All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Bronco March Teach, and he writes regularly for Jacobin, and we've run quite a bit of his stuff at antiwar.com as well.
This is his new book, paperback and ebook, Yesterday's Man, The Case Against Joe Biden.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm a big fan of antiwar.com.
Oh, cool.
Happy to hear that.
Well, cool.
We're a big fan of yours, too.
We've run a lot of your stuff, and I'll have you know, I read your whole book last night and a little bit this morning, and yeah, it was great.
I knocked it right out and I liked it a lot.
So and in keeping with the spirit of the Horton rule of attack the left from the left, you certainly have a lot of insight into the career of this guy, who Joe Biden has been, I knew he was a career politician, but he's been in the US Senate since 1972, is that right?
Yeah, a very, very long time.
I'm not sure where exactly he ranks on the longest, but if you look at the Senate's longest serving senators, he's somewhere there.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm old and I was born in 76, so yeah.
Oh, so right as Joe Biden was making his turn from a sort of New Deal liberal into a kind of a Reagan neoliberal.
All right.
So now tell us exactly what you mean by that when you call him a neoliberal.
Well, I think a couple of things.
One is the shift to, you know, away from sort of government intervention to, you know, whether to provide sort of a safety net for people and to kind of manage the economy through the government into a more kind of free market based approach.
And one that sort of stresses, you know, lower taxes, less government, you know, I think those are things that probably we wouldn't agree on.
But interestingly, at the same time that Biden did shift to the right on sort of economic and social policy, he also shifted to the right on foreign policy.
And the culprit of that is really the same thing, which was the kind of conservative turn that happened in the late 1970s and 80s, particularly with Reagan's election.
And you know, Biden looked at Reagan's election, he said on the one hand, you know, we have to kind of cater more to the conservative white South in terms of, you know, social and economic policy.
But he also said, you know, Reagan shows that, you know, we cannot be, we cannot cringe at the use of force anymore.
We can't be reluctant to go to war, because Biden did start out as kind of a reluctant anti-war, anti-Vietnam person, and he slowly shifted.
And in the 80s, that's really when it really takes hold, because he looks at Reagan's big landslide wins and he goes, OK, well, we have to be sort of maybe not quite as far onto the sort of aggressive side of things as Reagan, but we should be, you know, maybe, maybe somewhere closer than where we are now.
Right now, so for a lot of libertarians listening, they're thinking, well, but Joe Biden is the biggest statist since Joe Stalin.
I mean, what could he possibly be against?
He's for everything.
And so can you parse that a little bit about what it means that he traveled from this position to that one on particularly on the welfare and regulatory state stuff that you're talking about?
Yeah, sure.
You know, Biden is a guy who who doesn't have any firm ideology.
I mean, he at first thought about being a Republican and then he decided at age 27 in 1969 that he would register as a Democrat and he ended up running as a Democrat.
But he was always sort of he was not super happy to be labeled a liberal.
He was always insisting, well, I'm not that liberal.
I'm actually a conservative in some things.
You know, he started out saying I'm a conservative on social issues.
Then later on, he said, actually, I'm more liberal on social issues and I'm more conservative on fiscal things.
So it's sort of he does this thing where he tends to change who he is, depending on what audience he's talking to and also depending on where the political winds are blowing at a particular time.
And so in 1972, this was at the time when, you know, that kind of postwar, I quote unquote, liberal consensus, the New Deal consensus that came about after the 1930s and Franklin Roosevelt.
It was it was waning, but it was still, you know, broadly the predominant political tendency in the United States.
And so he runs in 72 against this this very well-established Republican opponent as a New Deal liberal.
You know, he sounds a lot more like Bernie Sanders today than he does with the Joe Biden of today.
You know, he's hitting millionaires for not paying their taxes.
He wants Social Security benefits expanded.
He wants a consumer protection agency and so on and so forth.
You know, he's speaking up for labor rights and that kind of thing.
And then in 1978, you have the taxpayers' rebellion in in California, and that sort of spreads beyond California.
