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marian wright edelman
Elizabeth Warren Versus Joe Biden
Is Biden’s not-very-progressive record a huge mismatch for the current political moment?
Mar 21, 2019
Joe Biden's almost-certain decision to jump into the 2020 presidential race means that the top three candidates for the White House in 2020 are all white men over the age of 75--Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump.
There's something wrong with this picture in a political era defined by #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and a massive backlash against the White Man's Last Stand presidency of Donald Trump.
And the problem is bigger than the optics of race and gender.
Biden's coziness with the financial industry--especially his support for a 2005 bankruptcy bill that made it harder for ordinary people to get out of crushing debt and easier for big banks to profit from predatory lending--puts him on the opposite end of the spectrum from the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party.
Biden's not-very-progressive record is actually a huge mismatch for the current political moment.
Biden told a group of supporters in Delaware that "I have the most progressive record of anybody running." But Biden's not-very-progressive record is actually a huge mismatch for the current political moment.
A lot of the ghosts in Biden's past are the consequence of a long, long career in politics: his eulogy for Southern segregationist Strom Thurmond; his warning, as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, about "predators on our streets" who were "beyond the pale," taking credit for a crime law that exacerbated mass incarceration; his dismissive treatment of Anita Hill; his support for the Iraq War.
But age is not the only factor. In the 1960s, Bernie Sanders joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped lead in a sit-in to desegregate student housing at the University of Chicago.
In 1973, Hillary Clinton went undercover in Alabama, working with Marian Wright Edelman to expose tax-exempt "segregation academies" set up so that white children could avoid going to school with black children.
Here's an excerpt from a 1975 interview with Biden The Week dug out of the Congressional record:
"The new integration plans being offered are really just quota-systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with; what it says is, 'in order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son. That's racist!'"
Biden's biggest problem in the primary is likely to be Elizabeth Warren, who is bound to shine a bright light on Biden's cozy relationship with--and considerable campaign donations from--the financial industry.
Warren has a lot of credibility. Like Biden, she makes a pitch to blue-collar voters that they deserve a champion.
But Warren is the real thing. In a CNN town hall in Jackson, Mississippi, she made news by declaring that the Electoral College should be eliminated, along with laws designed to make it harder for poor people, people of color, and young people to vote. She gave a powerful account of her own life story, connecting it to the struggles of working-class Americans as a group. And she talked about her plans for expanding access to health care and combating corporate crime and income inequality that clearly stakes out the progressive wing of the Democratic Party--what her supporters call the Warren Wing.
Who can forget the Senate hearing when Warren skewered Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan who, Warren pointed out, got rich urging Wells Fargo employees to open fake accounts for customers and then covered it up? "At best you were incompetent; at worst you were complicit. Either way, you should be fired," she told Sloan.
In the 2020 primary, Biden will have to deal with Warren face-to-face.
I predict another moment like the Bernie Sanders/Hillary Clinton debate, when Sanders called out Hillary for taking money from Goldman Sachs, and pointed out that big donors don't hand out big money without expecting something in return. Only it will be Elizabeth Warren putting the screws to Biden this time.
Biden brushed back "the New Left" and extolled bipartisanship to an enthusiastic crowd at a fundraiser in Delaware--you know, the state that mails you your credit card statements? Biden, as a long-time, powerful Senator from the state that helps banks skirt consumer protections, counts among his friends many executives in the financial industry. MBNA America Bank, his largest contributor, lobbied him, successfully, to support the 2005 bankruptcy bill that made it harder for recession-battered consumers to seek bankruptcy and allowed banks to collect high interest rates on their debts.
Elizabeth Warren criticized Biden for that vote at the time, as The New York Times has pointed out.
The Times quoted Warren's 2014 book, A Fighting Chance: "The Senate was evenly split between the two parties, but one of the bill's lead sponsors was Democratic powerhouse Joe Biden, and right behind him were plenty of other Democrats offering to help. Never mind that the country was sunk in an ugly recession and millions of families were struggling--the banking industry pressed forward and Congress obliged."
