The former vice president is eager to stake out the middle of the road, between ultra-predatory capitalism and solidarity with working-class people

Here Comes Joe Biden and It's Worse Than You Thought

When the New York Times front-paged its latest anti-left polemic masquerading as a news article, the March 9 piece declared: “Should former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. enter the race, as his top advisers vow he soon will, he would have the best immediate shot at the moderate mantle.”

On the verge of relaunching, Joe Biden is poised to come to the rescue of the corporate political establishment—at a time when, in the words of the Times, “the sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats.” After 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, Biden is by far the most seasoned servant of corporate power with a prayer of becoming the next president.

When Biden read this paragraph in a recent Politico article, his ears must have been burning: “Early support from deep-pocketed financial executives could give Democrats seeking to break out of the pack an important fundraising boost. But any association with bankers also opens presidential hopefuls to sharp attacks from an ascendant left.”

The direct prey of Biden’s five-decade “association with bankers” include millions of current and former college students now struggling under avalanches of debt; they can thank Biden for his prodigious services to the lending industry. Andrew Cockburn identifies an array of victims in his devastating profile of Biden in the March issue of Harper’s magazine. For instance:

•“Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools.”

• “Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.”

•Biden worked diligently to strengthen the hand of credit-card firms against consumers. At the same time, “the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.”

At an October 2017 gathering in Alabama, he said: “Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.” Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he told an audience at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

As Branko Marcetic pointed out in Jacobin last summer, “at a time when left-wing populism is increasingly accepted as the antidote to Trump and the GOP’s nativist and corporate-friendly pitch, Biden stands as a remnant of precisely the sort of left-averse, triangulating Democratic politics that Hillary Clinton was relentlessly criticized for personifying.”

Censorship continues to roll on...

Facebook Bans Zero Hedge

Over the weekend, we were surprised to learn that some readers were prevented by Facebook when attempting to share Zero Hedge articles. Subsequently it emerged that virtually every attempt to share or merely mention an article, including in private messages, would be actively blocked by the world's largest social network, with the explanation that "the link you tried to visit goes against our community standards."

We were especially surprised by this action as neither prior to this seemingly arbitrary act of censorship, nor since, were we contacted by Facebook with an explanation of what "community standard" had been violated or what particular filter or article had triggered the blanket rejection of all Zero Hedge content.

To be sure, as a for-profit enterprise with its own unique set of corporate "ethics", Facebook has every right to impose whatever filters it desires on the media shared on its platform. It is entirely possible that one or more posts was flagged by Facebook's "triggered" readers who merely alerted a censorship algo which blocked all content.

Alternatively, it is just as possible that Facebook simply decided to no longer allow its users to share our content in retaliation for our extensive coverage of what some have dubbed the platform's "many problems", including chronic privacy violations, mass abandonment by younger users, its gross and ongoing misrepresentation of fake users, ironically - in retrospect - its systematic censorship and back door government cooperation (those are just links from the past few weeks).

Trump has issued an executive order to start using facial recognition cameras at more airports. This is for our connivence of course.

DHS Facial Recognition Scanners To Be Deployed At Top 20 Airports By 2021

The Department of Homeland Security is rushing to implement a March 2017 executive order issued by President Trump mandating the use of facial recognition to identify "100 percent of all international passengers" - including American citizens, according to BuzzFeed.

Originally signed into law by President Obama in 2015, Trump's EO accelerates the program, which will be implemented by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in 20 top US airports by 2021 (Of note, seventeen international airports already use facial recognition, including "Atlanta, New York City, Boston, San Jose, Chicago, and two airports in Houston").

According to a 346-pages of "as-yet-unpublished" documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and reviewed by BuzzFeed News, US Customs and Border Protection is furiously rushing to meet the deadline for this "biometric entry-exit system" - which will use facial recognition technology on more than 100 million passengers in as little as two years, or roughly 16,300 flights per week.

Meanwhile, it appears that CBP has simply skipped part of the "rulemaking process" - foregoing public feedback prior to implementing the technology. Beyond "privacy, surveillance and free speech implications," this is worrisome according to BuzzFeed, which notes that last summer the ACLU reported that Amazon's facial recognition technology falsely matched 28 members of congress with arrest mugshots.

"Facial recognition is becoming normalized as an infrastructure for checkpoint control," said ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley. "It's an extremely powerful surveillance technology that has the potential to do things never before done in human history. Yet the government is hurtling along a path towards its broad deployment — and in this case, a deployment that seems quite unjustified and unnecessary."

CBP has suggested that privacy concerns are overblown, and that "CBP is committed to protecting the privacy of all travelers and has issued several Privacy Impact Assessments related to [its biometric entry-exit program], employed strong technical security safeguards, and has limited the amount of personally identifiable information used in the transaction," according to an agency spokesperson.

Body scanners are coming to subway stations, ballparks and anywhere else our benevolent overlords wants them to be. But hey, if you say that you have nothing to hide then it's obvious you don't care about your rights.

In case you haven't heard...

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— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) March 11, 2019

Lots of interesting news that I thought people might not have heard about and might be interested in