And, you know, this is burgeoning anti-tax feeling in the United States.
And Biden looks at that and he looks at the fact that he's going to run for reelection for the first time in his life.
And, you know, he knows that he was very close to what he beat, the last incumbent who had been in a seat for many years.
And he knows that that could easily happen to him.
And so he very quickly shifts to the right from about 1975 to 1978.
You know, he that's the period where he's famously an anti-busing person.
And, you know, he suddenly says he's a fiscal conservative.
He wants a huge tax cut.
He wants to put a limit on the federal bureaucracy and that kind of thing.
And then when Reagan comes in, you know, Biden kind of goes, well, actually, you know, there's some things that Reagan's doing that I can actually get on board with.
So he says, you know, I mean, a tax cut I can get on board with.
He votes for Reagan's first budget, which is created by The New York Times and The Washington Post at the time for sort of being this landmark moment in rolling back the New Deal order.
And for the rest of the 80s and 90s, he's really collaborating with Republicans to roll back some of these economic policies that were that were legacies of the New Deal, like welfare and, you know, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and that kind of thing.
At the same time, also, though, he, you know, that that might be, you know, for libertarianists, that might be good and they might think, actually, that's not so bad.
But at the same time, through the 80s and 90s, he's also not just moving right on foreign policy into a more hawkish direction, but very much in a more anti-civil liberties stance.
You know, he started out kind of as a as a civil liberties activist.
You know, you can't see it, but I'm doing quote marks with my hands.
But that was sort of what he was known for.
And then really through the 80s and 90s and into the war on terror, he ends up being this guy who is pushing for some really, really radical restrictions on civil liberties and succeeds as well.
Yeah, well, a lot there, first of all, just one point on the Glass-Steagall thing, it's notable that the only libertarian in Congress at the time, Ron Pollock, opposed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, you know, Phil Graham and all these conservatives and Joe Biden were for that.
And he said, hey, as long as we have this completely corrupt inflationary monetary system that we have that causes these massive boom and bust dislocations every decade or so, the last thing we want to do is completely deregulate the rules of the casino when it's a casino.
It's not what market capitalism should look like at all in the first place.
It's already corrupt.
Now you want to be able to let the banks invest grandma's savings into some mortgage derivative.
That should be against the law as long as the game is already rigged so badly in favor of the House in the way it was.
So, yeah, it depends on the circumstances, you know, whether justice is really being served or not, you know.
Yeah, no, totally.
And it's interesting to note that that was pushed by by MBNA, which is the credit card company in Delaware that was Biden's biggest lifelong contributor, that hired his son, that he sold his house to one of the executives, you know, a lot of connections between Biden and MBNA.
And they did push for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, along with some other things.
And Biden, you know, he has his reputation as the center from MBNA, you know, because you see this so so devoted to their interests.
Now, so, yeah, please talk more about that, because I'm from Texas and so I'm not that familiar with this company other than what I've read over the years about Biden's interest there.
But I think most Americans sort of in popular culture, we all kind of heard maybe they discuss this on TV shows even and stuff like that, that you incorporate your company in Delaware and that way you can get away with a lot more murder when it comes to screwing over other people and this kind of thing.
This is the state that he's the senator from.
And that then apparently, especially like financial firms, credit card companies and banks and and companies like that, like to base themselves out of Delaware for very Biden-esque type reasons.
And then it sounds like from reading your book, this MBNA, as you say, the company that hired his son before Burisma hired him way back when.
Uh, this this company is kind of the epitome of all of that scene.
So please do tell if you could.
Yeah, totally.
And I'll just add just before I get into that, that one other element of Biden's career is not just Hunter Biden, but, you know, really his brother as well.
His family has been making money off Biden for really his entire senate career leading up to Burisma.
So, you know, Burisma and MBNA are just really the tip of the icebergs there.
But Delaware's status as this kind of mecca for for corporations is it precedes Biden.
It didn't start with him.
You know, I think there was a law passed in the in the late 19th century that kind of advantaged corporations there.
