Intuit's (NASDAQ:INTU)acquisition of personal finance site Credit Karma, announced Monday alongside its fiscal second-quarter 2020 earnings, is a pretty sizable deal: Intuit will fork over total consideration of $7.1 billion, funded equally between cash and Intuit stock, to fold in the popular finance destination.Per CFO Michelle Clatterbuck in the company'searnings conference callon Monday, Intuit will supply the cash portion through existing resources and by utilizing its $1 billion unsecured revolving credit facility.

How can shareholders determine whether this princely sum is appropriate considering the assets being acquired? Intuit relayed that Credit Karma's revenue, based on unaudited results, expanded by 20% in 2019, to $1 billion. The company didn't provide any insight into Credit Karma's profitability, but we can make an educated guess that it's unlikely to enjoy a profit margin anywhere near Intuit's high annual net profit margin of 23%. This is because management expects the transaction to be "neutral to accretive" to Intuit's non-GAAP(adjusted) earnings per share in the first full fiscal year after the deal closes.

This leaves investors with a single yardstick to gauge the deal's reasonableness: Intuit is buying Credit Karma at a multiple of seven times its annual sales. This seems a steep price on the surface, especially since management doesn't project an immediate, quantifiable impact on 2021 fiscal earnings per share.

Yet, as a strategic acquisition, the hefty purchase size may be warranted. Intuit has a long history of attempting to extend beyond its tax and small business accounting base into personal finance, from personal bookkeeping product Quicken (which it sold in 2016) to net-worth tracking platform Mint, to its relatively new Turbo offering. Turbo combines income data gathered from Intuit's TurboTax users (with their consent) with credit scoring to generate offers for home, auto, and personal loans from financial service providers.

Turbo seeks to add incremental revenue to Intuit's coffers in a manner quite similar to that of Credit Karma's primary offering: linking customers with service partners to help optimize their finances.Credit Karma has over 106 million customerson its Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered platform, which acts as a personalized financial assistant. According to Intuit's press release on the transaction, Credit Karma owns the "largest engaged member base in consumer digital finance." The company boasts an extremely high rate of engagement: 37 million of its customers use the platform more than four times a month. And Credit Karma works with a plethora of service providers, teaming up with more than 100 partners that offer home, auto, and personal loans, as well as high-yield savings accounts and insurance products.

Image source: Getty Images.

Credit Karma's reach helps illuminate Intuit's willingness to front the large purchase multiple. The transaction will roughly double the tech giant's total addressable market (TAM) in personal finance products from $29 billion to $57 billion. Yet access to Credit Karma's customers also introduces cross-selling opportunities, reducing Intuit's cost to acquire customers for its tax and small business products while opening a new avenue for Credit Karma to amplify its own user numbers. I presume that in its pre-deal due diligence, Intuit ascertained that the two companies don't have a huge overlap in existing customers.

Perhaps most importantly, Intuit may be able to significantly boost Credit Karma's value proposition to its customers by linking income data from TurboTax (as Turbo now offers) to their existing shared credit information, potentially exposing Credit Karma's customers to better offers from service providers.

Intuit states Credit Karma will continue to operate under its own banner, and I expect that at some point, Turbo will be folded into Credit Karma's brand. Given Intuit's deep pockets, the long-term opportunity to scale the Credit Karma brand after a one-to-two year integration period likely shows a high internal rate of return in management's calculations. Over time, then, the massive price tag may not seem so luxe.

Of course, the FinTech space is highly competitive and prone to disruption -- there's no guarantee that Intuit will see resounding success from attaching Credit Karma to its portfolio of brands. But overall, the purchase multiple, although high, isn't egregious. In fact, over the last two years, due to its stock price ascent, Intuit itself has traded at well over seven times sales -- it currently sports a price-to-sales ratio of 10.5. So, viewed through this lens, Intuit is purchasing Credit Karma at a discount to its own market pricing. Smarter yet, it's using its own, higher-priced equity to fund half the deal.

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With a $7 Billion Price Tag, Is Intuit Overpaying for Credit Karma? - Motley Fool

Dear Annie: I am a 65-year-old woman who suffers from insomnia. I exercise regularly, limit my caffeine intake and try to wind down at the end of the day with more relaxing books or TV shows. However, there are still a couple of nights a week when I simply cannot fall asleep.

Im retired, so I dont have to worry about going to work in the morning, but its still very frustrating to lie awake for hours, tired but not sleepy. I feel lousy the next day, too.

Which is worse for you, lack of sleep or sleeping pills? Both are said to increase the chance of dementia. If both carry the same risk, then Im inclined to pop a pill to at least stop the tossing and turning, and drop off to sleep. Does anyone have the answer to this? -- Sleepless in Roanoke

Dear Sleepless in Roanoke: There might be a third option here. Melatonin is a natural sleep aid that is considered safe, with few side effects. Couple that with some breathing techniques and you might find yourself dozing off in as little as five minutes. Heres how to practice the 4-7-8 breathing technique, as reported by Healthline:

"1. Allow your lips to gently part.

"2. Exhale completely, making a breathy whoosh sound as you do.

"3. Press your lips together as you silently inhale through the nose for a count of 4 seconds.

"4. Hold your breath for a count of 7.

"5. Exhale again for a full 8 seconds, making a whooshing sound throughout.

"6. Repeat 4 times when you first start. Eventually work up to 8 repetitions."

Continue your routine of winding down and limiting caffeine, but substitute just reading instead of TV. Any electronic screen can affect your quality of sleep. I also open this up to any readers who have had success falling asleep naturally.

Dear Annie: A few weeks ago, a letter ran from a person who seems to have tried everything to get in shape, from gym memberships to personal trainers, and asked, How do people stick with it?

I dont know how others do, but Im willing to share how I have. I graduated from high school nearly 50 years ago at 98 pounds. I now weigh 127 pounds. I had a baby in those years, too. So, how have I managed to only gain 29 pounds in 49 years?

Lots of small things: Walk for a mile every night after dinner (its good for your waistline and your marriage). Park toward the back of the parking lot and walk all the way in. Dance (think The Twist) while watching an entire 30-minute television program (its hard to eat while doing this, and it burns a lot more calories than just sitting there). Think just five minutes of exercise: Do situps, jumping jacks, pushups, toe touches or rope skipping for just five minutes. Its not a major commitment. ... Think of it as I deserve this five-minute break for a tiny bit of exercise.

At a restaurant, ask for a box when your food first comes. Put half of your meal in right then. Once its in the box, even if youre tempted to clean your plate, you will have only eaten a healthy portion. Get a watch that gives you stickers for physical activity. Yes, I know, it sounds silly, but I really wanted those stickers on my paper as a child, and I enjoy earning stickers on my watch now.

None of these are big things. But lots of small things do add up. -- Still Slender 50 Years Later

Dear Still Slender 50 Years Later: Congrats on your continued health. Just about anyone could use your suggestions to jump-start their wellness routine. That they are playful and provide opportunities to connect with others is especially beneficial.

Ask Me Anything: A Year of Advice From Dear Annie is out now! Annie Lanes debut book -- featuring favorite columns on love, friendship, family and etiquette -- is available as a paperback and e-book. Visit http://www.creatorspublishing.com for more information. Send your questions for Annie Lane to dearannie@creators.com.

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Dear Annie: Is it better to toss and turn all night, or just pop a sleeping pill? - oregonlive.com

Bill Gates has ordered the first hydrogen-powered super-yacht to support clean energy technology and speculation that Google could potentially buy Tesla. FOX Business Lauren Simonetti with more.

Bill Gates, most famous for being the co-founder of Microsoft Corporationand one-time richest man in the world, has gone from tech wizard to billion-dollar philanthropist. With so many contenders on the billionaires' list, how much capital does Mr. Gates have now?

Gates along with childhood friend Paul Allen founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975. Originally basedin Albuquerque, New Mexico, it eventually relocatedto Washington state in 1979.

Microsoft, specializing in computers and supported software, grew to become a major multinational technology company. One of the biggest leaps on the ladder of success for Microsoft came on Nov.6, 1980, when IBM made a contract stating itwould pay Microsoft $430,000 (around $1.5 million today, inflation-adjusted).

The contract agreed to Microsoft putting itsDisk Operating System (DOS) on IBM's new Personal Computer.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. ( Doug Wilson/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

WHO IS THE RICHEST BILLIONAIRE IN THE WORLD?

The key point in the contract was one that enabled Microsoft to license the operating system to other manufacturers, a nonexclusive agreement that IBM agreed to in part because it wasembroiled in years of ongoing antitrust investigationsand litigation.

IBM's loss would be Microsoft's greatest gain, allowing the company the capacity to grow into one of the biggest tech companies of the 1980s. This opened the door to partnerships with Tandy and Commodore, which further boosted both Mircosoft's market dominance and brand awareness.

It was this period of the decade that Microsoft saw the biggest increase in revenue, rising from $16 million in 1981 (about $45.5 million today) to $140 million in 1985 ($335.5 million today).

On March 13, 1986, Microsoft wentpublic on the Nasdaqstock exchange, selling 2.9 million shares at $21 each, raising $61 million. Shares closed at $28 on first day of trading, making a 31-year-old Gates and his 11.1 million shares worth $310million, marking his debut on the Forbes 400 with $318million.

By 1987, Gates was officially declared a billionaire in Forbes' 400 Richest People in America issue, just days before his 32nd birthday. He was also officially the world's youngest self-made billionaire with a net worth of $1.25 billion, over $900 million more than he was worth in 1986.

Bill Gates attends the Telluride Film Festival 2019 on Aug. 31, 2019, in Telluride, Colorado. (Paul Best/Getty Images)

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1994 was a landmark year for Gates, who at the age of38 becamethe richest man in America with a wealth of $9.35 billion. It's around this time that his company began to enter the commercial consumer market, with Microsoft Windows as the flagship productwith sales reaching $3.7 billion,making it a household name.

1995 was the year that Gates entered a new stratosphere of wealth and success. Not wanting to miss the boat, Gates prepared staff via an internal memo for an "internet tidal wave." This move was made in hopes for Microsoft to place itself at the forefront of theworldwide web industry.

It was also in 1995 that Gates was named the richest person in the world, with a fortune of $12.9 billion. After the release of Windows 95, Microsoft sales reached $6 billion.

