ERIC ZUESSE -- Joe Biden’s Type of Racism

 

Joe Biden’s Type of Racism

Eric Zuesse – August 16, 2020

 

The news-media are hiding Joe Biden’s racism, his racism which Ted Kennedy and the NAACP had condemned, and which Jesse Helms had praised. Should the news-media be prosecuted for trying to rig the 2020 U.S. Presidential election in favor of a Biden victory, far worse than any “Russiagate” against Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016? Of course, Donald Trump is just as bad as is Biden, but the news-media report his evilness; they don’t report Biden’s evilness. So, I will do it here. 

 

These will be the facts about Biden’s racism, which any reader can easily verify on one’s own, simply by clicking onto the link wherever the reader wants to see the source. It’s an amplified version of an article I had previously done on the topic and which failed to receive the public attention that I think this important subject warrants; so, more needs to be said about this crucial matter regarding Joe Biden’s record, things that he constantly lies about, and here are those facts, about Joe Biden’s bigotry, which is targeted against poor Blacks:

 

Joe Biden was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists; and he was condemned by the NAACP for it in 1977 hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but he has claimed instead to have participated in anti-segregation sit-ins, which were led by black ministers all of whom were conveniently deceased at the time when he made those assertions, and so they could not be asked whether he had participated. (Click on the links there to see the evidence for that.) He was making those false assertions while running against Bernie Sanders, whom the Chicago Tribune showed in their photo during the 1960s being arrested as a college student for his peacefully demonstrating against Chicago’s segregationist policy at the time. Sanders in his Presidential campaign didn’t brag about it; only Biden bragged about his anti-segregationist activity, though it was fictitious; and so Biden swamped Sanders in the South Carolina primary on February 29th — the turning-point in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries — where most of the voters were Blacks, who had been deceived by Biden’s claims and who didn’t know that Biden had actually been a leading northern segregationist. (Biden had even backed an anti-integration bill by North Carolina Republican segregationist Senator Jesse Helms to prohibit the federal government from requiring school districts to be or become desegregated in order to qualify to receive federal funds and to allow instead ‘separate-but-equal’ education of Black and White children. Helms thanked Biden on the floor of the Senate, for his support.) Notwithstanding Biden’s having been condemned by the NAACP for his support of ‘natural’ segregation, Biden appeared on a broadcast to young Blacks, on 22 May 2020, saying "The NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve run.” The very next day, the NAACP quietly said “The NAACP is a non-partisan organization and does not endorse candidates for political office at any level.” They did it quietly, because, if Biden becomes the President, they want to have the President’s support; they don’t want to antagonize a future President by conspicuously making a point of what a fraud he is, regarding racism. 

 

The NAACP official, at that Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, condemned Biden’s legislative proposal, by saying (among other things) that Biden was trying “to enact an unconstitutional set of technical obstacles whose sole purpose is to interfere with and delay the courts in their work in school segregation cases.” Would that condemnation by the NAACP be consistent with Biden’s currently saying "The NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve run” — even if the fact weren’t that the NAACP refuses to endorse any candidates?

 

Biden had opened that 1977 Judiciary Committee hearing by attacking the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, saying against it: “The average citizen, and finally his representatives in Congress, have come to the conclusion that the courts have gone too far in education cases.” He was actually referring there to only one case: Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954 (which still hasn’t been implemented in law). The NAACP’s lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, had been the NAACP's advocate arguing before the Court, to come to that decision. In 1967, Marshall became himself the first Black on the U.S. Supreme Court. Ten years later, in 1977, Senator Biden was being condemned at the Senate Judiciary Committee, by Jack Greenberg, Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In 1940, Thurgood Marshall had founded, and became the first Director-Counsel of, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and his title is the one that Marshall had held when he argued the Brown v. Board of Education case at the Court. Jack Greenberg was Marshall’s immediate successor; and, so, when he condemned Biden, Greenberg was doing it as the immediate heir to Marshall. Biden was the NAACP’s chief enemy on this matter, the enemy of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

 

In that same 22 May 2020 broadcast to young black voters, Biden said:

 

Joe Biden: (09:10)

I opposed that three strikes and you're out bill. I oppose the position taking that, saying that you're going to have any mandatory sentences.

 

But here’s what Biden had told Katie Couric on NBC’s Today Show on 1 February 1994:

 

what I support is a three strikes and you're out, if in fact, they're very violent crimes--arson, rape, murder, manslaughter. Three strikes in those areas, and you should be out.

 

His bill listed the sorts of crimes that Blacks were more commonly committing (petty drug violations and physical crimes, the latter often entailing violence), not the sorts of crimes that Whites were more commonly committing (crimes which are done by deception, and by signing documents, etc. — executive crimes and other white-collar crimes, including corporate crimes that pollute the environment and that kill thousands by pollution and by producing dangerous products). The aim was to keep the poor in prison, and the rich out of prison. Biden boosted white-collar crooks and blasted blue-collar ones.