But it's really in the latter half of the of the 20th century that that firms start going there en masse.
One reason is the is the Delaware bankruptcy courts, particularly favorable to to companies that go bankrupt and not so much towards the creditors.
They tend to kind of do a very speedy process.
So that makes makes it very tempting for companies to go there.
And there was actually a attempt in the mid 90s in Congress to get rid of this this status of Delaware.
It was called the Delaware Killer.
I believe it was tried at least twice.
And each time Biden kicked up a huge fuss, you know, he was like, you know, why would you why would you get rid of this this this power of Delaware's when these courts have such great esteem and reputation?
You know, of course, he's he's protecting not just the local industry, but obviously a lot of companies that that incorporate them and donate money to him.
But so that's one element of it.
There's other laws that get passed over the years that that make it advantageous to incorporate into Delaware.
Of course, some of these companies actually physically located in Delaware.
But but, you know, they they all have their legal papers that there's tax advantageous as well.
Delaware is right now sort of a bit of a tax haven in the United States.
And and Delaware kind of turns into this hub for for white collar jobs, you know, legal jobs and that kind of thing.
A lot of suburbanites who are driving into into the inner city where these white collar jobs are located and then then driving out.
And the result there is that that, you know, Delaware, Delaware's entire economy is really based very much around around, you know, this kind of thing, whether it's bankruptcy or what have you.
And also there's a lot of credit card companies that credit card debt is start soaring, you know, from about the 80s or the early 90s and onwards.
It's increasingly the source of a lot of people's bankruptcy bankruptcies.
And the bankruptcy bill that Biden pushes at the behest of MBNA and other credit card companies, which he starts doing it actually in Clinton's at the tail end of Clinton's presidency.
But he finally manages to do it in the Bush.
Basically, it sets up a means test for declaring bankruptcy for middle class families and a whole host of other other kind of very onerous requirements for people declaring bankruptcy.
For example, they have to take like credit literacy or credit counseling courses, you know, I guess to sort of prove that they've learned their lesson or whatever and that they know how to manage their money, I suppose.
Some people don't actually know that they have to do that.
And so their bankruptcies, judges are forced to invalidate the bankruptcies.
There's actually there's bankruptcy judges that complain about this law and how badly it's written.
And, you know, they say this is probably one of the worst laws that we've ever seen.
All this kind of thing.
It imposes more costs on people who are filing bankruptcy.
And again, all of this is really at the behest of the campaign contributors that were contributing to Biden.
Right.
And in the midst of this boom bust economy where we know that the bottom two thirds or three quarters of everybody have to get the wind completely knocked out of them every 10 years or so and start over again and that without bankruptcy protections and stuff like this, you're making it just absolutely so burdensome on regular people.
And then meanwhile, what's the flip side of that?
Is Joe Biden and Barack Obama, his president when he was vice president, coming to the rescue of the banks?
Well, he was a senator during the TARP bailout vote, and then he was vice president in the Obama administration when they came for, you know, well, bailout so large that the companies could afford bonuses for everybody on Wall Street who'd ever made a bad bet on housing.
Yeah, and, you know, the the key there as well is that while the bank's going to bail out, of course, ordinary homeowners did not.
And that was partly because of the kind of people that Obama surrounded himself with.
You know, if you believe Biden, Biden's sort of trying to wrap himself up in Obama during this campaign.
You know, he does this typical thing where he'll anything good that Obama accomplished, Biden says, oh, well, that was that was me.
Yeah, that was the that was the Obama Biden administration.
If it has to be something bad that he doesn't like, if it happens to be, you know, mass deportations and that kind of thing that gets challenged on, then he goes, well, that's you know, I did.
I said what I said, but I'm not going to say what I told him.
But, you know, that was Obama.
But, you know, according to Biden, he says that he was involved in every decision of hiring and everything during the the Obama administration.
And of course, who did Obama hire to surround himself with?
He hired Clintonite people like Rahm Emanuel and John Podesta.
And he hired people who were connected to the to the very banks that were being bailed out.
