Biden Urges Eliminating Tax Cut for Super Wealthy
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden began a visit to the battleground state of Wisconsin on Thursday by meeting with the family of Jacob Blake, the Black man whose shooting by a white police officer sparked days of sometimes violent protests.
Biden spent more than an hour in private with Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr., his siblings, and one of his attorneys, B’Ivory LaMarr. Blake’s mother Julia Jackson and another attorney, Ben Crump, joined by phone.
Crump said the younger Blake participated in the meeting by telephone “from his hospital bed.” Blake, 29, shared the pain he is enduring and Biden commiserated. The family has said that Blake is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot seven times in the back by police as they tried to arrest him on Aug. 23.
Crump said Blake’s mother led everyone in prayer for his recovery.
Biden followed his meeting with Blake’s family and representatives with a community discussion at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha. The gathering included business and civic leaders and at least two representatives of law enforcement.
At the church, Biden said of Trump: “No president’s ever going to say ‘they’re very fine people on both sides.’ No president has ever said anything like that … It legitimizes the dark side of human nature.” Biden was referring to Trump’s comments after a 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned deadly.
The Rev. Jonathan Barker, pastor of the church, opened the meeting with a prayer asking for “justice for Jacob Blake” and for God to “anoint” a national leader in November who will “seek justice, love mercy … and love their neighbor.”
Biden, a practicing Catholic, ended the prayer making the sign of the cross. He then heard from Kenosha residents discussing the need to address systemic racism so that society — including commerce — will function peacefully. “I look at the buildings in our community that are gone,” said Barb DeBerge, owner of DeBerge Framing & Gallery, which still stands. “I just I don’t think I really grieved as much as I should because being a business owner, I have to keep going, I have to keep working.”
The trip, Biden’s first to Wisconsin of the general election campaign, is intended to draw sharp contrasts with President Donald Trump. Biden is emphasizing an argument that he’s a unifying figure, able to lead the nation through a reckoning with systemic racism along with the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout.
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