Comments by "Gary S. Seth" (@GLORYNEVADASMITH) on "Bernie Sanders goes after Joe Biden's voting record" video.

  1. Joe Biden by Adolph I. Reed Jr. and Cornel West - The Guardian ( abridged ) An unrecognized irony of the South Carolina primary’s current importance as a gauge of African American support is that it and other southern primaries figured prominently in the late 1980s and 1990s strategy of the conservative, pro-business Democratic Leadership Council – of which Biden was a member – to pull the party to the right by appealing to conservative white southern men, in part through stigmatizing and scapegoating poor African Americans. Clinton-era politics refuses to die. Joe Biden is its zombie that staggers on Hamilton Nolan Read more Biden was one of the lustiest practitioners of that tactic. In fact, that’s what often underlies Biden’s boasts about his talent for “reaching across the aisle”. In 1984, he joined with South Carolina’s arch-racist Strom Thurmond to sponsor the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior. He and Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass incarceration. (Making political hay from racial scapegoating was nothing new for Biden; he’d earned sharp criticism from both the NAACP and ACLU in the 1970s for his aggressive opposition to school bussing as a tool for achieving school desegregation . Joe Biden was also an enthusiastic supporter of the 1996 welfare “reform” that ended the federal government’s 60-year commitment to direct provision of aid to poor and indigent people. Instead, his tender mercies have been reserved for the banking and credit card industries. He has a record that goes back to 1978 of consistently working to make it more difficult for poor and working people to declare bankruptcy. And he actively supported the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking. The result was to give commercial bankers access to depositors’ money and intensify the wild financial speculation that culminated in the Great Recession.
    1