Bill Gates and wife Melinda in Paris, April 2017. (Getty Images)

In 2008, Gates decided to step down from his senior role at Microsoft, instead choosing to put his energy into philanthropy, along with his wife,Melinda.

Despite now owning just 1 percentof Microsoft shares - which is around $7.3 billion - he is still one of the richest people on the planet with a net worth of around $108.4 billion.

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What is Bill Gates' net worth? - Fox Business

Combat Sports

He may be marooned in Texas, but Joseph Parker is closer to a return to boxing's big time than you'd think.

Joseph Parkers road back to boxing relevance wont ever lead to the now fully resurgent Tyson Fury.

But that doesnt mean the Gypsy King wont be a key figure in the Kiwi heavyweight recapturing a crown of his own.

Fury, who produced a tactical and psychological masterclass to fully unmask the huge punching but technically bereft Deontay Wilder to claim the WBC title on Sunday, has categorically ruled out fighting his Kiwi brother.

The reasons are straight forward enough: Fury has no desire to fight a mate, and feels no competitive compulsion to prove himself against a boxer he believes he would defeat without breaking a sweat.

Even if the second part of that equation were to change which would only occur should Parker recapture a heavyweight championship belt the first part likely wouldnt.

While Parker is certainly hard-headed enough to put sentiment aside to focus on business inside the ring, Fury is clearly a different kind of beast; the type that wears their heart on their sleeve, and isnt much for turning.

Fury has pledged never to fight his Kiwi mate, and that'sthat.

But Fury could well still play a key role in Parkers return to relevance.

Boxing journeys are seldom, if ever, tales of uninterrupted pugilistic perfection and personal success.

Parkers fight this weekend, against 39-year-old never-wazzer Shawndell Winters in Frisco, Texas, is about as far removed from a world heavyweight unification fight against Anthony Joshua at the Millennium Stadium as it's possible to be.

A main event fighter for pretty much his entire career, this weekend Parker isnt even the main undercard fight on a card headlined by Mikey Garcias clash with Jessie Vargas for the vacant WBC Diamond welterweight title.

Heck, Parkers tune-up is not even the third-ranked attraction. With three world title fights to follow his scheduled 10-rounder against Winters a fighter with losses to fellow nobodies Brian Howard and Nikodem Jezewski on his resume - the reality is that Parker will enter the ring before most of the fans atFord Center at The Star have even pondered taking their seats.

And hell be showered and back at his hotel long before the real contests begin.

The last time Parker was such an irrelevance on a boxing card was his pro debut, when he subdued Huntly PE teacher Dean Garmonsway on the undercard of Shane Camerons shock victory over Monte Barrett in 2012.

Being so far from the limelight will likely be a sobering experience not a bad thing for an athlete who has experienced his sports pinnacle but is yet to realise his full potential.

For a lesson on what can be achieved from his less than lofty current station, Parker need look no further than his gypsy mate.

Just 20 months ago, Fury entered a boxing ring in Manchester to face the less than well-performed Albanian Sefer Seferi. That contest deservedly had fifth billing on a card whose star names were Turbo Terry Flannagan and Maurice Mighty Mo Hooker.

That was Furys comeback fight after spending the two-and-a-half years following his victory over Vladimir Klitschko transforming himself from an elite athlete into a 175 kilogram human fatberg.

The linear world champs subsequent physical metamorphosis and re-accession to his throne shows what can be achieved in little more than the blink of an eye.

With Anthony Joshua and Wilder both having tasted defeat, the undefeated Fury is now the one calling the shots in the division.

While all roads would seemingly point to a unification showdown with fellow Brit Joshua, it aint that simple.

Fury is two fights into a $NZ163million five-fight contract with ESPN. Joshua is signed to US-based streaming service DAZN, while Wilder, who has a rematch clause, has a contract with yet another US broadcaster, Showtime.

Thats not a dynamic that lends itself to an all-British megafight.

Before his victory at the weekend, Fury said a showdown with Joshua was not an option until at least the end of his ESPN deal.

Throw in the factboth Joshua (who has more belts) and Fury (who is undefeated) have strong claims for a bigger slice of any pie and the odds of any deal being reached lengthen.

In the event of a stalemate, its a stone-cold certainty one or more of the four main sanctioning bodies will order mandatory title defences based on their rankings.

That, as it happens, is precisely the scenario that led to Parker capturing the WBO title in 2016.

Faced with a mandatory rematch against Klitschko, Fury vacated his WBA and WBO titles in favour of battling his cocaine addiction.

Then ranked two and three by the WBO, it was Parker and Andy Ruiz who found themselves in line for a shot at the WBO strap.

Parker claimed his sliceof history in Auckland, with Ruiz following suit with a shock victory over Joshua in New York last year.

Both Ruiz and Parker have since faded but, as Furys resurrection shows, the bright lights are far from out of reach for former champs.

The recipe for Parker is obvious. Get back in the ring, stay active and keep winning and his shot will come.

First things first he needs to get the job done this weekend. And then get the hell out of Texas.

Steve Deane has contracted to Duco Events, the company owned by Joseph Parkers manager and advisor David Higgins.

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Parker's plan: win - and get the hell out of Texas - Newsroom

Stem CEO and 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Music alumna Milana Rabkin introduces Scale by Stem.

Beginning today, music artists and indie labels have access to a new stream of funding. Stemdistribution and payment platform invested in bythe likes of Mark Cuban and Scooter Braun (with clients Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Kanye West and Usher) is providing more than $100 million in advances each year via Scale, its newly-launched financing product supported by a capital partnership with CoVenture.

Scale is led by Stem CEO and 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Music alumna Milana Rabkin, who, with co-founders Tim Luckow and Jovin Cronin-Wilesmith, launched Los Angeles-based Stem in February of 2015 to help artists establish sustainable businesses. Stem provides creators with tools to streamline music and video distribution, royalty splits and data tracking. Scale promotes further independence among creators by providing an alternative to traditional means of funding and empowering them to own their own music.

Scale felt like the natural next step for Stem, says Rabkin. We had figured out how to simplify splits and handle royalties, but wanted to help independent artists leap to the next stage of their business since day one our focus has been on empowerment and clarity.

Early payments from Scale are made in the form of a revolving credit line with the ultimate draw limit and fee based on net share of income. Unlike most other industry advances, Scale offers artists more flexibility with repayment, meaning that they choose what percentage of their earnings are contributed to paying down the advance each month. The product also offers all content shareholders access to capital.

Creators using Scale are not required to report how advances are spent. The company also does not perform personal credit checks or collect interest, minimum monthly payments or finance charges. Before launching Scale, Rabkin started Stem Check, a service that helps artists evaluate the financial viability of a prospective deal with a label or distributor.

The workings of Scale by Stem.

Music producer and artist Billy Lemos is among the first artists to use Scale to finance future projects and says, Scale has allowed me to fund my ideas without signing to a label. I have full control and freedom with my music and dont need to worry about any deadlines.

While labels can provide benefits for some artists, standard record deals tend to favor the company and place operating, marketing and distribution costs on creators. As an increasing number of music performers today choose to work independently, Rabkin hopes that Scale will drive financial literacy and empower them to think more like entrepreneurs with an understanding of the value they are bringing to the table. She also thinks that it will raise the bar for the industry to be truly transparent.

Success in the music industry I think will come when we can dispel the notion of the starving artist, says Rabkin. All of the new emerging platforms are really important they are so heavily dependent on music as the media that drives engagement yet, the people creating music have no way to understand the value of what theyre creating.

With more than 40,000 new songs released a day on Spotify alone, Scale enters the market at an opportune time. According to Rabkin, independent artists are the fastest growing segment of the music business, and growth within the music freelance economy is expected to continue as the industry expands. Artists have aired their grievances about the increasing pressure they feel to sell their rights for a paycheck, and Rabkin says Stem is a viable alternative to lease, not sell.

I personally believe that as more services and labor work is automated, more humans will be driven to creative work, says Rabkin. Days of doctor, lawyer or accountant versus creator are going away, and I hope its tools like Stem that allow creators to create sustainable careers and businesses recognized by society I never want a parent to tell a child that they cannot be a creator.

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Artists, Labels Scale Business With Advance Capital From Stem, CoVenture Partnership - Forbes

Amid herculean competition, Saturday, February 22, 2020 will probably go down in history as one of the strangest and most embarrassing dates in the history of cable news. While the symptoms of a full-blown media crackup have undoubtedly been festering for weeks, Bernie Sanderss overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses turned out to be the proverbial levee-breaking moment, especially for the talking heads who populate what is supposedly Americas liberal cable network.

In a medium not exactly renowned for offering wisdom or insight, MSNBCs marathon coverage felt like a broadcast from another dimension; a parallel reality with a peculiar metaphysics of its own. At once painful, hilarious, and downright appalling, the networks unhinged response to Sanderss win doubled as a master class in everything wrong with cable news from reflexive deference to the corporatist center to pathological hatred of populist candidates who refuse to accede to the arbitrary rules set down by elite politicians and media executives.

Over the course of a single afternoon, or so it seemed, the self-serving narratives and rhetorical shibboleths that sustained an entire era of liberalism came crashing down, leaving many of MSNBCs star personalities and talking heads to respond with a mixture of denial, anger, and fear. As Risings Krystal Ball described it:

Faced with a choice between the man they have loudly proclaimed to be a cross between Hitler, Mussolini, and Benedict Arnold and a man who threatens the very lifeblood of their access journalism, personal self-conception, and class interest, what would they choose? ... As caucus after caucus turned in overwhelming results in favor of Bernie Sanders, the flummoxed anchors were left to cope with this singularly myth-exploding event in their own ways.

Thus, an incensed James Carville, somehow looking even more cadaverous than usual, came on to announce, The happiest person right now ... its about 1:15, Moscow time? This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin, before waving hysterically at the camera and barking, How ya doin, Vlad? Reporter Chris Jansing could be heard audibly sighing as she reported with unconcealed frustration that the predominantly Latino voters caucusing at a location near the Bellagio were going overwhelmingly for Sanders. A furious Joy Reid, meanwhile, declared, No one else is as hungry, angry, enraged, and determined as Sanders voters before urging the Democratic establishment to sober up and figure out what the hell theyre gonna do about that.