 

He called it there “the Biden bill” — all of it was. The law’s “Sec. 70001. Mandatory life imprisonment for persons convicted of certain felonies” spells out its Three-Strikes-And-You’re-Out provisions, and they apply equally to “each serious violent felony or serious drug offense.” “Serious drug offense” needn’t be “violent”; so, non-violent “serious” drug-law violations could and did place prisoners behind bars permanently. But, regardless, Biden lies when he asserts that “I opposed that three strikes and you're out bill.” He supported it but said that he opposed it. The interviewer allowed him to get away with that, and with his other lies. There was even a section for “Enhanced Penalties” regarding drug-law violations. It was skillfully targeted against poor Blacks.

 

Later in that May 22nd interview, he said:

 

The only mandatory was in there was carjacking, which I opposed and three strikes and you’re out, which is ridiculous. It only was imposed three times but still even once makes no sense. The idea of three times three strikes and you’re out, give me a break.

 

Of course, that’s false (to the extent that his broken syntax makes any sense).

 

In that May 22nd broadcast, Biden diminished the law’s relevancy to federal drug-law violators, by saying “94% of every prisoner in jail is in a state prison, not a federal prison. No federal law.” However, the fact is that there are 226,000 federal prisoners, and that 100,000 of them are in prison for federal drug-law violations. So, 44% of inmates in federal prisons are in there for having violated federal drug-crimes. Yet again, Biden lied, to say “No federal law.” (Furthermore, the numbers he cites — such as “94%” — are inaccurate.) He wasn’t even questioned on that lie.

 

Then he said that the problem “wasn't the crime bill. It was the drug legislation. It was the institution of mandatory minimums, which I oppose.” The interviewer caught him on that lie (the only one he did catch him on) by mentioning that the mandatory minimum sentences were part of his 1994 crime bill. Then Biden promptly distracted by saying that the real problem for Blacks is that they received longer sentences than Whites for the very same crime, and he said that his crime bill fixed that, which was yet another lie. They came too thick and fast to cover. For example, when NPR covered Biden’s presentation, they didn’t point out any of his lies. NPR reaches mainly Democratic Party voters (just like that “The Breakfast Club” interview reached mainly young Blacks), and keeps them ignorant of the reality regarding the Democratic Party, just like Fox News reaches mainly Republican Party voters and keeps those voters ignorant of the reality regarding the Republican Party. Everything that both Parties’ billionaires don’t want the American people to know is kept out of all of the billionaires’ ‘news’-media. (“The Breakfast Club” is controlled by the giant Premier Radio Networks.)

 

A section in the Wikipedia article on the Biden crime law notes its “Elimination of higher education for inmates.” It observes that this provision “effectively eliminated the ability of lower-income prison inmates to receive college educations during their term of imprisonment.” Biden’s trashing of convicts led him to want them to come out of prison as lacking in higher education as they were when entering prison. That’s an excellent way to encourage them to stay out of the productive and legal workforce, and to be hopeless about their futures, and thus inclined to a life of continuing crime. He knows it, but he does it anyway. He instead lies about himself, and misrepresents his aims.

 

Biden also said in that May 22nd interview:

 

Change the entire prison system for one, that is punishment to rehabilitation. There's only a couple of things everybody has in common in jail. One is they were the victims of abuse or their kids were, or their mother was. Number two, can't read. Number three, they don't have any job skills. They were in a position where they didn't get a chance. Why does it make sense? Why did I come along and write the first act that said, when you get out of prison, you don't just get a DOSA where you get 25 bucks and a bus ticket. You end up under the bridge and just do the same place.

So every single solitary person being released from prison should have access to every single government program. Why does it not make sense to have African Americans who were getting out of prison, served their time, everybody for that matter, be able to have public housing? Why didn't it make sense that they can have Pell grants to go to school? Why did it make sense they can have access to healthcare? What are we nuts? That's what we keep doing.

 

He doesn’t mention, and wasn’t asked by his interviewer about, “the Biden bill” (as he called it) having eliminated any and all higher education in federal prisons. He pretends to be a different person, and to have done different things, than he actually is, and did. And thus far, he has gotten away with it, because all billionaires find him to be acceptable.

 

Although Biden said in the Senate on 17 September 1975 that people might consider surprising that he was supporting an anti-busing bill by Helms, “a Senator with the voting record such as that of the Senator from North Carolina,” Biden actually was very much allied with Helms. For example, the outstanding investigative journalist Alana Goodman headlined on 3 February 2020 “Biden defended bid by segregationist Jesse Helms to gain control of CBS in 1980s”, and she reported that, ten years later, in 1985, Biden endorsed a bid by a segregationist group of investors led by Helms to take over CBS, because, Biden said, it was important to have “a range of political views in the media,” and that Biden referred to this group as being “a group of us that think you have to have a lot more fiscal conservatism” — which Helms (a military super-hawk) also advocated for: cutting severely back on non-military spending by the Government.

 

Those are just a few examples, but they are typical ones.

 

Biden’s type of racism is whatever is acceptable to enough billionaires so as for him to get enough money from them to enable him to win the political office he is seeking to win. And he gets loads of money from loads of billionaires and their corporations and their ‘non-profits’, etc. — he’s just as much a candidate of the billionaires as Trump is, though (being a liberal) far more hypocritical about it than Trump is.

 

So: he’s not against all Blacks — only against ones that aren’t rich.

 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.