Rep. Bobby Rush issued a scathing rebuke of Joe Biden on Friday, calling him “woefully ignorant” of the black American experience, as the former vice president confronts a growing backlash over his comments about working alongside fervent segregationists.

Rush, a high-profile activist during the height of the civil rights movement, told POLITICO in an exclusive statement that Biden’s remarks at a New York fundraiser earlier this week were “wholly out of touch.”

“You would think that after eight years of serving as Vice President under President Obama, Biden would get it, that his frame of reference would be more audacious for the future and less on the obvious incrementalism of the past,” Rush said. “With his statement he has demonstrated that he is wholly out of touch and woefully ignorant of the nuances of the black American experience and that is, in itself, beyond disappointing.”

Biden’s campaign declined to comment and instead pointed to the numerous black lawmakers standing by him, including the congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis.

...Biden has not apologized for his remarks and stirred up more controversy when attempting to address criticism from his fellow Democratic presidential hopefuls.

“Instead of being a bold agent of change — one who will fight to dismantle the remaining vestiges of segregation and other aspects of racial discrimination — he remains focused on an unacceptable pronounced ideology of racial incrementalism,” Rush continued. “It’s shocking, sad, and troubling that Biden just don’t get it. In the minds of die-hard segregationists, President Obama was — and will always be — a ‘boy’ to them and never ‘son.’”

More at https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/21/bobby-rush-biden-ignorant-1376557

After Sen. Cory Booker appeared on CNN on Wednesday night sounding off on Joe Biden’s recent comments surrounding segregationists, the New Jersey Democrat got a phone call — it was the former vice president.

Biden, however, didn’t apologize for his remarks at a New York fundraiser recalling that “at least there was some civility” when he worked with segregationists in the Senate and that one of those senators “never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

“I find it remarkable that the surrogate talking points they were sending around, as they were trying to contain this, include no mention of the language the vice president used and instead tried to spin that the vice president is being criticized for working with people he disagreed with,” a Booker aide said. “That’s nonsense and speaks volumes to what they know is true, which is, he should be apologizing for what he said.”

...A Biden campaign official confirmed that the call happened but did not comment further.

Booker’s campaign on Thursday was still calling on Biden to take responsibility for his remarks.

“Cory shared directly what he said publicly — including helping Vice President Biden understand why the word 'boy' is painful to so many,” said Sabrina Singh, Booker’s campaign spokeswoman. “Cory believes that Vice President Biden should take responsibility for what he said and apologize to those who were hurt.”

More at https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/20/biden-booker-call-segregation-1375300

Joe Biden faced a growing backlash Wednesday from prominent Democrats — and a bit of second-guessing within his own campaign — over comments in which he proudly described his history of working hand-in-hand in the Senate with avowed racists.

...As seemingly random as it was for Biden to reference Sen. James O. Eastland, a long-ago deceased segregationist senator from his own party, some in Biden’s campaign had heard him discuss this relationship before — and warned him against mentioning it in public. Eastland, who represented Mississippi in the Senate from the early 1940s to 1978, often said that African Americans were “an inferior race.”

Aides said they had urged Biden to find a less toxic example.

“It might move him to pick a different senator,” said one adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “But he’s not someone you can go to and just say, ‘You’ve been doing this x number of years and you can’t do this anymore.’?”

Another adviser, expressing confidence that the fallout from Biden’s remarks could soon subside, nonetheless worried that Biden could inflame matters if he jokes about it the way he has sought to defuse other campaign controversies.

More at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-faces-backlash-over-comments-about-the-civility-of-his-past-work-with-racist-senators/2019/06/19/c0375d2a-92a8-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html?utm_term=.fc8ff272808a

...But what came later in Cowan’s speech may have been the larger and more important revelation: that the group is not offering “a warmed-over 1990s centrism.” Cowan’s critique of what were, after all, the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency was not hedged: “Back then,” he said, “we placed too much trust in the market’s ability to provide a reliable and realistic path to prosperity for most Americans. In the last 30 years, we have seen the impact of globalization and automation on our workers. And it is clear that a rising tide will not lift all boats.”