In a rare moment of clarity that inadvertently seemed to sum up the whole afternoon, former George W. Bush communications hack Nicolle Wallace was finally forced to concede, I have no idea what voters think about anything anymore. The days undisputed champion, however, was MSNBCs carnival-barker-in-residence, Chris Matthews, who, fresh from imagining an alternate reality involving his own execution by Cuban communists in Central Park a few weeks ago, managed to outdo himself by equating Sanderss victory in Nevada to the Nazi Blitzkrieg of France in 1940.

Justifiably under fire for the remarks, Matthews has since apologized. But the moment may nonetheless be symbolic of something larger than the deranged outburst of a septuagenarian TV host raised on a noxious diet of Cold War propaganda.

Matthews is, after all, a creature of cable news to his very bones emblematic of a modern infotainment culture that has long prized deference to orthodoxy, empty provocation, and branded personality over any particular desire to enlighten or inform. A veteran of what is laughably called Americas national conversation (in practice, a hollow pantomime of political engagement in which overpaid people who are mostly neither very curious nor very bright theatrically spar for the cameras before meeting up at the bar a few hours later), hes been a fixture of the Washington political scene since his days as a staffer for Jimmy Carter and Tip ONeill.

Boorish, ill-tempered, and punctuated by a particularly repugnant streak of old-world misogyny, Matthewss schtick is virtually unwatchable unless youve already pickled your brain with a million or so hours of cable news. Having been described by one profiler as soothing like a blender, his voice sounds like a balloon perpetually stuck in the act of trying to deflate and never quite succeeding. The same writer would diplomatically call Matthews a whip-tongued, name-dropping, self-promoting wise guy of the sort you often find in campaigns, and in the bigger offices on Capitol Hill or K Street that is, one who graces interlocutors with incandescent insights like, Barack Obama is Mozart and Hillary Clinton is Salieri.

His biggest intellectual contribution, such as it can be called one, has been to articulate the art of Beltway social climbing as a kind of public philosophy: breaking through with the best-selling 1988 book Hardball (described by New York Times Magazine as a how-to guide to social and career climbing in Washington). Though Matthews got his TV start courtesy of Roger Ailes, it would be the 1997 debut of his show on CNBC (which carried the same title) and the ensuing Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that put him firmly on the national cable news map. As MSNBC attached its brand and its business strategy to the rise of Obama its prime-time audience would rise a whopping 63 percent in 2008 he would enter his heyday as a fixture of Americas media establishment.

Though a long-form profile published that same year tries its absolute darndest to find virtue in Matthewss loutishness and personal ambition (There is a level of solipsism about Matthews that is oddly endearing in its self-conscious extreme, even by the standards of television vanity), the portrait that emerges is largely that of a man obsessed with hollow status-seeking and the pursuit of fame for its own sake:

Matthews has an attuned sense of pecking order at MSNBC, at NBC, in Washington and in life. This is no great rarity among the fragile egos of TV or, for that matter, in the status-fixated world of politics. But Matthews is especially frontal about it. In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. Im like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1, Matthews told Playboy. I would argue for a higher position for myself.

None other than Jon Stewart exposed the moral vacuum at the core of Matthewss personal philosophy in a 2007 grilling of his book Lifes a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success (which channeled similar themes to 1988s Hardball). Catching Matthews off guard, Stewarts opening challenge was both pointed and lethal:

What you are saying is people can use what politicians do in political campaigns to help their lives? It strikes me as fundamentally wrong. It strikes me as a self-hurt book. Arent campaigns fundamentally contrivances?

Matthewss response, justifiably met with a bemused stare, amounted to a naked defense of amoral ladder-climbing coupled with the idea that everything about life should be treated like a campaign qua sales pitch:

Yeah, campaigns can be. But the way politicians get to the top is the real thing. They know what theyre doing. I mean, you dont have to believe a word they say. But watch how far they got. How did Clinton get there? How did Hillary get there? How did Reagan get there? They have methods to get to the top, and you can learn from those methods ... Do you wanna succeed? Do you wanna have friends? ... Everything about getting jobs is about convincing someone to hire you, right? Its about getting promotions. Its about selling products. Its always a campaign. Its a campaign to get the girl of your dreams. Its a campaign to do everything you want to do in life.

This strikes me as artifice, replied Stewart. If you live this book, your life will be strategy.

In an eerie parallel, Matthewss personal philosophy mirrors the acquisitive, market-centric amoralism of the modern Democratic Party with which hes become so intimately aligned. Albeit in different ways, both are products of a hollow liberal culture that values individual success over collective solidarity, toasts the endless triangulation of its elites as a marker of enlightened realism, and allows the twin idols of wealth and celebrity to be its lodestars.

In Bernie Sanders, this ecosystem and the apparatchiks who populate its gilded hierarchies have met their first real nemesis in decades: a figure whose popular support owes itself to explicit rejection of the politics of triangulation and craven self-interest they have so voraciously embraced. Thanks to a social and ideological base outside the clutches of the elite media, Sanders and the millions of people who comprise his movement may be totally alien to Chris Matthews and the culture that has produced him, but they also represent an existential threat to its primordial rites and sacraments.

Ever partisan for personalities rather than policies or principles, the Democratic Party and its media surrogates plainly expected a traditional primary contest auditioning competing centrist brands ahead of Novembers scheduled season finale. In Nevada, both collided suddenly and violently with the realization that their world may in fact be coming to an end; that huge numbers of Americans find their self-serving narratives unconvincing; and that their expectations of deference are now largely being ignored.

The cable news crack-up that crescendoed in Matthewss splenetic outburst was thus something more than a manifestation of conservative Democrats frustration at the prospect of a socialist insurgent winning his third electoral contest in a row. Beneath the layers of ugliness in the Hardball hosts execrable analogy could be heard the anguished cry of an elite liberal culture jarringly coming to terms with its increasing isolation and utter remove from the people for whom it has long claimed to speak.

In the weeks and months ahead, expect it to reach a fever pitch.

Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin.

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The Agony and the Ecstasy of Chris Matthews - Jacobin magazine

In just five short months, the 2020 Olympics will get underway in Tokyo. While the mainstream news agenda will have its eyes on the medal haul of Australias Olympic hopefuls, success or failure at the Games will run far deeper for the sports themselves, where the consequences of under-performance, and failure to keep the pipeline of future fans and supporters stacked, could be felt long after the closing ceremony confetti has been cleaned up.

Right now, Olympic sport communications departments and social media teams are busy working on their Tokyo content plans, internal resource allocation and on-the-ground logistics mapping. A large part of that thinking will be spent figuring out how to make sure that if and when their medal contenders step onto the podium, the whole world will get to hear about it through a flurry of posts and press releases.

These comms strategies revolve around a legitimate compulsion to service a sense of community and belonging that permeates sport. But the Olympics is unlike every other major sporting event in the calendar. Rather than only watching a favourite sport, viewers abandon preconceived affinities in favour of whatever is being played or broadcast. In other words, most people drawn to the Games this July will be interested in the Olympics first and its composite sports second.

National sporting organisations that only have eyes for existing fans and followers will be missing a crucial opportunity to grow their numbers, and in turn increase their future revenue potential from both the Australian Sports Commission and lucrative sponsors. In other words, any sport walking away from the Games with the same type and tally of fans they arrived with will have failed.

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At the 2020 Olympics, news will find its audiences faster than communications departments will be able to serve them.

Being able to accept that the news will take care of itself, and fans will self-serve with updates, brings with it the potential to liberate comms teams from resource-heavy, reactive tasks, and in turn, provides them with the freedom to explore more constructive and ambitious brand and communications strategies.

The Olympics isnt business as usual. For anyone involved in the business of promoting the sports represented there, that means following a different set of guidelines, adjusted to meet the behaviour of a special kind of sports fan that emerges only once every four years.

Theres no silver bullet for achieving that and every individual sport needs to consider its unique DNA carefully before deciding whats best, but they should start by considering the benefits of occupying a space at the heart of the Olympic party, instead of a single-minded focus on trumpeting personal success.

That means finding a way into other peoples conversations and the special Tokyo Olympics zeitgeist. No matter what individual sports have to say about themselves, it will only ever represent a tiny and transient percentage of what the rest of the Olympics-invested community is talking about. So instead of expecting new fans to come to them, sports communications specialists should find ways to embed their brand with potential new fans on their home turf.

No matter what their podium presence proves to be, after the high of the Olympics, many Australian sports will be facing an almighty comedown as they return home.

How long that hangover lasts and what the future looks like in the sober light of day will depend on how well sports win not just in the medal tally, but in their comms strategies.

Lee Robson is founder and chief storytelling officer at Istories, with two decades experience working with sports brands and elite athletes in Australia and the UK

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To win at Tokyo 2020, sports need to look beyond the medal tally and at their comms strategies - MuMbrella

Kate McKenna and her Grampy Jack Wedge, circa 1992.

To know my Grampy was to love him.

My grandfather, Jack Wedge, died from cancer in 2016. He had been omnipresent in my life, never missing a graduation, holiday or birthday party.

I travelled home to Prince Edward Island from Quebec for his funeral.

I figured it would be a small gathering to celebrate his life. Instead, there were hundreds of people, from many walks of life.

I was amazed. I asked my mom who they were. Many of them, she guessed, knew him from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) a fellowship he'd been part of for more than 30 years.

It was then that I realized I had only known a small part of my grandfather.

I made a mental note and filed it away for the next two years.

In 2018, I quit drinking.

I was nervous about my relationship with alcohol. I had started noticing I'd go out with friends and have three pints while everyone else was having one. I'd work till midnight, then stay out till morning. I felt myself slipping into a bit of a spiral.

I swore off booze altogether in May. The watershed moment came after a brutal professional disappointment. After that bad day at work, my first impulse was to crush a bottle of wine. Such a blatant urge to self-medicate set off alarm bells in my head.

The next morning, I woke up and emailed two close friends, saying I was finished with drinking forever. I said it kind of flippantly, but their earnest reaction made me think that maybe my drinking had worried themtoo.

My dear friend Dave Atkinson persuaded me to find a therapist. I followed his advice. After doing a questionnaire-style test, the therapist determined that yes, my drinking was probably problematic, and yes, I should probably stop drinking forever.

Lord, it was brutal, but I did it. I slipped up once, a month in. As of writing this, I've been sober for more than 19 months.

Nobody warned me, but my body reacted when I quit drinking. I was not a vodka-on-my-wheaties-type drinker, but I still noticed changes.

Some good better sleep, weight-loss and clear skin.