Biden, who defends his friendliness with Republicans including Strom Thurmond, John McCain, and Mike Pence, as a healthy sign of civility and bipartisanship--comes from an era when the good old boys got together and made policy.
And that's exactly what the next election is likely to be about. Not, as Biden says, about voters longing for a return to the days when we all got along, but a new generation's demand for a powerful brushback of the good-old-boys' network and everything that comes with it: sexism, racism, self-dealing, a rigged system, and an increasingly out-of-it elite that doesn't worry much about inequality and sees coziness with an in-group of powerful men as a good thing.
Either another candidate will overcome Biden's early lead and win the primary, or he will advance to the general election having been damaged by the process.
Either way, Biden will have to deal with the "Warren Wing" of the party--progressive voters who want a candidate who will fight the power. They are demanding that the person who runs against Trump address our climate emergency, regulate predatory banks, make college and health care available to everyone, and end special favors for the elites. They do not want an affable, get-along centrist.
They want big, bold progressive change.
Sorry, Joe.
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How the US Can Prevent a Fire Like Grenfell Tower
At least 80 people are missing and presumed dead after a devastating fire in Grenfell Tower, a high-rise apartment building in London. It's the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century.
Jun 30, 2017
At least 80 people are missing and presumed dead after a devastating fire in Grenfell Tower, a high-rise apartment building in London. It's the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century.
This fire is, unequivocally, a tragedy--particularly because it was so preventable. Investigators say the root causes were lax regulation and an unwillingness to invest in basic safety features. Residents had repeatedly warned that their living conditions were dangerous, pointing out that the building didn't have fire alarms, sprinklers, or a fire escape, and there was only one stairway for people to get out and one road for firefighters to get in.
The fire has been a wake-up call for British politicians about a dangerous lack of investment in safe housing. Unfortunately, Britain is not the only country that has underinvested in safe homes.
A report by the Federal Healthy Homes Work Group found that more than 30 million homes in the United States are putting their occupants at risk. Six million homes have moderate to severe infrastructure problems, such as substandard heating, plumbing, and electrical wiring. Another 23 million homes have lead-based paint hazards, and 6.8 million homes have dangerously high levels of radon exposure. This means that millions of families face increased risk of lung cancer from radon exposure, fire-related injuries, and lead poisoning.
So far, the Trump administration has stymied efforts to address these problems. The administration's proposed $6 billion in budget cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would severely curtail efforts to provide safe and affordable housing.
At least $300 million in cuts would come from rental assistance programs such as the housing choice vouchers program, which means that 250,000 people could lose access to housing vouchers. Landlords participating in the housing choice voucher program commit to extensive property maintenance and safety standards that other private landlords serving very low-income families are often not required to meet. When families who cannot pay their rent are evicted, they often move into homes with more health and safety hazards, which is why children who are evicted are twice as likely to be in poor health.
More than 30 million homes in the United States are putting their occupants at risk
The Trump administration's budget also calls for direct cuts to the HUD public housing Capital Fund, the program that funds repairs to public housing. The budget would slash the fund by more than half, so that 212,000 fewer units would receive the repairs they need next year. It also means that local public housing authorities--which rely on this funding to address fire hazards before they become disasters and address health risks like mold, lead, and rodent infestations--could be short on their budgets.
Even indirect cuts, such as the proposed elimination of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), will put more people at risk. LSC funds civil legal aid organizations that help low-income households bring lawsuits against landlords who refuse to deal with potentially deadly living conditions. After similar cuts to legal aid in Britain, residents of Grenfell Tower were unable to afford legal advice when they had concerns about their building's safety.
We're not doomed yet. Fire deaths have been dropping across the United States due to stronger building safety codes. Most states ban the usage of flammable aluminum cladding in tall buildings, which contributed to the Grenfell Tower fire.