Those sentences speak to a quiet revolution in the thinking of Democrats across the board since the 2008?economic downturn and especially since Trump’s election. It can fairly be described as a leftward movement in the entire party. Sanders is often credited with moving the party left, and his proposals such as Medicare-for-all and free college (which came under sharp criticism here this week) have entered the mainstream conversation. But the language of “left” and “center” is imperfect in capturing the change. The new attitude toward the economy’s shortcomings is as much about the realities on the ground as it is about any ideological awakening.

“After 2016, it was imperative for everyone in the party to sit back and ask: What have we done wrong?” Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president for public affairs and a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me. He vigorously defended both the Clinton and Obama presidencies, dismissing as “preposterous” the idea that they were failures.

Nonetheless, he added: “We have to own some of the mistakes of the New Democrats” of the Clinton era. Among them, he said, was underestimating the effect of trade liberalization on a significant number of blue-collar workers and “the speed and ferocity with which technology would decimate certain sectors of the American workforce.” A particularly negative effect of this was the “concentration of opportunity” in certain regions as large parts of the country were left behind.

“We need to be working to tame capitalism at this moment, because it is not functioning well,” he concluded. “We need to do in this century what the progressives and New Dealers did in the last century.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-moderate-democrats-want-to-tame-capitalism/2019/06/19/11c9d5c4-92d0-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html?utm_term=.b5d428a9d74b

Vice President Joe Biden has talked on the campaign trail about working with Republicans, and during the Poor People’s Summit today, he defended his position as he acknowledged people consider it naive.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid, one of the moderators, told Biden at one point the initiatives he’s proposing would wind up in the Senate, currently run by Republicans. She asked, “How would you get past either a majority-Republican Senate in which Mitch McConnell was determined to kill all of these ideas or even a Mitch McConnell in the minority who repeated the consistent filibustering you had when you were vice president?”

“Joy, I know you’re one of the ones that thinks it’s naive to think we have to work together,” Biden responded. “The fact of the matter is if we can’t get a consensus, nothing happens except the abuse of power by the executive.”

“You have to go out and beat these folks if they don’t agree with you by making your case,” he continued, saying the president should be able to persuade the public.

“If you start off with the notion there’s nothing you can do, well, why don’t you all go home then?” Biden said. “Or let’s start a real physical revolution if you’re talking about it. Because we have to be able to change what we’re doing within our system.”

“You can shame people to do things the right way,” he added.

More at https://www.mediaite.com/tv/biden-if-we-cant-work-to-compromise-with-gop-we-might-as-well-go-home-or-start-real-physical-revolution/

A majority of millionaires support Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed tax on large wealth, according to a new survey.

Fully 60% of millionaires support Warren’s plan for taxing the wealth of those who have more than $50 million in assets, according to the CNBC Millionaire survey. The wealth tax is different from an income tax, since it taxes a family’s total holdings every year rather than their income.

Polls show that a majority of Americans also back a wealth tax. But the support from millionaires, some of whom would presumably pay the tax, shows that some millionaires are willing to accept higher taxes amidst growing concern over inequality and soaring fortunes of the rich.

While 88% of Democrats support the wealth tax, 62% of independents support it along with 36% of Republicans. Even the upper tier of millionaires, those worth more than $5 million, support a wealth tax, with two-thirds in favor.

Warren’s proposal calls for a tax of 2% on wealth over $50 million and 3% on wealth over $1 billion. The presidential candidate estimates it would apply only to 75,000 of the richest families and would raise $275 billion a year.

A larger number of millionaires also support an income tax rate of 70% on those making more than $10 million – a suggestion floated by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And a majority support repealing the 2017 tax cuts on companies.

“Over the years, we have seen that this population is willing to pay more,” said George Walper, president of Spectrem Group, which conducted the study with CNBC. The survey polled 750 people with investible assets of $1 million or more. Of the respondents, 261 were Republicans, 261 were independent and 218 were Democrats.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/12/most-millionaires-support-tax-on-wealth-above-50-million-cnbc-survey.html