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| Home / College Guide / ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ But First, We’ll Need Much Better Leaders. |
| Posted on Thursday, February 20 @ 00:00:25 PST |
‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ But First, We’ll Need Much Better Leaders. by RootsAction.org on February 20, 2020 Many people don’t need to read the news to know how bad things are in communities left behind.
Low wages. Inadequate housing that costs way too much. A racist criminal justice system, from courts to prisons. Sky-high rates for insurance. Big corporations that overcharge for everything from food and medicine to credit-card interest. College out of reach for students who just can’t afford it. The Republicans in power keep making nearly everything worse. We need leaders who’ll really push back and fight for economic and racial justice. But unfortunately, some Democrats haven’t measured up to the task -- and have even made life harder for millions. “My greatest accomplishment is the 1994 crime bill,†Joe Biden said when he spoke to the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2007. Biden has continued to deny the harm done by that crime bill, especially to black men and families. Campaigning for president in New Hampshire less than a year ago (May 14, 2019), he said that the 1994 crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration.
†An absurd claim.
Of course, Biden doesn’t mention those aspects of his record when he visits black communities in South Carolina and elsewhere -- but during his political career, he has undermined people of color in very important ways. We have a crucial opportunity on February 29 to help turn our country in a more positive and progressive direction if we vote in large numbers in South Carolina’s Democratic primary. Professors Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Cornel West wrote in The Guardian last spring that Joe Biden “earned sharp criticism from both the NAACP and ACLU in the 1970s for his aggressive opposition to school busing as a tool for achieving school desegregation.†In 1984, he “joined with South Carolina’s arch-racist Strom Thurmond to sponsor the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior. He and Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass incarceration.
†That’s not the kind of leadership we need in the White House. ‘It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about.’ “In more than four decades of public service, Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now animate his party.... Biden was a steadfast supporter of an economic agenda that caused economic inequality to skyrocket during the Clinton years.†– HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter (3-5-19) “It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about.... As a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden didn’t just craft the 1994 crime bill – he also ushered a variety of other draconian measures into law.... During the 1980s, Biden helped pass laws reinstating the federal death penalty, abolishing federal parole, increasing penalties for marijuana possession, expanding the use of civil asset forfeiture, and establishing a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for possession of crack cocaine (used disproportionately by poor nonwhite people) and powder cocaine (used disproportionately by rich white people).
†– New York magazine journalist Eric Levitz (3-12-19) “Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights.†– Author Rebecca Traister, writing for TheCut.com (3-29-19) “We must take back the streets. It doesnt matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesnt matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesnt matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesnt matter whether or not theyre the victims of society. The end result is theyre about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons.†– Joe Biden, speaking on the Senate floor in support of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill (11-18-93)
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