https://vimeo.com/443545489 Will Joe Biden cast aside decades of conservative political wisdom and lead us to an FDR style presidency he's talked about, or is this another case of Biden telling voters exactly what he thinks they want to hear? Branco Marcetic author of 'Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden', joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Transcript Paul JayHi, I'm Paul Jay, welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast.Joe Biden will be the next president barring something unexpected and these days that something could well be increased provocations against China or maybe Iran, creating an opportunity for Trump to have his war-time president moment, outright war is unlikely, but almost war possible.If you think that Trump represents an extremely aggressive section of American capital and is moving the country towards a Mussolini style corporate fascism, then there's only one way to defeat Trump and that's to vote for Biden.That said, we shouldn't have illusions about who Biden represents. So consider this interview one that helps dispel notions that Biden is anything other than a representative of, at least domestically, a somewhat less aggressive section of finance and big corporate power, less aggressive. But Biden is still a defender of a system and policies that created the greatest inequality gap in history and set the table for Trump.When it comes to foreign policy Biden is a mixed bag. He supported the Iraq war, but he fought to pass the Iran nuclear deal. His recent threatening rhetoric against China does not promise much change on that front. And one thing is certain if the U.S. and China do not cooperate to deal with the climate crisis, we're doomed. Perhaps, despite the rhetoric, there is more of a chance of Biden doing that than Trump, given that Don the Con won't even accept that there is a climate crisis.Now joining us to discuss just who is the real Joe Biden is Branco Marcetic. He's a staff writer for Jacobin magazine and was the 2019-2020 investigative fellow at In These Times. He's the author of, 'Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden'. Thanks for joining us, Branco. Branco MarceticThank you for having me.Paul JaySo when you wrote this, when it was published, the primaries were still on, Joe Biden was not yet the nominee. So as he is Yesterday's Man, I guess he's also, whether we like it or not, today's man. In going through the book, Biden seems to be a man who's maybe instinct is to kind of go a little bit more liberal, a little bit more understanding, things. But when political expediency says go to the right, he'll certainly go to the right, whether it's on crime, on the Iraq war. So overall, did I come away with a correct impression that, and what do you make of that? Branco MarceticYeah, I would say so. I mean, he's definitely on the more conservative end of the Democratic Party. He's not an ultra-conservative, but he definitely leans that way. If you look at his AFL-CIO, (The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), rating, he was for a long time in the 80s, he basically was around the same level as Gary Hart, who was hated by organized labor. If you look at, for example, his lifelong environmental rating, he started out as a really committed environmentalist. But by the end, his ratings were pretty middling and in fact, actually pretty low if you compare them to most other Democrats.So, yeah, Biden has his conservative instincts. Part of it is because of the state he had to run in and when. Part of it is the time that he came up and I mean, I try and explain that in the book, that he ran as kind of a slightly socially conservative New Deal liberal initially. And then when American politics really kind of shifted to the right by the end of the 1970s and he saw that he had impending re-election,
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