Political Rot Continued - "Hey Man!"

“Yesterday’s Man – the Case Against Joe Biden,” by Branko Marcetic, 2020

This is the definitive case study on Joe Biden.  Even-handed when justified, it nevertheless tracks Biden’s descent into neo-liberal hell since the mid-70s, helping lead the Democratic Party down with him.  It is not his ‘gaffes,’ his grabbiness, lies, exaggerations or senility that are so problematic as much as his inside-the-beltway sensibilities, bi-partisanship and moderate Republican essence.  He’s essentially a double-talking, wind-blown political careerist, chameleon-like in his drifting with the right-wing ideological agenda set by the GOP for 42 years.  He’s a supporter of the ‘both-party system’ like the Democratic Party leadership, not even the elite anti-democratic ‘two-party system.’  As one politician who knew him when he was young said “But to my knowledge, he had no substantive ideology.”

As Marcetic points out, partial political ‘revolutions,’ such as those occurring in the 1930s-40s and 1960s-70s in the U.S. are followed by ‘counter-revolution.’ The Reagan / Clinton neo-con/neo-liberal assault is of the latter type and Biden is one of its standard bearers. 

The book was written prior to Biden’s 2020 ascension to the throne and his servile endorsement by Sanders.  In this book I counted at least 89 right-wing positions Biden took from the ‘70s to 2020.  It reads like the rap sheet of a political criminal.  In the U.S. no matter how many political ‘mistakes’ a bourgeois politician makes  - though sex is sometimes the exception - they are forgotten.  Here is some of what Marcetic dug up.

      1.        Biden opposed federal funds for busing to limit segregation in 1977.  On busing he blocked with segregationist Jesse Helms frequently.

      2.        As a senator Biden backed Carter, the first truly neo-liberal president, voting to ‘sunrise’ all government programs every 4 years.  In the 1970s he voted against a bill to keep Social Security solvent, against cost-of-living raises for federal workers and against Humphrey’s ‘Full Employment’ bill. These votes of the young and ‘liberal’ Biden were not the last.

3.        Supported consistent tax cuts to business and the rich throughout his political life, beginning in 1981 by voting for Reagan’s tax cut. Delaware, his home state, is the playground of chemical firm Dupont and 10 major banks, including MBNA.  His funding base has always been corporations, rich people and some right-wing unions.

4.        In 1978 Biden vowed to fight national health insurance.  In 2020 he promised to veto single-payer/Medicare for All if it came across his desk.

5.        Biden was to the right of both Reagan and Bush on the ‘wars’ against crime and drugs.  He tends to flow with hysterical panics pushed by the right-wing, which demonized drugs and exaggerated crime.  He still opposes marijuana legalization.

6.        Biden is the key figure in the creation of the incarceration state.  He supported increases in the death penalty and more youth prosecution over ‘super-predators’; mandatory minimum sentences; ‘3 Strikes and You’re Out;’ the ‘drug czar;’ civil forfeiture; militarily arming the police; racist crack cocaine laws, etc.  He regularly worked with far-rightist Strom Thurmond on these issues. 

7.        Biden has supported ‘balanced budget’ amendments since the 1980s – even pushing a potentially disastrous Constitutional Amendment.  He was instrumental in Obama’s negotiations trying to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid during the Simpson-Bowles hearings.  This thankfully failed due to Republican intransigence for deeper cuts. 

8.        Biden leaned towards ‘states rights’ beginning in the 1980s.  He’s sort of a Tea-Party soft-Reaganite, a Third Way triangulator, a DLC acolyte -  a DLC which Jesse Jackson called “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”

9.        Biden supported many restrictions on the right of abortion, starting with the Hyde Amendment.  He was brought up Catholic.

10.  Biden’s handling of Supreme Court picks, partly as head of the Judiciary Committee, was almost uniformly ignorant, giving right-wing Republican picks Rehnquist, Scalia, A. Kennedy and most notoriously Clarence Thomas easy rides.  Instead of pushing them on their records, he looked at their ‘character.’  In the process he confided that he did not believe Anita Hill.

