[D66] Joe Biden: A familiar face, a deeply reactionary record

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wsws.org:

Joe Biden: A familiar face, a deeply reactionary record
By Patrick Martin
23 September 2019

Former Vice President Joe Biden has been a leading figure in American 
capitalist politics for nearly 50 years. He was first elected to the US 
Senate in 1972 from the state of Delaware and spent 36 years in office 
before his eight years as vice president in the Obama administration.

While Biden today seeks to emphasize his association with Obama to give 
a liberal gloss to his political career and curry favor with black 
voters, the truth is that Obama selected Biden as his running mate in 
order to demonstrate to the US ruling class, by picking the veteran 
servant of big business, that if elected he would carry out a 
pro-corporate domestic policy and a foreign policy that staunchly upheld 
the global interests of US imperialism.

Obama mouthed rhetoric about “hope and change” to appeal to the millions 
who hated President George W. Bush and the Republicans, but he selected 
as his running mate the most right-wing figure among those who sought 
the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. This set the tone for an 
administration that bailed out Wall Street at the expense of the working 
class, added wars in Libya and Syria to those it inherited and continued 
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and enacted domestic policies such as 
Obamacare, whose goal was to strengthen corporate America, not improve 
conditions of life for working people.

In the lead-up to announcing his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden 
created controversy with his gratuitous praise for ultra-reactionary 
segregationist Democrats in the Senate like James Eastland and Herman 
Talmadge, citing their willingness to work with him in a collegial 
fashion despite supposed political differences. This was not simply a 
“gaffe,” as the media claimed, but revealed something of Biden’s 
long-term political role, both in the Senate and in the Obama 
administration.

He has always been a Democratic wheeler-dealer, able and willing to work 
with the most reactionary forces in both capitalist parties when it 
served the interests of corporate America. Biden was never afraid to get 
his hands dirty, and in the process covered himself with the muck and 
filth of American capitalist politics.

This is why the current effort to package and sell Biden as the 
embodiment of up-from-hardship, struggling Americans, as “middle class 
Joe,” rings so hollow. He first came to the Senate in 1973 at age 29 and 
spent a political lifetime in the circles of power and influence in 
Washington.

It should be noted—particularly for readers outside the United 
States—that Biden’s home state of Delaware has an infamous reputation as 
the headquarters location of choice for giant corporations seeking to 
evade taxes, regulations and scrutiny of all kinds.

The tiny state has only 975,000 people, ranking 44th of the 50 states. 
However, “More than 1,000,000 business entities have made Delaware their 
legal home,” according to the state’s Division of Corporations website. 
“More than 50 percent of all publicly-traded companies in the US 
including 64 percent of the Fortune 500 have chosen Delaware as their 
legal home.”

Delaware is the Cayman Islands or Singapore of America, sheltering 
corporate tax evasion and criminality of every kind, and every 
capitalist politician from that state, Democrat and Republican alike, 
upholds that distinction. It was this particularly noxious milieu that 
produced the young Senator Joe Biden.

It took several years of cajoling, but in 1977 Biden finally obtained a 
coveted seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, then under the 
chairmanship of James Eastland. In 1981, when the Republicans gained a 
majority in the Senate, the chairmanship passed to Republican Strom 
Thurmond, the antediluvian reactionary from South Carolina who had run 
for president in 1948 as the candidate of the States’ Rights Democratic 
Party, the ultra-right segregationist wing of the Democrats, and who 
crossed over to the Republicans in 1964 in opposition to Lyndon 
Johnson’s concessions to the civil rights movement.

 From 1981 through 1997, a period of nearly two decades, Biden was 
either the ranking Democrat under Thurmond or chairman himself after the 
Democrats regained control in 1987-1995. Thurmond and Biden collaborated 
closely in approving such Supreme Court nominees as Antonin Scalia, 
Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, and in passing numerous pieces of 
law-and-order legislation that resulted in longer jail terms for 
millions of people.

