off to get him elected if he’s the nominee. But the fact of the matter is that on issue after issue, Biden has gotten it wrong while Sanders has gotten it right.
For example, in voting to support opening trade with China in 2000, Biden said this:
“Nor do I see the collapse of the American manufacturing economy, as China, a nation with the impact on the world economy about the size of the Netherlands’, suddenly becomes our major economic competitor.” (p. S8717)
www.congress.gov/…
Obviously, since then China has become America’s most powerful economic competitor and America has lost millions of manufacturing jobs to China.
Meanwhile, Sanders consistently opposed opening trade with China. Here’s him speaking out against granting China most-favored nation status way back in 1994:
And of course there’s the Iraq War, which Biden voted for and Sanders voted against, and which in the end cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and over 4,000 US troops. But if voting for such a disastrous war over non-existent WMDs that cost so much in life and treasure wasn’t already bad enough, during this campaign Biden has, well, prevaricated about his support for the Iraq War.
For instance, last fall Biden claimed to have opposed the Iraq War from “the moment it started” in an interview with NPR:
He got them in, and before we know it, we had a shock and awe. Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.
But there’s a little problem with that. In July 2003, Biden said this about his Iraq War vote:
Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force, and I would vote that way again today. (It’s at the 6:11 mark of the video)
When selecting a leader, you are selecting someone on the basis of their judgment. Time and again Biden’s judgment has been wrong while Sanders’ has been right on the money.
Which brings me to another point about why I support Sanders over Biden. Biden and many who support him seem to be proceeding under the assumption that Trump was some kind of aberration, that in fact things were going great before Trump, and that all we need to do is get rid of Trump and go back to the good ol’ ways of doing things. When you listen to people who support Biden and to mainstream Democratic figures on cable TV and on social media, they seem to think this election is about restoring decency and dignity.
In my view, this could not be more detached from reality. Do such people not see why so many people here and all over the world are so angry and riled up? All over the world we are seeing people rebelling against the political ruling order in their countries.
Britain had Brexit and just had an election between a right-wing populist and a left-wing populist. France nearly elected right-wing nativist Marine Le Pen, and if Macron continues to be as unpopular as he currently is, Le Pen may win the next election. Last year France was racked by the Yellow Vest protests. Ukraine elected as their president a comedian who ran on upending the corrupt status quo. Mexico elected leftist populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as their president. The Philippines and Brazil elected right-wing populists. Here in the US we elected Trump, and now we face the possibility that the Democratic Party may select a life-long independent and democratic socialist as their presidential nominee.
This is not to say Biden will certainly lose, in fact I give him as decent a shot at winning the election as anyone else. But I fear that even should Biden win, he will govern in line with the status quo of the last several decades, which will only continue to fuel the political unrest we’ve seen in this country and around the world, and we may end up in four years facing another Trump-style figure who may actually be competent at executing his vision. In other words, I fear Biden would be an American Macron. And as I mentioned, Macron is so terribly unpopular right now that there’s a good chance in France’s next election, the virulent reactionary Le Pen may very well win.
Lest you doubt that this anger I’m speaking of really exists in any meaningful way here in the US:
The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that — despite Americans’ overall satisfaction with the state of the U.S. economy and their own personal finances — a majority say they are angry at the nation’s political and financial establishment, anxious about its economic future, and pessimistic about the country they’re leaving for the next generation.
“Four years ago, we uncovered a deep and boiling anger across the country engulfing our political system,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which conducted this survey in partnership with the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies. “Four years later, with a very different political leader in place, that anger remains at the same level.”
The poll finds that 70 percent of Americans say they feel angry “because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington.” Forty-three percent say that statement describes them "very well."
www.nbcnews.com/...
Why are so many people upset? It’s because over the last 40 years the wealthy, the well-educated, and well-connected have reaped all the gains while the incomes for everyone else, and particularly the lower and working classes, stagnated and costs for everyone else rose faster than their incomes. Not only has wealth been unevenly distributed between the wealthy and everyone else, it has also been geographically and educationally uneven. Urban centers and the coasts, and the college-educated who gravitate to those places have reaped the economic gains while non-urban America and the non-college-educated have fallen further and further behind.
And as many communities and their people have seen their economic prospects deteriorate, the physical and mental health of those people have deteriorated. Americans are increasingly dying of despair, succumbing to drug and alcohol abuse, to such an extent that America’s life expectancy has actually dropped in recent years. Underlying these trends are the twin forces of globalization accelerated by corporate-friendly trade deals and the information technology revolution, both of which have exacerbated wealth inequality and have caused major cultural and economic disruptions worldwide.
When considered alongside these problems, decency and dignity, while important, seem like minor problems that struggling Americans don’t much care about. I think it’s pretty clear that real change in government and politics is desperately needed. And I seriously doubt that Biden, a man who has been in Washington for almost 50 years, who embodies the status quo, and who has argued that he simply wants to return us to how things were before Trump, will bring about that change especially since he’s explicitly told his rich donors, the very kinds of people whose power needs to be whittled down, that “nothing will fundamentally change”. On the other hand, Sanders with his long history of tirelessly and consistently advocating for the poor, the working class, and the underprivileged against the predations and abuses of the rich and powerful, with his talk of political revolution and his anti-establishment bonafides, clearly is dead serious about pushing for fundamental change.
When choosing someone to be the party’s standard-bearer, I think it’s common sense to want to choose someone who’s been mostly right about the big issues rather than someone who’s been mostly wrong. But if you’re wondering why I think that’s such a big deal, as the saying goes, past is prologue, and that being the case, I prefer the guy who was more often right on the big issues over the guy who was often wrong on those big issues.
Here’s what I’m talking about: let’s say it’s 2022, the Republicans have regained full control of Congress, and they’re trying to hold President Biden and the debt ceiling hostage again in exchange for massive cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security. Given Biden’s history of saying that he’s open to cutting Social Security, and given his repeatedly expressed desire to play nice with Republicans, do you trust Biden to hold firm? I sure as hell don’t.
But would I trust that President Sanders, who has long made clear his firm opposition to any Social Security or Medicare cuts, would make the right call in both those situations? Clearly, the answer is yes.
As for the argument that Sanders is not electable, to that I would just point out who is sitting in the White House now, and who sat in the White House before the current occupant. Conventional wisdom held that an urban, Black senator with a Muslim-sounding name was not electable, yet he got elected. Conventional wisdom held that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in to be elected and that Trump, a buffoon, a bigot, and reality TV host, stood no chance of winning, yet look where we are.
So I don’t buy the electability argument. We’ve seen too many supposedly safe, “electable” candidates nominated who went down to defeat. Meanwhile, we have seen in the last 50 years a number of candidates elected on upending the status quo — Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and Trump — all ran on variations of that theme.
So if you’re a Warren supporter wondering who you might support next, I would just offer you the words Warren spoke just the other night at her final pre-Super Tuesday campaign rally:
“No matter how many Washington insiders tell you to support him, nominating a fellow Washington insider will not meet this moment. Nominating a man who says we do not need any fundamental change in this country will not meet this moment. And nominating someone who wants to restore the world before Donald Trump, when the status quo has been leaving more and more people behind for decades, is a big risk for our party and for our country.”
www.nbclosangeles.com/...
That sentiment is a big reason why I supported Elizabeth Warren, and I’m certain the same can be said for many of my fellow Warrenites. So if fundamentally changing how business is done in Washington and how our economy operates is as important to you as it is to Elizabeth Warren, in a contest between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, Sanders is the only choice.
