10-13-2020, 11:35 PM
LP, I wouldn’t necessarily go too far down the “Biden stands against corporate greed” line. I’d put him around John Howard on the Australian political spectrum. It’s just that Trump’s at the Pauline Hanson/Mark Latham extreme that makes Biden look left-wing.
Remember that Biden was a Senator from Delaware. Delaware just happens to be like the Lichtenstein of US States. It has lax corporate laws so a stack of corporations with no natural link to Delaware domicile there. Any Senator from Delaware has to keep them happy, so in a sense you can’t blame him from doing so (though he could have moved to another State to avoid that influence). Elizabeth Warren and Biden squared off over bankruptcy laws back in the early 2000s. There were 2 forms of bankruptcy. Chapter 7 bankruptcy that allowed people to do something like corporate liquidation: sell off non-protected assets, distribute them to creditors and extinguish the remaining debts. Chapter 13 bankruptcy is more like a payment plan in which the debt continues until it’s paid. The Banks and credit card companies of course didn’t like the Chapter 7 bankruptcies and Biden as lead Democrat on the Judiciary Committee pushed legislation to limit access to that form of bankruptcy. Warren and Biden have been frosty since.
Perhaps Biden is now free of that sort of corporate influence. Sure as hell, he won’t run for the Senate in Delaware no matter what happens. Perhaps he can make amends by giving Warren a Cabinet position or role in an agency from which she can promote consumer protection. But he ain’t an enemy of capitalism.
He has some serious credits in the bank when it comes to race relations as he was an enthusiastic underling to Obama. I’d imagine a closet racist would have kept his distance from Obama as Vice-Presidents can easily do but he was keen to be of service. He was also humanised by his son Beau’s death from brain cancer: he was obviously shattered by it on top of the death of his 1st wife and daughter in a car crash and it has made him a much more empathetic man than Trump could very be. But don’t expect him to be a democratic socialist.
I’d compare Harris to Julia Gillard on the Australian political spectrum.
Remember that Biden was a Senator from Delaware. Delaware just happens to be like the Lichtenstein of US States. It has lax corporate laws so a stack of corporations with no natural link to Delaware domicile there. Any Senator from Delaware has to keep them happy, so in a sense you can’t blame him from doing so (though he could have moved to another State to avoid that influence). Elizabeth Warren and Biden squared off over bankruptcy laws back in the early 2000s. There were 2 forms of bankruptcy. Chapter 7 bankruptcy that allowed people to do something like corporate liquidation: sell off non-protected assets, distribute them to creditors and extinguish the remaining debts. Chapter 13 bankruptcy is more like a payment plan in which the debt continues until it’s paid. The Banks and credit card companies of course didn’t like the Chapter 7 bankruptcies and Biden as lead Democrat on the Judiciary Committee pushed legislation to limit access to that form of bankruptcy. Warren and Biden have been frosty since.
Perhaps Biden is now free of that sort of corporate influence. Sure as hell, he won’t run for the Senate in Delaware no matter what happens. Perhaps he can make amends by giving Warren a Cabinet position or role in an agency from which she can promote consumer protection. But he ain’t an enemy of capitalism.
He has some serious credits in the bank when it comes to race relations as he was an enthusiastic underling to Obama. I’d imagine a closet racist would have kept his distance from Obama as Vice-Presidents can easily do but he was keen to be of service. He was also humanised by his son Beau’s death from brain cancer: he was obviously shattered by it on top of the death of his 1st wife and daughter in a car crash and it has made him a much more empathetic man than Trump could very be. But don’t expect him to be a democratic socialist.
I’d compare Harris to Julia Gillard on the Australian political spectrum.