Biden likes to dismiss this legislation as ancient history, seeking to 
avoid any close scrutiny of what he actually did. But the record 
demonstrates his role as the principal advocate within the Democratic 
Party of the most brutal forms of state repression, including, among 
other things, capital punishment. The laws included:

* The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which established 
mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, increased the penalties 
for marijuana cultivation and use, and re-established the federal death 
penalty.

* The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which contained the notorious 100-1 
provision penalizing possession of crack cocaine over powder cocaine by 
that ratio (a minimum five-year sentence for 5 grams of crack or 500 
grams of powder).

* The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which further stiffened penalties for 
drug abuse, provided $6.5 billion for the “war on drugs” and 
strengthened the federal death penalty.

* The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which 
created 60 new federal death penalty offenses, stripped federal inmates 
of the right to obtain educational Pell grants, set aside money for 
100,000 new police officers and further entrenched a “three-strikes” 
rule in sentencing.

The combined impact of this legislation was barbaric and racially 
discriminatory. A report from the US Sentencing Commission found that in 
1992, 91.4 percent of federal crack cocaine offenders were black, even 
though the majority of cocaine users were white. And Biden was a fervent 
defender of these laws, boasting in one Senate speech, “We do everything 
but hang people for jaywalking in this bill.”

Biden was not an outlier with regard to Democratic Party support for 
these punitive measures. Nearly every one of these laws had overwhelming 
bipartisan support. The 1986 bill, for example, passed the House by 
392-16 and the Senate by 97-2. Majorities of the Congressional Black 
Caucus and, later, the Congressional Progressive Caucus supported these 
laws.

In 1993, Biden boasted in a speech on the Senate floor, “Every major 
crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor 
crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of 
Delaware: Joe Biden.” In 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed the 
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law on the White 
House lawn, Biden sat directly behind him, sharing the spotlight.

This period included Biden’s first run for the presidency, in 1987-88, 
which collapsed early after charges of plagiarism emerged based on his 
lifting whole passages of speeches by British Labour Party leader Neil 
Kinnock for his own campaign.

After 1997, Biden’s focus shifted from throwing poor people into prison 
to bombing and otherwise annihilating people in countries targeted by US 
imperialism. He had long been a member of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee, an even more influential position than Judiciary, and when 
the opportunity arose to become the panel’s ranking Democrat, with the 
retirement of Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, he took it.

In that capacity, Biden was one of the principal proponents of US 
intervention in the former Yugoslavia, a role he describes in his 2007 
campaign autobiography as his proudest achievement in foreign policy. He 
advocated a direct US attack on Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo crisis, 
joining with a like-minded Republican senator to introduce the 
McCain-Biden Kosovo Resolution authorizing Clinton to use “all necessary 
force” against Serbia.

Biden was chairman of the committee from 2001 to 2003, and then from 
2007 until his entry into the Obama administration. As committee 
chairman, he played a critical role in authorizing both the war in 
Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. The Senate panel approved an 
Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, 
which became the basis for the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan 
and the entire subsequent “war on terror.” In 2002, the same body 
approved another Authorization for Use of Military Force against the 
Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Biden voted for both and helped shepherd 
them through Congress.

As a candidate for president in 2008, Biden was undone in large measure 
because of his pro-war record, as young people in particular flocked to 
the candidacy of Barack Obama, who postured as a longtime opponent of 
the Iraq War. While today Biden claims to have been opposed to the war, 
that is not what the record shows. In July 2003, well after the invasion 
and occupation of Iraq and President Bush’s declaration of “mission 
accomplished,” Biden gave a speech in which he declared he “would vote 
that way again” on the war resolution.

He bemoaned the Bush administration’s failure to sell the war 
effectively to the American people. In a speech to the Brookings 
Institution in June 2005, he declared, “I want to see the president of 
the United States succeed in Iraq... His success is America’s success, 
and his failure is America’s failure.”

Biden later became associated with proposals to break up Iraq into three 
separate states based on religion and ethnicity: a Kurdish north, a 
Shi’ite south and a Sunni center. Such an arrangement would have 
involved forced population transfers in the millions, an effort at 
“ethnic cleansing” dwarfing Yugoslavia and rivaling the 1947 partition 
of India.