And, you know, so so Biden, you know, if you believe his own sort of boasting about his role, the Obama administration is directly responsible in a large way with that for that bailout and everything that happened with with the banks after that.
Hey, guys, just real quick.
If you listen to the interviews only feed at the Institute or at Scott Horton dot org, I just want to make sure you know that I do a Q&A show from time to time at Scott Horton dot org slash show the old whole show feed.
And so if you like that kind of thing, check that out there.
Hey, guys, here's how to support the show.
You can donate in various amounts at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
We've got some great kickbacks for you there.
Shop Amazon dot com by way of my link at Scott Horton dot org.
Leave a good review for the show at iTunes and Stitcher.
Tell a friend.
I don't know.
Oh, yeah.
And buy my books.
Fool's errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan and the great Ron Paul.
The Scott Horton Show interviews 2004 through 2019.
And thanks.
Hey, guys, check out listen and think audio books there.
Listen and think dot com.
And of course, on audible dot com.
And they feature my book Fool's errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan, as well as brand new out inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audio books.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audio books.
Just donate $100 to the Scott Horton Show at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
All right.
So that's pretty good on the on the financial stuff so far.
If there's anything real important on there before we change the subject, let me know here.
I feel like I feel like we covered it mostly.
OK, good.
So now let's talk about the domestic police state before we get to the wars.
He has been I didn't I didn't realize.
I guess I did.
But I learned a lot, too, about his push for the creation of the drug czar and how Ronald Reagan kept trying to tell him no.
And I guess you know what, too, I guess I always thought the drug czar just meant the head of the DEA.
But now there's a whole other thing to that, like he's the DCI of older, you know, this kind of thing.
So and then and then the all this stuff with Strom Thurman's crime bills and the civil forfeitures and the drug wars.
And I guess, you know, we'll do we'll do the foreign drug wars as the segue to the rest of the foreign wars.
But but start with the domestic police state and drug wars for us here, because this guy, again, he's been in the Senate for 40 years.
And he as he put it in the debate a couple of debates ago, I wrote that I wrote that I wrote everything you claim you wrote.
He's the most law rightness and pessimist guy around, apparently, if you listen.
Yeah.
For a very long time, the one of the crime bills that he passed in the 80s, I believe it was the one that established that crack part of cocaine disparity that was considered his greatest accomplishment for a very long time.
You know, he didn't really have anything else to point to.
But when he ran for president, people were like, well, that's you know, this is this is the big thing that he managed to accomplish in his, you know, relatively young career in the Senate.
And yeah, Biden, as you say, you know, we think of Reagan and Bush and Rudy Giuliani as these very tough on crime figures.
And Biden really positioned himself during the 80s and the 90s to as someone who was even more extreme on them on these issues.
And I think that was purely for completely just cynical political calculation.
It's hard to interject here, but as you point out in here that he had been actually a public defender for a little while and knew something about what it's like for poor and minority people to be defenseless and completely under the onslaught of the state for essentially being themselves and in the wrong place in the wrong time and all that.
He sure forgot everything he ever knew about that later on.
Right.
Well, you know, forgot is perhaps generous.
I would say that, you know, I mean, I don't know if I mentioned it, but Biden's Biden's whole thing, I think, because he's not really ideologically committed either way, you know, one way or another.
He's always been more about, you know, he wanted to be a president or a senator from when he was a little kid and suddenly a young man.
That's why he went to law school.
And I think that's really the thing that explains his entire career is he just wants to rise to the ranks and he'll do whatever he can to basically go up there.
And, you know, Delaware was a state that had a very, very fraught racial history.
It didn't, for example, ratify the 13th Amendment until 1901.
That's the amendment that banned slavery, you know, for those of you at home.
And, you know, there was a lot of racial strife there, a lot of conflict.
Biden grew up in that.
And, you know, there were a lot of people in that area.
I mean, an era when crime and drugs were very much racialized, you know, people saw African American communities as kind of a problem, at least the kind of people that Biden was catering to.
