Feeling the pressure from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie-- and the energy among grassroots activities they have inspired-- Biden's team of weasels is talking about making some kind of symbolic gesture so Status Quo Joe can pretend he stands with working families instead of the Wall Street crooks who are underwriting his campaign and who he has always kissed up to. The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reported that the crew of crooks who think for Biden is "weighing the introduction of a new tax on Wall Street, as the former vice president now stands alone among the Democratic presidential front-runners in not backing a multitrillion-dollar 'wealth tax' on the richest Americans." Biden, who famously assured Wall Street banisters that if he's elected, "nothing fundamental will change" for them, will never make any moves against Wall Street even if his campaign comes up with some cosmetic bullshit to reassure the dumb Dems who don't pay attention.Stein reported that "An aide to Biden confirmed that the campaign is working on tax policy proposals but would not confirm that a Wall Street tax is in the mix." Bernie and Elizabeth have been working to implement and perfect these kinds of policies for decades while Biden fought them and killed them on behalf of the banksters. Now his team is trying to put a p.r. effort together to trick low-info voters into backing him. Meanwhile, his campaign is doing something more in line with who Biden is: launching a SuperPAC to try too turn around the negative momentum his campaign has been experiencing in recent weeks as voters have gotten a sense of what a useless turd he is. Biden-- who officially disavows having anything to do with the SuperPAC (just as Trump does)-- has been looking at ways to get around legal and moral fundraising limits and the SuperPAC rand is the one he's decided to take. CNN's Dan Merica reports that Biden allies want to counter all the slime coming out about his family of grifters-- who everyone is seeing are on the same level of Trump's family of grifters. Trump ran-- through his own crooked SuperPAC, Great America-- this disgusting, manipulative and purposely misleading ad about Joe Biden:As I've been warning, if Biden is the nominee, this election will be all about which candidate is the most dishonest, which candidate is the most senile and which candidate has a more corrupt family. Trump's biggest fear-- that he will have to confront Bernie or Elizabeth on substantive issues that matter to the American people-- will have evaporated.
The possible super PAC is far from operational, but Larry Rasky, a former Biden aide, has led the effort to stand up an outside group that he believes would help the former vice president rebut attacks that could impact Biden's standing in the crowded and contentious Democratic primary. While Biden is still seen as a front-runner in the race, recent polling has shown his once-large lead slipping as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren rises in the field."For me, this week puts everything into stark relief," Rasky said. He added that he has begun to think "the campaign was being a little naïve about the resources we'd need to fight this.""The campaign is fighting a war on two fronts-- the primary and the general election-- at the same time. They certainly need all the support they can get."..."The attacks aimed at this campaign from dark money groups helping Donald Trump spread his outlandish lies and slander have only served as a reminder of the urgent need for campaign finance reform," Ducklo said. "Which is exactly why since the beginning of this campaign, Biden for President has not and will not welcome the help of super PACs. That goes for those that purport to help him, despite his explicit condemnation of their existence."A source familiar with the internal Biden campaign strategy, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the outside effort, put a finer point on it."The campaign had its best week of fundraising since the second week after launching, and it would be impossible to miss from anywhere on earth that Donald Trump is panicked about Joe Biden," the source said. "The campaign doesn't need or want this effort, and anyone engaging in it doesn't have its best interests at heart."Rasky said he expected that his prospective effort would be disavowed by the campaign, but he and others still believe the outside group is needed to rebut attacks leveled by Trump and other Republicans."We are dead serious about the need to do it," Rasky said. "But we are also mindful of the campaign's position and the Vice President's expressed desire not to have one. That is a lot for us to ponder."...A source close to the possible super PAC said that while its focus would be to respond to attacks from Trump and other Republicans, they would not rule out responding to Democratic attacks on Biden."That's not what it is for," the source said, "but if Biden is attacked, we need to defend him."
And it isn't just Wall Street banksters who Biden is kissing up to. As Branko Marcetic noted at Jacobin Tuesday, In Joe Biden, the Health Care Industry Has Found Its Guy. Short version: "A new survey conducted by a Biden-linked firm is workshopping Biden’s own attacks against Medicare-for-All. His campaign is part of a multi-front corporate effort to defeat the policy."