Still, the Trump administration has promised to dramatically cut back on important safety regulations. Trump's recent executive order that requires eliminating two regulations every time a new one is created forces agencies to choose which life-saving regulations they should prioritize to comply with the rule. Congress is now considering the Regulatory Accountability Act, which would add so many hurdles to the regulatory process that companies that produce dangerous products could delay regulations indefinitely. The Environmental Protection Agency faced similar roadblocks when it tried to ban asbestos--a known carcinogen--more than 25 years ago. Asbestos manufacturers used hurdles in the regulatory process to their advantage and blocked the agency from removing this toxic substance from commerce. Since 1999, at least 12,000 Americans have died every year because of asbestos exposure. Under the Trump administration, long-awaited asbestos regulations and many other critical protections may never be implemented.
In a chilling letter written just months before the building caught fire, residents of Grenfell Tower warned that "only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders." Americans shouldn't wait for a tragedy of this magnitude. Investing in the health and safety of low-income Americans begins with the funding decisions Congress will make this year.
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President Trump's War On Children
This draconian budget erodes the security of our nation's future
May 29, 2017
Our nation's budget should reflect our nation's professed values, but President Trump's 2018 Federal Budget, "A New Foundation for America's Greatness," radically does the opposite. This immoral budget declares war on America's children, our most vulnerable group, and the foundation of our nation's current and future economic, military and leadership security. It cruelly dismantles and shreds America's safety net laboriously woven over the past half century to help and give hope to the 14.5 million children struggling today in a sea of poverty, hunger, sickness, miseducation, homelessness and disabilities. It slashes trillions of dollars from health care, nutrition and other critical programs that give poor babies and children a decent foundation in life to assure trillions of dollars in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and powerful corporations who do not deserve massive doses of government support.
The cruel Trump budget invests more in our military -- already the most costly in the world -- but denies vulnerable children and youths the income, health care, food, housing and education supports they need to become strong future soldiers to defend our country. Seventy-one percent of our 17- to 24-year-olds are now ineligible for military service because of health and education deficits. It seeks to build a wall to keep immigrants out by slashing supports for those inside who can be counted on to help staff our businesses and factories and other services. This budget creates more inequality and less opportunity for those struggling to make ends meet and is a grave injustice.
President Trump invests in fighting those he sees as outside enemies through weapons and walls and turns his back on the internal enemies that threaten the basic domestic needs of our people -- health care, housing, education and jobs that pay living wages. The Congress and the people of the United States must reject President Trump's 2018 budget and the mean spirited values it reflects. It declares war on children and working people struggling to support their families by ignoring even their most basic needs and gives trillions to those who do not need massive government support -- especially at a time of record wealth and income inequality.
The president's 2018 budget:
- Slashes $610 billion over 10 years from Medicaid, which nearly 37 million children rely on for a healthy start in life and which pays for nearly half of all births and ensures coverage for 40 percent of our children with special health care needs. The budget also assumes passage of the more than $800 billion additional cuts in Medicaid included in the American Health Care Act for a total Medicaid massacre of more than $1.4 trillion over 10 years.
- Rips $5.7 billion from CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program), which covers nearly 9 million children in working families ineligible for Medicaid. The proposed cap on CHIP funding for families at 250 percent of the poverty level threatens coverage for millions of children in the 24 states and the District of Columbia that have chosen to extend coverage to children in families with slightly higher incomes.
- Snatches food out of the mouths and stomachs of hungry children by slicing $193 billion over 10 years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which some still call food stamps. SNAP feeds nearly 46 million people including nearly 20 million children. This cut is an unprecedented 25 percent reduction in a core safety net program that in 2014 lifted 4.7 million people, including 2.1 million children, out of poverty. For the 4.9 million households, 1.3 million with children, with no cash income who rely only on SNAP to keep the wolves of hunger from their doors, these cuts would be a catastrophic assault.
- Chops $22 billion over 10 years from TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program) including $6 billion that eliminates the TANF Contingency Fund which helps support some of our neediest families.
- Slashes programs to assist families with housing and end homelessness by $7.4 billion, a 15 percent cut for 2018 including $2.3 billion from Housing Choice Vouchers, which would leave more than 250,000 low income households without them; $1.8 billion -- nearly 29 percent -- from public housing already in desperate need of repair and expansion; and $133 million -- 5.6 percent -- from homeless assistance grants.