And I think the reason why he goes in this spree of tough on crime, tough on drug, you know, posturing is basically to be able to, you know, I mean, he says it.
He says that he was on the banking committee, Senate Banking Committee, and he moves to the Judiciary Committee.
And he says, the reason why I'm switching is because I think there are more important issues for Delaware, namely crime and busing.
And, you know, he's well aware, as you say, he was a public defender.
He defended people who, you know, committed crimes because they were in terrible states of distress.
He defended a drag race at one time, which is amusing because later in the 80s, there's this incident where he sees a guy speeding down the road and he chases him down across the state line into Pennsylvania.
And there's a citizen's arrest.
And he goes back to magistrate court personally three times because he wants to prosecute this guy.
And Biden is well aware, I think, that the tough on crime stuff isn't good.
You know, he is told, yeah, when he runs for Senate in the 1970s, there's an expert on crime statistics in the state who says, you know, politicians are really misusing the crime statistics, making it sound like it's a lot worse than it is.
Crime's starting to decline.
And Biden, you know, kind of does a doe-eyed, innocent thing.
And it's like, well, not me.
I don't think he's talking about me.
And he criticizes Reagan for his tough on crime measures.
He says, you know, well, it costs more money to hold someone in jail than it costs to send your kid to Yale or Harvard.
And nonetheless, throughout the 80s, you know, first of all, he pushes for more civil forfeiture powers for police.
And he gets it eventually.
And that has been disastrous for many communities, mostly communities of color.
You know, a lot of black and brown motorists just being stopped by police willy-nilly just on very flimsy grounds and then having their property confiscated, I mean confiscated, stolen, stolen by law enforcement.
And, you know, we know now this has been a crucial tool for police departments across the United States, either to plug in budget deficits or simply sometimes to just party.
You know, they have all those equipment and stuff and they just use it.
And this is one of those issues.
It's not like Waco, which we're going to talk about in just one second, or Iraq War II or something like that, where it's a huge political issue in a way.
But it is the kind of thing where I've met so many people and heard so many people say that this is what made them political.
This is what made them question that whole thing about red, white and blue and liberty and justice and whatever.
What do you mean the cops can just take your money?
They don't even have to charge you with a crime.
They can just take your house.
They can take your whole ranch, your whole company, and they don't have to prove anything.
And you have to sue them.
And the burden is on you to get it back.
And they take some old man's money at the airport, at the bus station, on the side of the road, people who are clearly innocent of any wrongdoing, or they're the stepbrother of somebody who, you know, this kind of deal.
You hear about that, and I don't know.
I've known so many people who just civil forfeiture is what made them understand that actually the national government, well, the police in general, they're your enemy.
They're not your security force.
They're their own security force.
You're their enemy.
And pretty hard to deny it.
And then I just like how, yeah, oh, it was Joe Biden that's behind all that.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a system just ripe for abuse.
I mean, and it's not as if it was unpredictable, you know, and even it didn't take long.
I mean, it was, I'm not sure how many years, but it was shortly after Biden enacted the bill that expanded those powers that there were actually, there was a report by a newspaper that looked at the results of civil forfeiture.
And yeah, I found exactly what we know is happening still now, you know, just wholesale robbery of people.
Yeah.
Well, in the last couple of years, sorry, one more thing.
Last couple of years, they reported it.
They actually, the cops stole more than all the reported burglaries and robberies in America.
Good Lord.
And heists in America.
Well, yeah, there you go.
I mean, that says it all.
And, you know, one of the things about this as well is that Biden was pushing all this stuff while the crime statistics were actually going down.
I mean, in, for example, in the early nineties, there were reports, there was a Justice Department report, there were, there were FBI statistics that were showing the crime was on the, on, you know, going down.
And Biden told people, no, no, no, don't listen to this.
This is ridiculous.
That it's, the carnage out there is much worse than, than what the statistics say.
Anyone who thinks that the war against crime is being won is completely wrong.
And, you know, of course he's, he's still pushing these, these expanded powers of the, I guess the security state in the United States.