11.  Like many other Republican panics, Biden fell for Bush’s lies over ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq. He was not alone, but this mistake should rule out anyone from deciding foreign policy issues.  Biden and Bush were close allies during this period.

12.  Then there was Clinton’s disastrous job killer NAFTA, which ‘pro-labor’ Biden pushed against nearly the whole labor movement, blocking with the Republican Party and the Democratic Party right.

13.  Biden and Clinton both backed Republicans like Trent Lott to support the “Welfare Reform Act” which switched control of welfare to the states through ‘block grants’ with work requirements, cutting food stamps and spurring massive increases in national poverty.

14.  Biden voted to get rid of the depression-era Glass-Steagall law so that a Citibank merger could be retroactively legal.  This made oligarchic banks even bigger and more systemically dangerous, as was proved in 2008.

15.  Supported ending student debt bankruptcy, while promoting Delaware’s bankruptcy courts as a lenient haven for corporations.  He made it harder for citizens to declare bankruptcy, a gift to Delaware’s credit card companies, along with backing a host of other pro-bank bills.

16.  Biden played a large role in 2008 in picking Obama’s Rubin-cloned Wall Street-oriented advisors and department heads, starting with the egregious Rahm Emanuel.  He was ‘always in the room.’

17.  As to foreign policy he has vacillated, opposing Iraq War I but then celebrated war criminals like Kissinger, Reagan’s invasions of Panama & Grenada, Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo intervention, Bush’s Iraq II invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Hillary’s support for the destruction of Libya and the coup in Honduras and bi-partisan regime change in Syria.  As a ‘brilliant’ foreign policy thinker, he was the chief promoter of a plan to partition Iraq into 3 parts against Iraqi wishes.  He supported the coup attempts against Venezuela, as part of his life-long hostility to socialism.

18.  Biden endorsed the Patriot Act and still does, along with continuing illegal war ‘authorizations for the use of force.’  He supports back doors to software so that the security services can use them to spy on anyone. He threatened countries not to grant asylum to Snowden.  He blew-off the WACO hearings so Janet Reno could get off scot-free.

19.  Yeah, he opposed gay marriage like all the rest of the top Democrats until he couldn’t anymore.

20.  Biden urged Obama to abandon ship on the ACA when it started to face some business and Republican resistance - even though it was a Republican-originated, pro-health care industry plan.    

NAFTA was so bad it led to the formation of the union-based Labor Party

Biden claims to represent ‘the middle class’ – the same one he has hollowed out.  He understands the ‘middle-class’ as conservative and suburban white men that he must represent.  The massive majority ‘working class’ is invisible to him, as proletarians are of every skin color, age, gender, nationality, religion, union relation and region.  Biden’s hokey and cracked idea of the middle-class is embedded in a 1950’s yesterday. “Lunch-bucket Joe” or "Middle-Class Joe" has never been anything but a Beltway politician.  His ‘lunch-bucket’ or 'kitchen' is the august Senate dining room.

Biden is the great compromiser, bi-partisanship being his life-blood.  Bi-partisanship means collaboration with the Republican Party … which in a war would be called treason.  And we are in a class war.  Any deals he makes are deals Republicans want.  He and Mitch McConnell are good buds and as Marcetic points out McConnell knows Biden is one of the primary weak points of the Democratic Party.  Biden’s already blocked with Trump on an aggressive new cold war against China and in the midst of mass protests for police defunding called for increased police funding -  just like Trump.  Now he is the Democrats’ standard bearer – almost the worst candidate of those who ran.  Like Trump, Biden is another sign of the human and political rot of capitalist politics.

 

P.S. - Sept, 2020 - Biden is running ads to out-Trump on looting, crime and arson.  But who will people choose as 'tougher' on these issues?  Biden is only building up these issues for Trump's benefit.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “The Democrats:  A Critical History,”"The Russians Are Coming Again," "Populists Guide to 2020," "Bernie Needs to Toughen Up His Debate Performances,"

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 28, 2020