Member-only story
The winner of the 2020 election: Capital
The most memorable moment of the debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders — the one that drew a bright line between them — was an exchange about the role on money in politics. Returning to a common theme that he has hammered home throughout his career, Sanders recited a litany of economic injustices, which he punctuated with a question: “Who has the power?”
He continued: “It’s the people who contribute money, the billionaires who contribute money to political campaigns, who control the legislative agenda. Those people have the power.” Sanders repeated the same point he has made countless times before — that it’s necessary to take on the entrenched power of capital in order to achieve meaningful change for working people.
And to do that, he argued, politicians need to be free from the influence of corporate interests.
Biden responded by saying that he called for publicly funded elections 30 years ago and that he supports a constitutional amendment to take private money out of politics. Only minutes before, he had scoffed at Sanders’ notion of a political…