One other aspect of Biden’s long and reactionary record has been raised 
in the 2020 campaign. He was one of the most fervent Democratic 
supporters of the reactionary 2005 legislation overhauling the consumer 
bankruptcy laws, making it much more difficult for working class and 
middle-class families to escape debt burdens exacerbated by the corrupt 
and misleading marketing tactics employed by companies like MBNA, the 
largest US issuer of credit cards. MBNA was then headquartered in 
Delaware and employed the senator’s son Hunter as an executive vice 
president. (MBNA has since been acquired by Bank of America.)

One of Biden’s main rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren, has repeatedly 
criticized him for this legislation, which she opposed at the time as an 
expert on federal bankruptcy law, arguing that it unduly favored credit 
card issuers and other creditors at the expense of borrowers.

It is a remarkable fact, given this right-wing record, that Biden has 
chosen to wrap himself in the mantle of the Obama administration—the 
most right-wing in US history up to that time—in order to draw attention 
away from his earlier career. As he said in a recent debate in Houston, 
“I stand with Barack Obama all eight years, good, bad and indifferent.”

This is not the place to review in detail the record of the Obama years, 
2009-2017, for which Biden bears shared responsibility. There is no 
record of any opposition on his part to the bailout of Wall Street, the 
forced wage-cutting for autoworkers, the austerity policies pursued 
jointly with Republicans in Congress (with Biden as chief interlocutor), 
or the foreign policy of drone assassinations and militarism.

One incident is characteristic of Biden’s role as a representative of 
the Washington foreign policy consensus. During the Egyptian Revolution 
of 2011, he came out strongly in defense of the longtime dictator Hosni 
Mubarak, declaring, “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of 
things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical 
interests in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions 
Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel… I 
would not refer to him as a dictator.”

In the years since he left office, Biden has cashed in with some gusto, 
becoming a multi-millionaire in the process. After 36 years as one of 
the poorest members of the US Senate, Biden raked in more than $15 
million in only two years, including six-figure speaking engagements a 
la Hillary Clinton, book-publishing fees, and six-figure gigs as a 
professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

He has the closest ties to big business and has raised far more money 
from financial interests than any other candidate for the Democratic 
presidential nomination. At one fundraising soirée in Manhattan, he 
noted that since the 1980s the value of tax exemptions for the wealthy 
had increased from $800 billion under Republican Ronald Reagan to $1.6 
trillion, effectively doubling.

“I could take about $400 [billion] away and it wouldn’t change your 
standard of living one tiny little bit—not even an iota,” he told 
donors. “I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made 
money,” he continued. “We can disagree in the margins, but the truth of 
the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be 
punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would 
fundamentally change.”

Biden was telling his wealthy backers that such a sacrifice would be 
politically useful. “When we have income inequality as large as we have 
in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and 
basic revolution,” he warned.

Later, at an appearance in Nevada, Biden scoffed at the prospect that 
younger voters were looking for “radical, revolutionary change.” He 
responded to that suggestion by declaring, “They’re looking for somebody 
who, in fact, can articulate what they believe and who is in the 
mainstream,” he said. “They’re not all—and this is not a hit on Bernie, 
my word—but this is not a generation of socialists.”

After the collapse of his 2008 campaign, Biden was tapped by Obama as 
his running mate. At the time, this writer described the choice of Biden 
in the following terms:

     The selection of Senator Joseph Biden as the vice-presidential 
candidate of the Democratic Party underscores the fraudulent character 
of the Democratic primary campaign and the undemocratic character of the 
entire two-party electoral system.

     Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the supposed 
protagonist of “change,” has picked as his running mate a fixture of the 
Washington establishment, a six-term US senator who is a proven defender 
of American imperialism and the interests of big business…

     Obama has selected Biden to provide reassurance that, whatever 
populist rhetoric may be employed for electoral purposes in the fall 
campaign, the wealth and privileges of the ruling elite and the 
geo-strategic aims of US imperialism will be the single-minded concerns 
of a Democratic administration.

Eleven years later, there is absolutely no reason to alter that assessment.

The author also recommends:

Obama selects Biden to reassure the US ruling elite

[25 August 2008]