Some weird. People in early recovery will talk about the vivid dreams they have, where they relapse in some way. I didn't know that was coming and would wake up in a cold sweat.

I also felt my emotions thawing. In my job and in my life, I had a reputation for emotional toughness. In hindsight, I had medicated away any bad feelings with alcohol.

Once the booze was gone, I'd feel random spurts of intense sadness or happiness. Once I was walking to the bus stop and started weeping because of some long-buried memory of high school gym class.

But I kept going with the sobriety, numbing my body into submission with a punishing regime of very early rising, CrossFit and marathon training. Those activities, combined, gave me a good excuse to skip out on after-work drinks. I artfully dodged further questioning by telling people I was on antibiotics and couldn't drink.

And it was fine. Until I hit the worst realization of early sobriety.

As someone recently said to me: a drunk horsey is still a horsey. You can quit the booze, but it doesn't magically fix all the parts of you that you don't like.

All of my pre-existing bad habits I could be selfish, inconsiderate, and an impulsive ass at times stayed with me. And what do you do when you have nothing to blame?

Despite my best efforts, I couldn't hide from this question. Faced with no options, I was dragged into introspection.

That's when I started thinking about my grandfather again.

I wished I could go back in time and ask my grandfather for his advice on sobriety. But since he was gone, I decided to do the next best thing: speak with those he had helped, glean his wisdom from beyond the grave.

Taking a break from my Montreal life, I flew back to Charlottetown for a month. I wandered around, feeling raw and uncertain.

The obvious place to start was with my grandmother, Phyllis Wedge. We call her "Mama."

Mama loves to talk about her family. She can rhyme off her children's birth weights and her grandchildren's occupations, beaming, as though they're markers of her own personal success.

While she raised eight children, Grampy worked as a garbage man. They didn't have many extras, but they were upright and proud.

She told me about his drinking. One night, she told him not to come home because he'd had too much. The next day, he quit outright.

He was sober for 36 years.

Mama knew Grampy attended Alcoholics Anonymous a few times every week. But, like me, she didn't realize just what that meant until his wake. Over and over, strangers came up to tell her stories of how Grampy had helped them. He even did things you're not supposed to do in AA, like loaning them cash.

She didn't know many of the people, given that AA is anonymous. But she did have two names for me: Margaret Arsenault and a man named Greg.

Margaret and Grampy worked at a home for people with addictions later in my grandfather's life. His job was to hang out with the patients, playing cards and helping them with their day-to-day activities.

When we met, Margaret said Grampy loved hanging out with the people staying in the home.

I pressed her for any advice he may have dispensed at that time.

"Mostly, he listened," she said.

She said he only really had one piece of advice: show up to AA meetings.

I had hoped for something more specific, maybe more philosophical, but I filed that away and went to meet Greg.

Grampy met Greg soon after Greg first got sober.

Thirteen months later, Greg fell off the wagon and somehow landed at the local Legion.

Grampy showed up and hauled him out of there. Greg said Grampy had a look in his eye that told him not to fight.

Grampy put him in the back of his truck and drove him to a meeting; then he drove him to detox.

Greg said it was one of the first times anyone had ever shown him unconditional love. For him, it was a defining moment.

Greg has been alcohol-free ever since more than 30 years.

I wanted to know: what was it about Grampy's intervention that was so compelling that Greg quit drinking for good?

"It was the meetings," Greg said. "Just go to the meetings."

Working the program was the most important thing to my grandfather.

I'm not sure what I was hoping for, advice-wise, but it wasn't that.

Lord, if there's one thing I didn't want to do, it was AA. To me, AA meant cold black coffee and despair, in a church basement.

In my early days of sobriety, my therapist suggested I try it.

I looked up meetings in Montreal. My work schedule is weird and none of them were convenient. Once, I walked around the block near a meeting location, willing myself to go inside, but I never did.

I just felt I didn't need it. I quit by myself, white-knuckling my way through it. Honestly, I've never been much of a joiner.

It may have been a case of cognitive dissonance, but I told myself I had a bit of a drinking problem, but I wasn't a problem drinker. I didn't want it to become my identity.

But now I had no choice. I was on the Island, with the sole purpose of seeking out and then applying my grandfather's wisdom. I had to attend a meeting.

I still didn't want to, at all. So I called my buddy Dave to discuss.

"It's almost so obvious that it's unglamorous," Dave said.

Yeah. That's exactly it.

"You sought lessons from your grandpa expecting it was going to be X and it ended up being seven," he said. "He was like, 'No man, go to the meetings. There's some community that can help you out.'"

As usual, Dave was right.

This whole journey was inspired by my want or need to connect with my grandfather on this thing we had in common sobriety.

His ghost dragged me across the country so I could find some community and walk this road with some support.

The obviousness of the whole ordeal smacked me in the face. Grampy came through for me. Of course what I needed was community, and AA was it.

Now all that remained was to attend a meeting.

The first two attempts were a wash. There were a couple of brutal snowstorms. I waded through a metre of snow, knocked on the church door and walked away when I found it locked.

When I was 20 metres away, a nun poked her head out the door and yelled "YOU LOOKING FOR ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS?"

"Jeez," I thought. "Cool it lady, now all of Charlottetown knows."

I attended and introduced myself as an alcoholic. It was one of those surreal life experiences you don't ever really think will happen to you when you're sketching out your five-year plan.

The meeting was good. People were nice. A woman roughly my age followed me out and welcomed me, giving me the low-down on which meetings were the best and letting me know she was around if ever I wanted to talk to somebody.

Leaving the meeting, I wondered if I'd been dishonest with myself about the extent of my problem. Maybe it was worse than I thought. Maybe I was still a "horsey" who had quit drinking through sheer will but never dealt with the underlying reasons for why I drank in the first place.

I resolved to attend a few more meetings and see if it stuck. To date, my attendance has been spotty because life is bouncing me around to different provinces and countries.

I will, eventually, go back.

My grandmother told me that near the end of his life, Grampy worried his alcoholism would be passed down through the family. To some extent, that has proven true.

But that's not his legacy.

Through his quiet patience and unconditional love, he taught us that life is easier and better when you work through it with others.

He taught us that letting people into your life requires courage, but it will pay back dividends.

Something my grandfather understood better than most is that we are put on this planet to relate to and serve others.

And if I take anything from this experience, it will be that.

Kate McKenna is a Montreal-based journalist and author. She's been reporting for CBC News for the last six years and has covered major stories including the Quebec City mosque shooting, allegations of sexual misconduct at Concordia University and the 2019 federal election. Her work has aired on the BBC, NPR and CNN. Kate tries to tell complex stories with simplicity and humanity.

This documentary was produced and edited with Kent Hoffmanand made through theDoc Mentorship Program.

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How my Grampy is helping me stay sober from beyond the grave - CBC.ca

The following is an excerpt from Branko Marcetics forthcoming bookYesterdays Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. You can noworder a copy of this important new bookdirect fromJacobin for only $10, with free shipping.

They are not dealing with George McGovern. They are dealing with Joe Biden and Bill Clinton.

Joe Biden on the GOP and the issue of crime, 1994.

By 1993, for all intents and purposes, Joe Biden had won. Sure, his 1987 exit from the presidential campaign trail had been humiliating. But he had survived a near-death experience, returned to the Senate with renewed purpose, been sent back to Congress for another six years by the people of Delaware, and, with three terms and a prestigious committee chairmanship under his belt, was now one of the Democratic Partys most influential and powerful lawmakers.

Whats more, the party had moved exactly where he had been urging it to go. In 1992, Democrats nominated Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to be their presidential nominee, a business-friendly Southern Democrat who antagonized the partys left wing, held conservative stances on criminal justice and the role of the government, and connected with those same conservative, white, Reagan-backing voters who Biden was convinced needed to be the beating heart of the party.

Since 1989, Clinton had been the chairman of the DLC, the conservative, Southern-dominated group determined to push the party rightward for which Biden had spent 1986 touring the country. Clinton had taken away many of the same lessons from his political career that Biden had from his. After becoming the countrys youngest governor in 1978 and challenging the states major industries, he had been unceremoniously tossed out of office two years later. He roared back in 1982, winning reelection and governing as a very different kind of politician one far more accommodating to business interests and conservative views. He won the 1992 election not just by tapping into his preternatural charisma and empathy but by showing he could be just as ruthless and right wing as any Republican: he publicly scolded Jesse Jackson by misconstruing the words of an African American rapper attending his Rainbow Coalition convention as racist, and he flew home from the campaign trail to oversee the execution of a lobotomized inmate.

Clintons guiding light was the philosophy of triangulation, otherwise known as the Third Way. Instead of going left or right, the theory went, Clinton would tread a path somewhere down the middle, much as Biden had spent his years in the Senate doing, voting largely as a Democrat but abandoning the party or taking conservative stances on key, consequential issues. In practice, this meant that Clinton and Biden, together with a cowed Democratic Party reeling after three consecutive presidential election losses, would spent the next eight years working with newly energized congressional Republicans to continue what Reagan had started: shrinking the size of government, rolling back protections for civil rights and liberties, cutting social programs and key regulations, and generally undoing the progress made under the New Deal and Great Society. He made clear he represents a new generation of leadership and government alone cant do it, and that is a new message from a Democrat, Biden said of Clinton as he prepared to take the oath.

The result was devastating for the US working class, as hundreds of thousands of Americans saw their jobs disappear, with only an increasingly frayed social safety net to fall back on. The march toward a repressive prison state sped up, while the gap between the rich and poor inflated. As these trends became more extreme, an ever-larger share of the voting public would conclude there was little point in taking part in the political system anymore.

The Reagan years may have been over, but their politics lived on. Biden, who like Reagan had spent the 1980s obsessed with federal deficits and cutting spending, would spend the next decade going even further in this direction.

Biden emerged from his 1990 reelection slightly bruised by a scandal that showed yet again the peril of his and the rest of the partys increasing reliance on big-money donors. During his earlier presidential run, Biden had forged a friendship with David L. Paul, a Florida-based savings-and-loan executive and major Democratic fundraiser known to lend his private jet to politicians. Paul, his family, and his companys foundation had given generously to Biden, a fact seized on by his Republican opponent in the wake of the ongoing savings-and-loan crisis and after CenTrust, the bank Paul founded, which regulators charged he had used as his own piggy bank, collapsed, costing taxpayers more than $1 billion. It would later come out that, after being personally lobbied by Paul, Biden had successfully weakened the criminal penalties for bank fraud proposed in a pending bill to reform the sector; he had tried and failed to recruit Strom Thurmond for the effort.

