SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN
BUSH IS WAGING TWO WARS:
IN IRAQ, AND ON THE MIDDLE CLASS

Sen. Biden didn’t mince words when he addressed the AFT executive council.

Iraq, he said, “is not the only war this president has been waging. There’s a second war”—a war on the middle class.

Biden, the senior senator from Delaware and a well-respected foreign policy expert on both sides of the aisle, said that “the war in Iraq is the boulder sitting in the middle of the road that prevents us” from moving forward on all essential domestic initiatives.

“We’ve lost flexibility at home and credibility abroad” because of the war, Biden said, noting that the war is costing $8.5 billion a month—money that could be spent on domestic priorities, including healthcare, education, energy, the environment and middle class tax relief.

“I’ve been saying for four years, and I know I’m a broken record on this, there’s no possibility in the lifetime of anyone in this room for there to be a strong, central democratic government in Baghdad,” Biden says of President Bush’s pursuit of a coalition government.

Biden’s plan for promoting stability in Iraq: “a federal system where you have a limited federal government inside a defined border giving each of the parties that are killing each other control over the fabric of their daily lives, their own local police force, their own laws relating to education, their laws relating to marriage, divorce—the things they’re killing each other over.

“That’s what we did in Bosnia. We have had over 24,000 NATO troops there for 10 years. Not one single one has been killed. And what’s happened? They’re now uniting to become part of Europe.”

The Bush administration’s war on the middle class, he says, is best exemplified by three domestic agenda priorities that serve to shift power from “ordinary people” to the very powerful.

They are: court reform, tort reform and labor reform.

The administration’s so-called court reform, he said, has translated into the undercutting of collective bargaining, civil rights, civil liberties. Through tort reform, the Bush administration would effectively stymie the ability of average people to sue major corporations. And the administration’s assault on labor ranges from making it harder for workers to organize to overseas outsourcing.

“There is only one reason there’s a middle class in America,” Biden said. “It’s because of the union movement. Were it not for organized labor and the union movement beginning the end of the 19th century, there would be no broad middle class in America.”

“The next president of the United States better be able to utter the word ‘union,’” Biden said.