While billing itself as a “national think tank that champions modern center-left ideas,” Third Way is a conduit for a panoply of corporate interests that campaigns against left-wing policies-- in 2013, two of its highest-ranking officials wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed warning that “economic populism is a dead end for democrats.” One of those officials, Executive Vice President Jim Kessler, the former longtime aide of Wall Street’s favorite Democrat Chuck Schumer, has admitted the majority of Third Way’s financial support comes from Wall Street, which views the health insurance industry as a great investment. At least as far back as 2013, it was staffed with Republicans and fundraising from a variety of corporations, donations that the companies themselves sometimes listed as part of their lobbying budgets.Today, one of its leadership team once worked for the National Association of Manufacturers, a Republican-aligned business group that, among other things, fights climate action and in its earlier years was one of the earliest forces to organize against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Meanwhile, Third Way’s board of trustees currently features a former private equity titan, a former Goldman Sachs executive, the head of a major corporate lobbying firm that has counted pharmaceuticals as its clients, and several other private equity and bank executives.Third Way has openly said it views Sanders alone among the Democratic field as an unacceptable choice for the nomination, so threatened by his campaign that they’ve now come around to even longtime nemesis and Sanders rival Elizabeth Warren. In 2018, the organization convened a meeting of 200 elected Democrats, political operatives, and donors to “launch a serious, compelling economic alternative to Sanderism,” as Kessler put it.Although health insurers and the pharmaceutical industry are funding a variety of Democratic candidates-- all of whom are now either attacking or backed away from their earlier support for Sanders’s Medicare for All bill-- the primary conduit for their campaign against the policy appears to be Biden. Health insurers were thrilled when Biden entered the race, seeing his campaign as a bulwark against Sanders’s plan for Medicare for All, and an In These Times investigation from July found that Biden received the most money in the Democratic field from insurance and pharmaceutical employees, while Sanders received the least. He kicked off his campaign with a fundraiser hosted by a health insurance executive, and one of Biden’s campaign aides is a former health care lobbyist.Not only that, but Biden’s advisor and chief pollster John Anzalone is the president of the firm that authored Third Way’s survey, Anzalone Liszt Grove Research (Anzalone’s partner, Lisa Grove, conducted the polling). Anzalone joined Trade Works for America earlier this year, an organization co-founded by Vice President Mike Pence’s current chief of staff that’s partly funded by the pharmaceutical industry and is pushing for Trump’s sequel to NAFTA.The results of the survey, which found majority support for Medicare for All among those polled, including 75 percent of Democratic primary voters, potentially give us a sneak preview of the negative campaign the health care industry and the candidates it funds will embark on.Polling showed that solid majorities thought statements arguing that Medicare for All would “end Medicare as we know it” (54 percent), produce lower-quality care and longer wait times for seniors and the disabled (60 percent), and that it would cost an extravagant amount and require doubling payroll taxes (59 percent), were all convincing arguments against the policy. Most potent were statements pointing to issues with the chronically underfunded Veterans Affairs health care system (64 percent), and fearmongering about the wait times of the United Kingdom’s far superior (and deliberately underfunded) government-run health care system (61 percent). Deemed least convincing were arguments that Medicare for All would empower bigoted politicians to control Americans’ health care (39 percent) and that it would be a “giveaway to employers” (49 percent).We’ve already seen the Biden campaign and other candidates deploy some of these arguments. Biden has made the ten-year $30 trillion cost of Medicare for All a core part of his attack on the bill, saying that the tax hikes needed to fund it are too expensive, that it would mean “Medicare goes away as you know it” and that “all the Medicare you have is gone,” and, as he told a forum hosted by seniors advocacy organization AARP, that it would create “hiatuses” in care. He even briefly deployed the argument that the policy would let employers “off the hook.” There is a remarkable convergence between Biden’s talking points and those tested by the organization’s survey....The 2020 election is less a contest between different candidates and more a battle between big business and the working class, with the issue of health care-- the number one concern among voters-- at its center. On one side is Joe Biden’s campaign, which, whether he’s conscious of it or not, is in reality one part of a multifront operation by the private health care sector to derail Medicare for All. On the other side is Bernie Sanders’s campaign, which has sworn off big money donors, is aligned with a variety of grassroots groups pushing for Medicare for All, and has emerged as a nationwide tribune of working-class anger.Somewhere between these two fronts is Elizabeth Warren, who is now genuinely surging in the polls after months of artificial elevation by a sympathetic media. Though Warren holds similar policy positions to Sanders, she has been inconsistent in her support for single-payer health care, calling it “the most obvious solution” in a 2008 book, before refusing to endorse it in her 2012 Senate run, and repeatedly waffling on her support for Sanders’s bill to the point that even mainstream news outlets have taken notice. She also continues to rely on big money donors, anchoring her current run in a $10 million transfer from her Senate coffers that was raised from wealthy fundraisers and tapping a major big-dollar fundraiser to be her treasurer, and she refuses to rule out funding her general election campaign with big-money donors. Should Warren win the nomination, now a distinct possibility, this could offer another point of leverage for the health care sector to defeat Medicare for All.Defeating Joe Biden’s campaign, an unabashed electoral channel for all manner of corporate interests hoping to defeat Medicare for All and other left-wing policies, should be the number one priority of the broad left. But even after Biden’s gone, we’ll have to exert all the pressure we can to keep Medicare for All on the table in any future Democratic administration.