Whether it really was corruption wasnt clear: Paul had lobbied Biden to weaken a different part of the bill, Bidens chief of staff said, and the penalty reductions had actually been requested by smaller thrifts and banks. But Bidens financial and personal connections toa man of, in one regulators words, insatiable vanity and greed who worked in an industry Biden was meant to be keeping in check wasnt a good look. It was a taste of what was to come.

Having locked down reelection, Biden, together with the DLC and other centrists, served as something of an ideological policeforce to keep an eye on Clinton, who they feared would govern as a New Deal Democrat. Though he had built a career kowtowing to right-wing forces, Clinton at heart still fancied himself one of Roosevelts heirs, bitterly complaining to Democrats in 1993 that were Eisenhower Republicans standing for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isnt that great?

After the election, Biden warned Clinton not to let his administration fall under the sway of liberals, singling out Bernard Nussbaum, the man who would become Clintons general counsel, for particular attention never mind that Nussbaum was a wealthy corporate lawyer. When a right-wing firestorm erupted over Clintons nomination of civil rights lawyer Lani Guinier to head the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division, partly as payback for the Thomas hearings, Biden joined the pile-on about her past academic writings, leading Clinton to cut her loose. His patience with liberal activists worn out by the previous decades judicial battles, Biden lashed out at the idiotic groups out there, like the XYZ Group for American Values, or the QSY Group to Save All the Women in the World.

Biden wasnt responsible for Clintons failure to reform US health care, but his lack of enthusiasm for the task didnt help. While behind the scenes, independent Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders who had parlayed his success in Burlington into a successful congressional campaign tried pushing Clinton to pursue a single-payer health care system, White House officials and party leaders privately viewed Biden as noncommittal and someone who would take extra effort to be won over to even Clintons piecemeal reforms.

Internal documents noted Bidens reservations about Clintons plan, his private warnings not to load up any health care bill with too many bells and whistles, and his concerns that the benefit package may be too generous and would negatively impact small businesses. He has been one of the few Democratic members who have declined to sign Senator Woffords universal coverage letter, read one memo written for First Lady Hillary Clinton, then leading the health care effort, adding that Biden had previously said he opposed single-payer. Biden himself later boasted that he had refused to sign on to Clintons plan even after being beckoned to the White House.

As in the case of the CenTrust scandal during his 1990 reelection campaign, Bidens position may have been driven by powerful interests back home. One White House memo noted that DuPont, which Biden privately said controlled the Delaware Chamber of Commerce, would be key in his decision. Yet the company was advocating for national health insurance at the time. Maybe more key was the over $150,000 that Biden had got from health insurers over fifteen years. In any case, the reform failed, sunk by the White Houses own mismanagement.

While running full tilt away from anything hinting at liberalism, Biden gave Clinton full-throated backing as he continued Reagans legacy. He proposed early on to have business experts advise Congress on how to streamline government agencies and endorsed Clintons plan to lay off 252,000 federal workers. Putting the customer first will ensure that taxpayers get the service they deserve, he said, echoing the language of the era that cast government as a business and the public as its patrons.

Ultimately, in Clinton, Biden finally found a Democratic standard-bearer as passionate about attacking the deficit as he was. Despite polling showing the public was vastly more interested in job creation, Clinton upset his political advisers by kicking off his presidency with a deficit-cutting budget that slightly raised taxes on the very wealthiest while taking a big chunk out of government spending through federal layoffs and entitlement cuts. Clinton was fully conscious that this would block the ambitious social agenda he had actually campaigned on. The measure, which passed with only Democratic votes in the Senate, began a years-long campaign of deficit-cutting that culminated in the first balanced budget in decades. While universally lauded in media and political circles, the true significance of the balanced budget lay in further rolling back the New Deal. By the end of Clintons two terms, federal spending fell to its lowest level since 1966, and the federal workforce accounted for the smallest percentage of overall employment since before Roosevelt took office.

Biden cheered him on all the way. He told a constituent that Clintons first budget was our best chance for deficit reduction and introduced his own six-year plan for balancing the budget. Even as Clinton accepted painful spending cuts dictated by the GOP, Biden proclaimed that we are approaching an historic moment and that Americans would enjoy real benefits from a balanced budget.

Which Americans though? Back home in Delaware, where federal money made up a large chunk of the state budget, Bidens constituents felt the sting. The states Democratic governor Tom Carper warned in 1996 that his government would have to tighten its belt as a result, with a variety of programs, including scholarships, services for the elderly and disabled, drug and alcohol prevention, and emergency relief shelters, drastically cut back or wiped out, even as the number of homeless kids in Delaware had tripled over the previous decade. Delawareans pled with the states finance committee to save vital programs on which they relied. While Biden continued earning top ratings from environmental groups, the cuts he supported imperiled Delawares rivers and beaches and weakened the states environmental programs and federal Environmental Protection Agency enforcement.

Bidens zeal for cutting government broughtpreviously untouchable targets into his crosshairs. He had cruised to reelection in 1990 through his tried-and-true playbook of outraising and out-Republicaning a mediocre opponent. His proposals included a freeze [on] all government spending until we get it in order, which would require the straight-up courage to cut everything even Medicare and Social Security.

This is largely how it was for the rest of the decade. Biden repeatedly spoke out against GOP attempts to cut the big three Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security and commended Clinton by the end of his presidency for making the protection of Social Security and Medicare our highest domestic priority. Yet he also insisted that something had to be done about Medicare, pushing fraud prevention as a way to soften any future cuts, and he gave a tacit endorsement to a Medicaid reform plan put out by the National Governors Association in 1996 that would have given states discretion to deny benefits. On Social Security, he suggested raising the retirement age by one year and voted to repeal an earlier increase in benefits. This was in sharp contrast to his treatment of business: Biden had been first out of the gate to pressure Clinton to sign a bill in 1993 creating an antitrust exclusion protecting certain ventures from high damage awards.

Well never know whether Biden would have defended these programs or folded to right-wing pressure to cut them: Clintons plan to close out his presidency by reforming entitlements was derailed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But Bidens willingness to even rhetorically put these popular programs on the chopping block foreshadowed a new, more strident phrase of his antipathy to government spending.

This antipathy found its most radical expression in the form of the balanced budget constitutional amendment, which Biden had viewed as laughable and dangerous in previous decades. Now he was warming up to it. Its opponents viewed it with alarm: making a balanced federal budget a constitutional requirement would not only hamstring the government during times of emergency but require even during economic downturns, when most economists advised more government spending and when spending cuts had historically plunged countries into even greater misery the government to sharply raise taxes or, more likely, make drastic cuts to core, often life-saving programs.

To the relief of progressives and hundreds of economists, the amendment never passed under Clinton. But with the help of a wavering Biden, it came perilously close.

With the backing of its chairman, the Judiciary Committee started the decade by endorsing the amendment two years in a row. A 1991 report Biden issued warned that the spree of deficit spending by our federal government must be curbed. All the while he acknowledged it would be a disaster. This is a lousy amendment, he said in 1991. Its not a good idea except I cant think of any other idea except maintaining the status quo. And the status quo stinks. Biden was, he explained, prepared to take what I consider radical medicine to tackle deficits.

Had the constitutional amendment process been less onerous, the balanced budget amendment may well have passed several times in the mid-1990s. In 1994, Biden stayed undecided until the eleventh hour, when he and several other Democrats, including future presidential nominee John Kerry and future Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, came out against the amendment, causing it to fall four votes short of the sixty-seven needed to pass. Biden instead voted for a doomed alternative offered by Reid that insulated Social Security and construction projects from any painful cuts.

That sweetener was gone from the version that made it to the Senate floor the start of the following year, under a very different Congress and in a distinctly new political landscape. In between, the United States had experienced something of a political revolution, as a cadre of right-wing radicals, fed up with what they saw as the GOPs timidity and feebleness, took over the House, leaving both chambers of Congress in the Republicans hands for the first time in forty years. In many ways, this was a more significant victory for the conservative movement than Reagans had been in 1980. After all, it was Congress that shaped and passed legislation, and Reagans vision had been largely stifled by Democratic control of the House throughout his presidency.

The George Washington of this victory was Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, who fancied himself the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times and called for large-scale, radical change. It was his Contract with America, a ten-point legislative plan that aimed to finish what Reagan had started, that victorious Republicans had signed and campaigned on. A balanced budget amendment was one of its key planks.

With the political calculus now altered, the Clinton administration toned down its opposition to the amendment. Even as Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget, warned that the amendment would exaggerate the boom-bust cycle, engineer worse recessions, and make for bad economic policy and bad constitutional policy, the White House made clear that it had lost the appetite to fight. Gingrich left a meeting with Clinton with the impression that he was not going to engage in an aggressive campaign against the measure.

Gingrichs confidence was likely rooted in the fact that many Democrats had become devoted converts. The 1995 version of the amendment, which required the prohibitively high threshold of three-fifths of both chambers of Congress to either raise the debt limit or pass a nonbalanced budget, was sponsored and championed by Illinoiss Paul Simon, one of the Senates stalwart liberals, and backed by prominent Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and, of course, Biden.

Something is going to come bouncing out of here and sent to the states [to be ratified], Biden said. The amendment had real flaws, he repeated, but vowed to back it because we need something. After several Democratic attempts to make it more forgiving failed, Biden and the rest of the committee, on a 153 vote, once more sent the amendment to the Senate.

Some of us tried to make this a better proposal, he said as he prepared to vote for it. But he was faced with a choice of an imperfect amendment or continued spending, and he had sufficient confidence in our citizens and in our political institutions that we will confront any challenges from its many flaws.

What those flaws and imperfections would mean in practice was stark. To make the spending cuts a balanced budget demanded, countless programs that Americans relied on would have to be cut or eliminated: low-income housing, heating assistance, federally funded school lunches, mass transit, even the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded hundreds of TV and radio stations around the country, not to mention the big three entitlement programs. It would be a disaster for working people, for elderly people, for low-income people, Bernie Sanders had warned.

In the end, a sufficient number of Democrats were spooked by the threat posed to Social Security and other programs to defeat the amendment, including Daschle and even Californias conservative senator Dianne Feinstein, both of whom had had been on board with the idea in 1994. But the decisions of Biden and two other Democratsto switch their votes in favor of the amendment brought it a mere two votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed for passage.

