Outrage, Hope and Action

Arianna Huffington described Biden's bomb succinctly at the time-

So what does the bill do? It makes it harder for average people to file for bankruptcy protection; it makes it easier for landlords to evict a bankrupt tenant; it endangers child-support payments by giving a wider array of creditors a shot at post-bankruptcy income; it allows millionaires to shield an unlimited amount of equity in homes and asset-protection trusts; it makes it more difficult for small businesses to reorganize while opening new loopholes for the Enrons of the world; it allows creditors to provide misleading information; and it does nothing to rein in lending abuses....

It turns out the average annual income of Americans who file bankruptcy is less than $30K, not the loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires gigging the system that we all heard about when this bill was debated. Also, the vast majority of people who file bankruptcy don't do so to strategically hang on to their mansion on the hill, but because of medical bills, a job layoff, or both. Real people, real lives.

And as I noted back in 2002, the pre-Biden/Bush bankruptcy laws were no bowl of cherries:

In most cases, the existing laws do wipe away some debts, particularly unsecured debt. But it leaves many others on the books, while destroying the debtor's credit rating for years to come, closing the door on dreams of buying a car or house, or engaging in any of the innumerable transactions that now require ID and surety in the form of -- what else? -- a credit card. It's no "easy out;" it's a hard step, a desperate measure, fraught with lingering doubts, agonizing decisions, and irrevocable consequences no matter what you choose--much like abortion, in fact.

And now it turns out that Biden's son was on the payroll of credit-card behemoth MBNA -- one of the prime movers of the nuclear attack on working people, the poor and the sick -- for years, first as an employee, then as a "consultant," until the bill oozed its way onto Bush's desk to be signed into law. (MBNA is not only one of Biden's biggest campaign supporters; it was also the largest single corporate giver to George W. Bush back in 2000, surpassing even the criminal syndicate known as Enron.)

Nothing demonstrates the reality of Barack Obama's candidacy than his pick of Joe Biden as his running mate:

Joe Biden voted to give George W. Bush a blank check to wage a war of aggression against Iraq -- a vast, brutal and brutalizing war crime that is inevitably breeding countless smaller war crimes of its own. (One of which is noted here by the New York Times.)

Joe Biden eagerly voted for the liberty-stripping Patriot Act; indeed, he claims to be its guiding inspiration.

Joe Biden is eager to prosecute the Terror War, which has already laid waste to three countries (yes, three; just because Obama, Biden, Bush and McCain never mention Somalia doesn't mean that ravaged, unlucky land is not part and parcel of their beloved WOT) and killed more than a million innocent people. Let that last fact sink in for a minute. Let that blood wash over your hands as you sit back with a cold brewski to watch the political conventions and debate fine points of presentation and handicap the "horse race." Mountains of the dead, vast pits of the dead, row upon row of the dead, just like the film clips you've seen of the Holocaust, all in the name of the berserker rage -- and the cooly calculated profits and power-games -- of the 'War on Terror' that both Biden and Obama want to wage in a "better" way than Bush has done.

And, as noted above, Joe Biden stood shoulder to shoulder with class warlords like Bush and Cheney to punish and ravage and drive down working people and the poor, on behalf of the rich and powerful.

No one forced Obama to choose such a running mate. No one forced Obama to make the statement of his own values that such a choice proclaims. It is glaringly, painfully apparent that he has no genuine values, beyond a keen ambition for power. Last week he was denouncing the Bankruptcy Bill. This week he's defending Biden's role in putting together a satisfactory "compromise" on the atrocity, while excusing the flagrant conflict-of-interest in the employment of Biden's son at MBNA. (It is also noteworthy to see how many liberal-progressive "dissident" types are suddenly finding outstanding qualities in Joe Biden, overcoming their various "quibbles" about his record and "evolving" toward a more mature and considered position on his virtues.)

Sometimes after I write critically of Obama and the Democrats, people ask me: "Well, what are we supposed to do? He's not perfect, they're not perfect, but don't you think McCain would be worse?"

As it happens, I do think McCain would be "worse" -- but only marginally so, for reasons I've laid out before. But what does that matter? These are the wrong questions for a nation swimming, sinking, drowning in the innocent blood shed by its bipartisan war machine. These are the wrong questions for a nation whose politics have become -- literally, with no metaphor or exaggeration -- insane, mired in violence, delusion and self-destruction. Whatever happens, whoever wins, there will be more war, more needless death, more mass murder in the name of America. Whoever wins, there will be more state-assisted assaults on working people and the poor. There will be more coddling of the rich, more servicing of the powerful, more injustice, more inequality.

The country is broke -- the bipartisan elite have looted it. The infrastructure is rotting; communities are dying; the quality of life is deteriorating for millions of people; the socioeconomic system, based on cheap gas and the consumption of a vastly disproportionate amount of the world's resources, is unsustainable -- but the bipartisan elite won't fix these problems. They won't even address them. They are too busy expanding the frontiers of empire, pushing for new adventures in Pakistan, in Georgia, in Iran, pushing for more war, more bases, more missile sites, more troops. Yes, McCain might push a little bit harder and a little bit faster, or in different directions -- but the self-destructive, mass-murdering push will go on. Listen to what Obama is actually saying, listen to what Biden is actually saying, look at their records, look at their coterie of advisors. There is nothing but blood and suffering as far as the eye can see.

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As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent "failed" policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the money.

When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set of squalid concentration areas, so the "peace process" never gets far from square one, etc., etc. - none of this makes the policies failures; these things are all surface froth, costs not borne by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing.