Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to greenlight the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs.
They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation.
They fund the endless wars.
The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up.
Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”
Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now.
The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.
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READ MORE: The Chris Hedges Report