Bidens support became even more determined as a result of his 1996 reelection contest. Once more, Biden faced an opponent who sought to paint him as an overly liberal flip-flopper. But businessman Ray Clatworthy was not only considered too far right by the Republican he had beaten in the primary; he was the first rival in Bidens career who could match him in fundraising. Despite political experts stressing his seat was one of the countrys safest borne out by his eventual 22-point margin of victory Biden, per usual, moved right. While campaigning for reelection, he became one of just twelve Democrats to side with a near-unanimous GOP to again bring the balanced budget amendment within two votes of passage.

Even after his reelection, Biden stayed the course. This time, with Clintons second term in the bag, the measure faced stronger Democratic opposition. As the ground was readied for yet another vote in 1997, the White House lobbied key Democrats to reject the balanced budget amendment, and Clinton trashed it in his State of the Union speech, calling it unnecessary and unwise and warning that it could cripple our country in time of economic crisis. Biden, for his part, played unconvincingly coy. His spokesman told the press Biden would use his vote as leverage to make improvements to the measure, such as exempting Social Security but then quickly added that Biden would vote for it no matter what, undermining any leverage he might have had.

Whatever economic motivation Biden may have had to support the amendment was undercut when more than one thousand economists, including eleven Nobel Prize winners, signed a letter pleading with Congress not to adopt it. One economist, Nobel laureate James Tobin, cautioned it would put the federal government into a fiscal straitjacket during economic crises; another compared its insistence on keeping spending strictly below revenue to telling the Atlantic Ocean not to cross a line in the sand.

Despite dithering in the days leading up to the vote, Biden voted for the third straight year to approve the amendment that even he along with just about everyone outside of antigovernment, right-wing circles, including his local newspaper had warned would bring economic catastrophe. He joined all fifty-five of the Senates Republicans and just ten other Democrats. The amendment failed by just one vote. Against Bidens best efforts, disaster had been averted.

But if the American working class narrowly avoided the economic calamity of a balanced budget amendment, the same could not be said for a host of other measures passed by Biden and the Democratic Party during the 1990s.

The first came in 1991, as President George H W. Bush began working on what would come to be the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Despite a decades-long political career heavily underwritten by organized labor, Biden became one of a small group of Democratic turncoats that gave Bush fast track authority to negotiate the deal. AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland bitterly noted his disenchantment that on a great issue that affects the livelihood and survival of our constituents, the Democrats had deserted labor.

NAFTA would ultimately be ratified under Clinton, who during his campaign had done a careful balancing act, backing the agreement to prove he could stand up to unions but pledging to improve it once in power. The improvements Clinton secured did little to assuage labors fears, and Democrats like Biden were forced into a similar balancing act. Biden agonized over the decision, claiming in September 1993 that if I had to vote today, I would vote no, but also insisting he thought labors theory that NAFTA would lead to an exodus of jobs to Mexico was flawed.

He stayed undecided until the very day of the vote two months later, ultimately charting a course that was vintage Biden. In his floor speech, he launched into a spirited attack on critics of unions: How dare we tell these people not to worry? he shouted. If you saw your future decimated, you would have every reason to be frightened. This is not a false fear. He then dismissed the arguments on both sides of the issue as vastly overblown, claiming labor only opposed NAFTA because they have nothing else to criticize. After only briefly explaining his support, he declared the agreement the best deal we are going to get now. With his vote and that of twenty-six other Democrats, NAFTA passed the Senate.

Biden turned out to be grievously wrong. The deal not only caused the loss of nearly 700,000 US jobs, many of them in the countrys manufacturing centers, but it further weakened the power of unions. It became a gift to unscrupulous businesses who used the threat of offshoring jobs to Mexico in some cases, purposefully loading equipment into trucks headed south of the border in full view of disgruntled workers to push employees into accepting worse wages, hours, and benefits, and to undermine unions bargaining power. As Sanders had warned during the House debate on NAFTA, it was indeed a bad deal for American workers. Politically, the consequences would be just as grievous, as the loss of power for unions pushed the Democratic Party further into the arms of corporate donors, and Democrats saw an exodus of blue-collar support over the betrayal, creating a future opening for the party to be outflanked.

Next came the euphemistically named welfare reform, what Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott later termed the Holy Grail of [the GOPs] legislative master plan. Conservatives had fantasized about dismantling the welfare system for decades. Reagan had memorably lobbed verbal broadsides at it during his 1976 presidential run, conjuring racialized images of a woman in Chicago scamming tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars and a strapping young buck using government handouts to buy a T-bone steak. Such deeply rooted caricatures had little relation to reality in fact, the welfare queen stereotype was based on a career con woman with a much more complicated personal history but they were potent images that seemed to confirm what many white Americans uncharitably suspected. More importantly, they were tied up with a centuries-old stereotype of African Americans as lazy and a post-1960s one of the poor as black and, as a result, lacking moral character.

Welfare had never been a big focus of Bidens. He had gestured at vaguely doing something about it during his first campaign, but other liberal golden calves had always taken priority for him. By the late 1980s, however, he started to echo long-standing right-wing attacks on the system. We are all too familiar with the stories of welfare mothers driving luxury cars and leading lifestyles that mirror the rich and famous, he wrote in 1988. Whether they are exaggerated or not, these stories underlie a broad social concern that the welfare system has broken down that it only parcels out welfare checks and does nothing to help the poor find productive jobs.

The legislation Biden was writing about, the Family Support Act, was a somewhat progressive measure. It strengthened the collection of child support, forced states to set up education, training, and job programs for people on welfare, and expanded childcare and Medicaid for families going from welfare to work. But by penalizing parents who either didnt take part in those programs or turned down any job offer, it chipped away at the welfare system in ways that would only intensify.

There are some things, dammit, we have to change on, he told a group of Iowa Democrats in 1992. I dont know of a single person who says that welfare, the way it is, we like it. Biden kept using this language throughout the 1990s. He claimed that too many welfare recipients spend far too long on welfare and do far too little in exchange for their benefits, called for Congress to require all welfare recipients to sign a contract in which they agree to work in exchange for their benefits, and insisted they should have a limit of just six months to find a job before they lost their benefits.

By 1995, all the pieces to make this happen were in place. A radically right-wing, Republican-controlled Congress had just swept to power on the back of a promise to take on welfare. The Democrats were under the thrall of the DLC, which put welfare reform at the center of its policy goals. The president had promised to shrink the size of government and campaigned on ending welfare as we know it, and he had just hired a political operative whose grand strategy was to fast-forward the Gingrich agenda.

This was an agenda that, at least publicly, horrified Biden. He had thought about retiring, he told the 250-strong crowd at the annual Sussex County Democrats spring dinner in 1995, but the GOP takeover of Congress had changed his mind. Its going over my dead political body that they succeed, he said, drawing the nights only moment of spontaneous, passionate applause. Newt Gingrich has energized Joe Biden. Im looking forward to beating the hell out of the Republicans.

The core of the Republicans vision of reform involved taking responsibility for welfare out of the hands of the federal government and putting it in the hands of the states in the form of block grants, funding packages they would be given complete discretion over. Biden understood some of the potential issues with this approach; he had attacked Reagans 1982 proposal to turn over social and economic programs and the taxes behind them to the states, charging that the states, because of their own budget problems, are not going to fund these programs. Nevertheless, in September 1995, the newly energized Biden voted with fifty-two Republicans and thirty-four other Democrats to make the radical welfare overhauls that Gingrich had made the cornerstone of the Republican agenda. Generations have made welfare their way of life, he wrote in the Wilmington News Journal. This must end. It is simply unacceptable to me and most hard-working Americans.

The Senates overwhelming passage of this measure sparked three months of pressure by progressive Democrats and activist groups to discourage Clintons support for it. Come December, when the House and Senate versions were reconciled into what Democrats decried as far too cruel and punishing to children, all but one Senate Democrat voted against the final version, which Clinton vetoed. But Democrats were not going to quit, Daschle pledged in the votes aftermath, and would continue to try to present alternatives.

Far from beating the hell out of Republicans, what ultimately passed in 1996 was a poster child for the bipartisanship Washington so often celebrates. As Bidens fellow Delawarean in the House, Republican Michael Castle, teamed up with a Democrat to put forward a version of welfare reform supported by Clinton, Biden linked arms with another Republican, Arlen Specter, to introduce an identical version in the Senate. Castle thanked the two senators for lend[ing] credibility to our proposal. Delaware governor Carper (who is today a senator) said the proposal demonstrates that Democrats and Republicans can work together in the Congress.

For his part, Biden declared, It is time to say we do not care who gets credit for reforming welfare. It is time to just do it in a bipartisan fashion for the sake of the American people and for the sake of the people on welfare.

The Senate ultimately rejected Biden and Specters bill for one that William Roth was pushing. But as Roth explained, Congress wasnt acting in the spirit of partisan competition. Were all working toward the same goals, he said. What has been lost in the shuffle and shouting of the last 10 months is that there is a great deal of common ground on welfare reform, affirmed Biden. When it came to a vote, six of the seven Democrats up for reelection that year, including Biden, helped send the bill to Clintons desk with large bipartisan majorities even as angry protesters stormed the halls of Congress.

Clinton signed the bill on August 22, 1996, in the White House Rose Garden, surrounded by a bipartisan gaggle of delighted lawmakers. Lillie Harden, a black former welfare recipient from Clintons hometown of Little Rock used by the bills proponents as a living, breathing argument for the supposedly debilitating effects of welfare, stood by Clintons side. Biden, who seven months earlier had said the Rush Limbaughs who got elected had got his juices going and strengthened his resolve to stay in Congress, was one of the small number of elected officials confirmed to attend.

But as the presence of protesters suggested, not everyone was happy. Ted Kennedy said that calling the measure reform is no more accurate than to call the demolition of a house remodeling. Three of Clintons assistant secretaries at the Department of Health and Human Services resigned in protest. Bernie Sanderswould term the law the grand slam of scapegoating legislation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who had jumpstarted Lyndon Johnsons war on poverty, called welfare reform ruinous and grotesque, warning it would throw between one million and five million children into poverty.

The predictions were largely accurate. The numbers of Americans living in deep poverty climbed to well over two million by 2005, with single-parent families with kids hit the hardest. Twenty years on, the number of households living on less than $2 a day had doubled. State governments, increasingly controlled by Republicans and free to do what they wanted with welfare funding, drew on those block grants to plug their own budget deficits while virtually eliminating the welfare programs they so despised. Across the West and South, the welfare safety net virtually disappeared. In Bidens home state, the bills freezing of welfare funding at 1994 levels kneecapped the Delaware governments welfare policy of putting more money into health care, day care, and job training. Meanwhile, Lillie Harden, who had had a stroke in 2002, died twelve years later at the age of fifty-nine, unable to get on Medicaid she had been while on welfare. Asked about the low-wage work shed taken up that supposedly marked her successful transition from welfare dependency, she said: It didnt pay off in the end.

The push for welfare reform had revealed a fundamental truth of US politics: even as partisan gridlock and dysfunction began to take hold of the US political system during the 1990s, the American ruling class was more than capable of coming together to get things done as long as it flattered the interests of the countrys most powerful and its victims were the working class. Just as with NAFTA, Biden and the Democrats support for all this would in the long run further sever their link to the partys working-class base and swell the ranks of the disenchanted and politically disengaged.

At the same time Biden was helping conservatives continue their assault on the American working class, he was going to bat for Delawares corporate sector.

Over the course of the previous decades, Delaware had transformed into a bankruptcy haven, one whose lenient bankruptcy courts, known for hustling cases through at twice the speed of the rest of the country and favoring bankrupted companies over creditors, helped attract a rush of major corporations or at least the legal papers incorporating them. Thanks to this and a package of corporate-friendly state banking laws passed in 1981, more than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies were incorporated in the state by the end of the 1990s, though you would be hard-pressed to find any of those companies stores or offices in Delaware. Bankruptcy was big business: the year before, 86 percent of bankruptcy filings by companies with $190 million or more in assets had been in the state, pumping money into local law firms and the surrounding economy. But the beneficiaries were chiefly suburbanites who commuted into Wilmington to occupy the citys proliferating white-collar jobs.

The rest of the country had taken notice. By 1998, the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, a panel of judges, lawyers, and professors formed in 1994, recommended a proposal given the moniker The Delaware Killer in legal circles to bar companies that didnt physically operate in states where they were incorporated to file for bankruptcy there.

Biden was outraged. I cannot comprehend what purpose would be served by diverting cases from a court with such an accomplished record, he said, vowing to oppose the measure when it came to the Judiciary Committee. His and the rest of the Delaware delegations outrage meant the measure never made it into a bill. It looks like Delaware has won the first round, Bidens state director said. Calling it a prestige thing for the state, Biden threatened one year later to filibuster a bill that tried to do the same; its author admitted defeat over Bidens intensity on the issue.

But when it came to easing the burden of bankruptcy on working Americans, Bidens intensity went the other way. As the decade came to a close, a coalition of banks and credit card companies began pushing a bill described by the Associated Press as the most far-reaching overhaul of the nations bankruptcy laws in twenty years. With personal bankruptcies rising 300 percent since 1980 to hit an all-time high of 1.4 million eighteen years later many of them due to credit card debt that banks were exacerbating by luring customers with high spending limits the industry-favored legislation aimed to make it harder for ordinary Americans to file for bankruptcy. Biden swiftly became one of its champions.

The episode was a classic case of a politician protecting a local industry. Delaware at the time was home to no less than ten credit card banks employing 20,000 people, including MBNA, the second largest in the country. But there was more to it than this. MBNA, which complained it lost $1 billion a year under the existing bankruptcy regime, was by far the largest campaign contributor to all three of Delawares members of Congress. By 1999, Biden had received $67,100 from its officials since 1991, less than his two colleagues but enough to earn him the label of the senator from MBNA. The connections went deeper than donations, too. Biden had sold his house for twice its value to one of those donors, MBNAs chief marketing officer, and his son Hunter had been hired straight out of law school in 1996 as a lobbyist for the company, zipping up the ranks to become senior vice president two years later.

Biden backed the bill, introducing an identical version of what had passed the House, even as consumer groups lined up against it and Democratic lawmakers warned it would hurt families and children. Democrats attempted to derail it, while a Harvard professor named Elizabeth Warren personally lobbied First Lady Hillary Clinton to get her husband to veto it. The pushback succeeded, and the threat of Clintons veto sunk the bill.

Or at least it did for a time. The lending industry continued pushing the overhaul well into the new millennium, this time under an industry-friendly Republican president and with Biden still its loyal soldier. He would vote again and again with Republicans to advance the legislation while taking tens of thousands of dollars more from MBNA, which by this point was paying Hunter, who had left the company in 2001 to become a lobbyist, a monthly consulting fee.

Simply put, too many people are finding it too easy to walk away from their legitimate obligations by filing for bankruptcy, Biden said, explaining his support for the bill. Warren, in a 2002 New York Times op-ed calling the legislation a quiet attack on women, charged that Biden had agreed to vote with Republicans on almost all the issues that were holding up the bill. The two would finally meet face to face three years later at a Judiciary Committee meeting, where Biden accused her of making a mildly demagogic argument and insisted her real problem was with interest rates, not bankruptcy.

But if its not going to fix that problem, you cant take away the last shred of protection for these families, Warren shot back. I got it, okay, Biden replied, chuckling. Youre very good, professor.

Biden and the lending industry won; he and seventeen other Democrats voted with yet another lockstep Republican majority for the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law on April 20, 2005. It was another disaster for the American working class: even as households remained buried under mountains of debt, fewer filed for bankruptcy, deterred by the bureaucratic hoops and higher costs ushered in by the law. Credit card fees, interest rates, and prices, all of which the bills proponents swore would drop once the law went into action, kept on climbing, bringing record profits to the industry on the order of many billions more a year. The law swiftly came to be hated by a cross-section of bankruptcy judges, furious at having to dismiss cases where the filers didnt know they were required to take credit counseling classes first. Unquestionably, this is the most poorly written piece of legislation that I or anyone else has ever seen, said one. Another accused Congress in a written opinion of working with the credit industry to make more money off the backs of consumers in this country. Of course, all of this affected Hispanic and black families the most; they were two and three times more likely to file for bankruptcy as white families, respectively.

All this had happened in no small part through Bidens efforts. He provided cover to other Democrats to do what the credit industry was urging them to do, Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America, would later recall, saying Biden had provided a veneer of bipartisanship that helped the industry sway other Democrats. Warren remembered it similarly. The Senate was evenly split between the two parties, but one of the bills lead sponsors was Democratic powerhouse Joe Biden, and right behind him were plenty of other Democrats offering to help, she charged in 2014.

This was a pattern with Biden. At various times, he voted against a measure banning double charging for ATM transactions, an amendment strengthening protections for bankrupt Americans who had large medical debts or served in the military, a provision to shift responsibility from debtors to the predatory lenders who had drove them into bankruptcy, and a requirement that credit card companies warn consumers of the consequences of making only minimum payments. It is little wonder that Warren, coming off her own political conversion from being a Republican, would view Biden as everything wrong with the Democratic Party.

But even all this paled in significance compared to a virtually ignored vote Biden cast at the close of the 1990s. After Citigroup was formed in 1998 out of a merger that was, strictly speaking, illegal, Robert Rubin Clintons former Treasury secretary who, unbeknownst to anyone, was in talks for an executive position at the new bank worked his influence in concert with Citi lobbyists and Clintons banker-friendly advisers to retroactively legalize its creation. They did so through a bill repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking passed to prevent another epochal crash. Voting against it in the House, Bernie Sanders warned it would lead to more mega-mergers and the further concentration of economic power in this country. Biden, once more with a unanimous GOP and a large contingent of Democrats behind him, voted to make it law.

I think we will look back in ten years time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said after the vote. That which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010.

Just as in the 1980s, there was one aspect of the federal government and its purse strings where Bidens budget-cutting obsession not only didnt apply but went in the opposite direction: crime and drugs.

The end of that decade set the pattern for what followed. In September 1989, President Bush had delivered a speech outlining his National Drug Control Strategy, calling for harsher punishments for drug dealers, nearly $1.5 billion toward drug-related law enforcement, and more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors at every level throughout the country. At the time, the right-wing Heritage Foundation gushed that this constituted the largest increase in resources for law enforcement in the nations history. Decades on, its remembered as a key moment in the escalation of the war on drugs, with Bush putting forward an expansive bill based on the strategy the following year.

But for Biden, it was a half-measure. Quite frankly, the Presidents plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand, Biden said in a televised response to Bushs speech. In a nutshell, the Presidents plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.

Just as Biden spent the 1980s chiding Reagan for being insufficiently pitiless on crime, he would spend the 1990s leading the Democratic Party in an ongoing contest of one-upmanship against the GOP on the issue. The stakes were high. Bush had won the presidency in 1988 by successfully tarring Michael Dukakis, his centrist Democratic opponent, as a wimpy liberal who put law-abiding Americans in harms way by being too soft on criminals. Neither Biden nor the rest of the party would let themselves be outflanked on the issue again.

Partisan wrangling over tough-on-crime legislation occupied most of Bidens time and energy for the first half of the 1990s. Biden and the Democrats tried again and again to pass a major, extreme new crime bill, eager to prove to the voting public they could be just as harsh and unforgiving to criminals as the GOP, if not more so. In 1991, Biden boasted that his much bigger version of the crime bill included the death penalty for no less than fifty-one offenses five more than Bushs bill. What do we have to do, put half the country behind bars? Bernie Sanders said on the House floor.

A wag in the newspaper recently wrote something to the effect that Biden has made it a death penalty offense for everything expect jaywalking, Biden joked.

These efforts were roundly criticized at the time. The NAACP and other groups lobbied against the bill. In a letter addressed to senators just a few days before the vote, three ACLU lawyers called the legislation far worse from a civil liberties perspective than any that has ever been considered by the Senate. Lawyers and federal judges including the latters official policy-making body warned the law would overwhelm the judicial system and widen its already broad inequality. As the different versions made their way to Bushs desk, the Washington Post condemned them as rotten and an exercise not so much to combat crime as to convince the public that legislators are tough on criminals.