- Whacks $72 billion over 10 years from the Supplemental Security Income Program (SSI), which more than 8 million children and adults with the most severe disabilities depend on to keep going. Despite the President's promise not to cut Social Security, his budget cuts $48 billion from Social Security Disability Insurance which assists, among others, grandparents and other relatives raising children because their parents cannot care for them.
- Cuts $40 billion over 10 years from the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) by barring tax-paying undocumented immigrant workers, many with American citizen children, from benefiting from the Child Tax Credit unless they have a Social Security number, and making it harder for them to benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit created to reward hard work and help parents support their children.
- Slashes job training programs by $1.1 billion, or 40 percent, over 10 years for youths, adults and dislocated workers. It denigrates the concept of public service jobs by eliminating the Corporation for National and Community Service, and with it AmeriCorps, Vista and Senior Corps.
- Cuts federal education funding $9.2 billion in 2018 alone at a time when a majority of children in all racial and economic groups cannot read or compute at grade level. It slashes $143 billion over 10 years from student loans by eliminating the loan program that encourages graduates to take public service jobs and restricts other programs that subsidize college education for first generation college students and others from low income families. And it proposes to add $1 billion in new funding for the Title I program for disadvantaged students, which has historically supplemented resources for students in schools in areas of concentrated poverty, but for the wrong reason. It proposes to fund a new school choice initiative to let children draw Title I funds away from schools in the neediest areas and take them to schools in higher income areas.
- Shears $54 billion in 2018 ($1.6 trillion over 10 years) in non-defense discretionary programs which include a broad range of health, early childhood, education, child welfare and juvenile justice programs as well as environmental protection, foreign assistance, medical and scientific research and other federal government programs. The Trump budget would reduce spending for these important programs 2 percent a year for the next 10 years.
- Zeroes out funding for the Legal Services Corporation to deny the poor their only option to defend themselves against injustice.
- Eliminates core programs that offer extra assistance to low income children, families and communities including the Social Service Block Grant ($1.4 billion in 2018 alone, $16.3 billion over 10 years); the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to ward off heat in the summer and cold in winter months ($3.4 billion); the Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOME, Community Development Block Grant, Indian Community Development Block Grant, and Choice Neighborhood programs ($4.1 billion), and the National Housing Trust Fund which provides funds to states and local communities to develop affordable rental housing; the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) programs that include CSBG ($723.6 million), Community Economic Development program ($29. 8 million) and Rural Community Facilities ($6.5 million).
- Axes the 21st Century Community Learning Program that offers programs to curb summer learning loss and keep children safe and engaged through after school programs for 1.6 million children; the Preschool Development Grants which went to 18 states to improve and expand access to high-quality preschool for children in high-needs communities; and the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program for parents enrolled in college to assist in child care costs.
At the same time, President Trump's 2018 Budget includes an estimated $5 trillion tax package for the wealthiest individuals and corporations who neither need nor deserve massive government support and dramatically increases spending on defense and border security. The Trump budget:
- Increases base defense spending $54 billion in 2018 alone (and $489 billion over 10 years). That's $147,945,205 a day, $6,164,384 an hour and $102,739 a minute. The U.S. military budget is already the largest military budget in the world. We spend more on the military than the next eight countries combined (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany).
- Spends $2.6 billion new dollars on border security including $1.6 billion for a down payment on the President's proposed obscene wall at the Mexican border estimated to cost $10 to $20 billion before completion and after false campaign promises that the Mexican government would pay.
This draconian budget slashes over $3 trillion dollars in the next decade and tramples America's values and is anti-child, anti-poor, and anti-low-income working people. It erodes the security of our nation's future.
President Dwight Eisenhower, a five star general and World War II hero, understood that throwing money at the military could not be an excuse for assaulting the poor and stealing from our children, saying, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies ... a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hope of its children."
The Trump budget would not pass the test of any great faith or standard of fairness. It must be rejected resoundingly by the Congress and the American people.
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