The left-wing group that was responsible for getting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) elected blistered former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday morning for representing the “old guard of the Democratic Party” that “stands in near complete opposition to where the center of the energy” is in the party today.
Justice Democrats, the group that was founded after the 2016 elections by former supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and has vowed to primary Democrats who are “demographically and ideologically out of touch with their districts,” tore into Biden just hours after he officially announced his presidential candidacy, signaling that Biden’s road to the nomination will be far from being smooth. Ocasio-Cortez, the headliner for Justice Democrats, recently said that a Biden candidacy does not “animate” her in the least. The group highlighted Biden’s past support for the Iraq War, the Crime Bill, and the Bankruptcy Reform Act while also pointing out his previous opposition to “gay marriage, reproductive rights, and school desegregation.”
“Joe Biden stands in near complete opposition to where the center of energy is in the Democratic Party today. Democrats are increasingly uniting around progressive populist policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free college, rejecting corporate money and ending mass incarceration and deportation,” Alexandra Rojas, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. “We don’t need someone who voted for the Iraq War, for mass incarceration, and for the Bankruptcy Reform Act while voting against gay marriage, reproductive rights, and school desegregation.”
Justice Democrats argued that Democrats need a candidate who “will fight racism and inequality with solutions that match the scale of the crises we’re facing — not piecemeal compromises with corporate America and the party of Donald Trump.”
“The old guard of the Democratic Party failed to stop Trump, and they can’t be counted on to lead the fight against his divide-and-conquer politics today,” the group added. “The party needs new leadership with a bold vision capable of energizing voters in the Democratic base who stayed home in 2016.”
The left-wing group said they would support Biden if he becomes the nominee but insisted that a “centrist” like Biden will only “divide” Democrats. Presumably referencing policies like the Green New Deal that establishment Democrats oppose while using one former President Barack Obama’s trademark lines on the stump, Justice Democrats said Biden will turn Democrats into the party of “No, we can’t.”
While left-wing activists have been highlighting Biden’s treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings and his past opposition to school busing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) this week perhaps signaled that Biden’s rivals will begin to focus what could be Biden’s true Achilles’ heel—his past support for big banks and credit card companies.
Perhaps ringing the bell on these potential lines of attack, Warren told Anderson Cooper at a town hall event this week that she became a Democrat in the 1990s when she realized that while all of the Republicans were for the big banks, only half of the Democrats were for big corporations and bankers. Warren said she “had been working over and over and over on what’s happening to America’s working families, to America’s middle class, how it is that people who work hard, who play by the rules are just finding the path steeper and rockier year by year, and for people of color even steeper and even rockier.”
“This is my life’s work. And so I keep working on this about what’s changing in America. I’m studying families that go bankrupt. And the credit card companies, half-dozen giant credit card companies figure out that if they can get the bankruptcy laws changed, that what will happen is they can improve their bottom line by just a little by keeping people locked out of bankruptcy,” Warren said. “ Never mind that there’s people are head over heels in medical debts, that they’ve had job losses that have put them way behind, that they’ve had a death or divorce in the family, but they’ve been cheated by credit card companies and mortgage companies. Never mind any of that. Just improve the bottom line for the credit card companies.”
Warren said she “looked around in the middle of that fight” and “realized all the money was on one side and all the hurting was on the other.”
“And that’s when I jumped in politically. I got in that fight, and I fought it for 10 years. And by the end of that fight, I fully understood that every single Republican stood there for the banks and half of the Democrats did,” Warren said.
But implicit in her criticism was that Democrats like Delaware’s Joe Biden represented the corporate-wing of the party and the interests of banks and credit card companies over those of working-class Americans when Biden backed the Bankruptcy Reform Act, which was one of the issues Justice Democrats highlighted.
Long before Warren started to hone in on Biden’s past corporate alliances, Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer first exposed and extensively documented the Biden family’s so-called “new corruption” in his blockbuster best-selling book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.
In fact, Biden was reportedly “uneasy” about entering the 2020 race because of the questions he and his son Hunter are likely going to face in 2020 because of Schweizer’s revelations.
In Secret Empires, as Breitbart News has noted, Schweizer revealed that in 2013 “Hunter Biden’s firm signed a billion-dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China just 10 days after Joe and Hunter Biden flew to China aboard Air Force Two.”
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