Occasionally Biden would oppose a particularly extreme Republican measure, though in typical style, only after accepting the premise and watering it down somewhat. So when Republicans tried to get rid of the exclusionary rule that is, allow the use of illegally seized evidence in court as long as it was illegally seized by authorities in good faith Biden argued forcefully against it on the floor, then put forward a proposal that allowed the use of evidence seized in good faith under an improper search warrant. Civil liberties advocates looked on in horror as dubious measure after dubious measure made its way into the bill, while one embarrassed Democratic senator shook his head at the crass political contest over who hated crime the most. No one will deny this is an extremely tough bill, Biden said.

The legislation failed, but only because of the GOP. Its gun control provisions inspired pushback from the National Rifle Association, andRepublican senators subsequently blocked it. When that didnt stick, Bush, afraid of handing the Democrats a win on one of his key issues so close to an election, vetoed it, claiming it was too soft. The process would repeat itself again the following year, when Republicans filibustered that edition because the severe limits it placed on habeas corpus, or prisoners right to appeal, werent severe enough. I just cant believe Republicans would kill a death penalty bill, said Biden.

By 1993, however, things had changed. Bush had been replaced by Clinton, who, facing down a surprisingly ferocious right-wing campaign, had every reason to make his party look tough on crime. Whispering in his ear was adviser Rahm Emanuel, a right-wing fundraiser who assured Clinton it would poll well. Whispering in his other ear was Biden, who privately urged the president to seize control of the issue by upping the ante and demanded rapid enactment of the Biden/Clinton crime bill to maintain crime as a Democratic initiative.

While Clinton gave the effort his full backing, Biden put his famous skills at Senate wheeling and dealing toward passing what was essentially a conservative Republican bill. On television, Biden offered Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm a deal: if Gramm dropped his opposition to the bills gun control measures, Biden would support Gramms mandatory minimum sentences, which at least one newspaper described as vague and almost uniformly bad. This was despite saying that same year: I think weve had all the mandatory minimums that we need. We dont need the ones that we had.

In went Trent Lotts amendment setting up a three strikes provision for violent felonies, something Biden had called a wacko amendment one year earlier but now voted for despite laying out his concerns about it at length. Same with an amendment to make carjacking a federal offense, potentially punishable by death. Even the extreme things Biden voted against, like prosecuting kids as young as thirteen as adults, didnt dampen his enthusiasm to get the bill passed.

There is a mood here that if someone came to the floor and said we should barb-wire the ankles of anyone who jaywalks, I suspect it would pass, he said in November 1993. I think weve gone overboard already.

As he explained on the Senate floor, he was fine with what he called barbed-wire amendments because while they make sense and they are useful, they also didnt mean anything of consequence. The real meat of the bill, he said, was the extra $21 billion being pumped into law enforcement, funded by almost the exact amount of savings ($22 billion) Biden and the rest of Congress had made by approving Clintons earlier slashing of the federal workforce. We are trading, in effect, in this bill, bureaucrats for cops, he explained.

This was far from an outlier in the Clinton years, when the money cut from public housing and welfare budgets was diverted instead toward building the carceral state. As sociologist Loc Wacquant pointed out, slicing $17 billion from public housing while lifting prison funding by $19 billion in these years effectively made the construction of prisons the nations main housing program for the urban poor.

On August 25, the bill cleared the Senate for the final time. Bidens relief was obvious, went one account of the vote. He gave a thumbs-up sign to a reporter in the press gallery. He chatted with his Democratic colleagues. He stayed unusually quiet in the floor debate. And he smiled. Often. Dianne Feinstein kissed him on the floor. Maine senator George Mitchell declared him the one person most responsible for passage of this bill and the most effective legislator in the Senate, bar none. I hope my mom was listening, Biden replied.

The bill whose passage Biden and the rest of the Democrats were celebrating like it was V-E Day wasnt necessarily viewed so favorably outside of Washington. Around the country, newspapers deemed the congressional bidding war that produced it a creation of hysteria, pointing out, for example, that mandatory minimums, which had helped to triple the prison population in fourteen years, were disastrous. Even in Washington the feeling wasnt unanimous, with the Congressional Black Caucus voicing wide-ranging objections. Bidens own words on the Senate floor described the skepticism: that Congress was simply trying to show everybody how tough we are.

Indeed, just as in the previous decade, Biden had actively cultivated this hysteriaeven while crime had in fact sharply dropped since a decade earlier. When the Justice Department released a 1991 report showing a decrease since the previous year, Biden called it flawed and urged no one to believe the epidemic of crime in America has been broken. That same year, he claimed that rural America was suffering a plague of violent crime, drug trafficking and drug abuse, even as the per capita rural crime rate was dwarfed by its urban counterpart. He charged that the whole country had just undergone the worst crime epidemic in its entire history and that demographics namely, a growth in violent teenaged gangs had led to this record carnage. As he steered the bill toward passage, he assured audiences that the victimization of America is greater than the statistics suggest, and that FBI figures showing a fall in crime over 1992 were misleading.

But as Bidens private and public rhetoric made clear and as was widely understood at the time the legislation had always been about securing political cover. As Biden put it on the Senate floor:

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties.The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties.The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.I would like to see the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

I hope the president would maybe take the politics of crime out of the upcoming elections, Biden had said after an earlier version passed under Bush. When the bill finally became law in 1994, he made it the centerpiece of his 1996 reelection campaign, touting it and his support for the balanced budget amendment to the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce, which gave him a standing ovation. When neoconservative commentator Bill Kristol told the GOP leadership to keep attacking Democrats on the crime bill, Biden responded: I would like to be running and have someone use the crime bill against me. I hope to God that Bush attacks us on crime, he said on the eve of the 2000 election. I think we would eat them alive.

Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law on a sunny fall day in September, as Biden proudly looked on and a large, bipartisan crowd of officials applauded. By the time Clinton left office, the United States had the worlds highest incarceration rate, and two decades after the bill passed, the federal prison population had more than doubled. Even the bills few laudable measures like the Violence Against Women Act, which Biden had pushed for intensely and which motivated even critics like Sanders to vote for it, further fed incarceration rates while doing little to bring down domestic violence and even exacerbated it in some cases.

It is little surprise that prominent figures involved in the laws passage would come to regret their roles, including the Clintons and Sanders, who later admitted he was not happy I voted for a terrible bill. Not Biden, though. For more than a decade afterward, he touted what he called the Biden crime law as one of his proudest accomplishments, claiming as late as 2016 it had restored American cities. Perhaps he had a point: evidence suggests that by locking more people away and taking them from the labor pool, mass incarceration artificially depressed official unemployment numbers, letting Clinton and his neoliberal policies take credit for a supposed economic miracle.

But the 1994 law was not the end of Bidens overzealous crime-fighting efforts. For the second half of the decade, he turned his attention to juvenile delinquents.

Warning of a youth arms race, he sponsored a bill in 1996 loosening the rules around imprisonment of minors, letting local jails keep juveniles locked up for three times as long in certain circumstances and relaxing the requirement that they be kept out of sight and sound of adult inmates. For the next three years, he worked with Republicans and Democrats to write and rewrite a massive juvenile crime bill, which at various times included provisions creating special juvenile gun courts, putting $1 billion toward jails for violent juveniles, and building on the 1994 crime bill by generally expanding the size and powers of law enforcement.

What prompted and justified such severe measures was one criminologists racist 1995 prediction that the country was on the brink of an outbreak of superpredators: fearless, remorseless, violent youth criminals who didnt know right from wrong. The prediction seemed to be proven true by a spate of school shootings. The theory, which its author later retracted, would become infamous during the 2016 election, when a twenty-year-old video of Hillary Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, espousing the idea ignited outrage. At the time, though, Biden echoed this language, charging that his 1996 bill would apply very forcefully to that category of children who are predators, whom he placed in a separate category from at-risk kids.

See the article here:
Joe Biden Is the Forrest Gump of the Democratic Party's Rightward Turn - Jacobin magazine

Editors Note: The Rainmakers Group will work alongside the RISMedia team to share pragmatic industry insights into building your personal and professional wealth in 2020. Throughout the year, the Rainmakers Group will cut through the noise to explore and share new business opportunities that will help drive your bottom line to new heights. Just to be perfectly clearthe Rainmaker in 2020 is YOU!

As we are officially roaring into 2020, the pundits have spoken. The good news is that interest rates most likely will remain low, the economy is strong and homeowners need the personal touch of a real estate professional more than ever. The headlines that should be on your radar: the inventory crunch continues; commissions will get squeezed a little harder; iBuyers will continue to make headlines; and the ROI for the latest shiny tech products will be as confusing as ever.

But there are more than 35 trillion reasons why you should be paying attention at the dawn of this decade. That was the combined U.S. housing market value in 2019, and the real estate transaction is at the center of it all.

Throughout the year, this column will share the DNA of the Rainmakersthose top thought leaders who are bringing it in real estate, mortgage, title, insurance, lead generation and data mining. But let me kick things off with a bit of personal history. As a wise man by the name of Confucius said, Study the past if you would define the future.

So, heres the scene: New York City, Oct. 2, 2013. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)the mecca of business institutions. Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford all stood within these hallowed halls to figuratively grab the brass ring and literally hear music to their ears as they rang the fabled bell.

We were staring up in awe at the massive pillars that grace the iconic NYSE on Wall Street. RE/MAX Founder Dave Liniger and a small team were coming off a long road show, ready to launch the companys IPO. This was surely going to be a surreal experience. Something to tell the grandkids. A defining moment of clarity about the pillars of business that the greats had mastered generations before us.

And, lo and behold, it happened! The elusive pillars of success were revealed. Those that led individuals and corporations to the holy grail of their professions are:

As a real estate agent, broker, team member and business entrepreneur, mastering these pillars to success is the path to your personal success in 2020.

YOU must build and honor your personal and professional brand. It is the promise you make to your customers.

YOU must be unique, a knowledge broker, an exceptional service-aholic.

YOU must TAKE marketshare in your local area. Referrals, leads, listings and closings are your lifeblood.

YOU must remain curious and dedicated to personal and professional education.

YOU must build purchasing power. Invest wisely in yourself and your profession.

The dawning of a new decade is upon us. Real estate, like the weather, is local, but paying attention to the national forecast is essential.

To get you started, here are our recommended Rainmaker Reads. Enjoy, be a Rainmaker, and share these insights with your team, customers and friends.

Rainmaker Reads

Mike Ryan is a partner with the Rainmakers Group, an advisory firm serving the real estate and settlement service industries with global insight, talent and technology.

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Welcome to the Roaring '20s: Rainmaking in the New Decade - RisMedia.com