And it's the same thing with drugs, you know, drug, drug uses.
It was on the uptick at one point, but, you know, I think by the, by the late eighties and the nineties, it starts going down.
Of course, you know, there's ups and downs, of course, but on the whole, the trend is down.
And Biden is saying, you know, no, no, no, drugs are a huge problem.
There's a, you know, a plague of drugs everywhere.
You know, one of the things that was most sort of striking to me when I was going through his research was at one point he issues this report where he says, you know, he looks at the drug problem in Europe and he says, you know, basically Europe is a hellhole right now because of the epidemic of heroin.
I mean, you know, kids are shooting up in the parks and you can't barely take a step in the streets without stepping on a syringe and this kind of thing.
You know, there's completely over the top image.
You would think that, that, that, you know, Western Europe, one of the wealthiest parts of the world is some sort of hellish war zone or something.
But, but, you know, he is pushing that idea to, to kind of ignite panic and to make people scared and to make them more conducive to supporting these, these tough on crime, tough on drug measures.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, this whole thing with the mandatory minimums and the disparity on the crack versus powder cocaine and all of that, that was going on at that time that, and this is a little bit, you know, off topic for your book, but it's gotta be mentioned that the, probably the majority, maybe the super majority of the supply of cocaine into this country during that era was the American government itself.
The Ronald Reagan government itself was bringing that cocaine into Florida and Arkansas and into Los Angeles by the truckload full while keeping it illegal and keeping the market black and turning the market, of course, over to gang warfare to control and all of that.
Well, no wonder everybody wants to pass new gun control laws and pass new laws where obviously this crack stuff is way more dangerous than the regular kind and all of this kind of thing.
And all of this crackdown by the Reagan government with Biden's help was against this massive crisis that they had created by not legalizing it, keeping it illegal, but then at the same time, increasing the supply by however fold, a million fold maybe.
And, and they did create a huge crisis.
And then, as you say, use that mileage to pass all of these new laws.
You know, there's a, I was trying to explain Joe Biden to a friend of mine the other day.
And I can't remember.
It might be Eugene Jarecki or Kevin Booth's Drug War films.
I forget which one it was.
But there's one, it's just a clip of a random guy, but it's personal.
So it's, it's individual.
So it kind of brings it home.
Right.
And it's a bunch of guys behind iron bars in a prison in Southern California somewhere.
And, you know, they're all black guys from Southern LA, basically.
And the one guy, they, they all kind of quiet down.
So the one guy can talk.
And he says to the cameraman, he says, I'm doing 35 years for one pocket full of crack cocaine.
Does that sound right to you?
And then the answer is, hey, to Biden, that's just fine.
Unless you're his son, Hunter Biden, who could smoke all the crack that Burisma can buy for a million dollars a year while he's cheating on his wife and his dead brother's widow.
Then in that case, no, no jail time for him.
He's, he's perfectly cool.
But if you're a poor and black and from Southern California, yeah, 35 years.
And I'd be willing to bet, right, that that guy never lived to get out of jail.
He probably died in there over a handful of cocaine.
It's staggering hypocrisy.
And there's a video that you can find on the C-SPAN website of Biden kind of giving the speech.
And I think it was the early eighties.
I, you know, don't quote me on that, but you can find it.
And he's talking about, you know, we need to send anyone who has a rock of crack the size of a nickel, you know, needs to be put away.
You know, he's calling for expanded powers of death penalty for drug kingpins, which is, you know, sounds sort of really terrible, but it's a very expansive definition in Biden's view.
So, yeah, I mean, and the other thing to remember about this is that you're right, you know, that the CIA played a huge role in sort of bringing this flow of drugs into the United States.
Of course, Gary Webb looked at that and he was kind of smeared for making that claim and he eventually committed suicide.
But I mean, this shows how just a perfect system, perpetual feedback loop it is, where that was then used to lock up mostly African-American men and then put them to work in jails for just a tiny amount of money.
You know, the only form of slavery still allowed by the 13th Amendment is if you're imprisoned.
And if you look at the statistics, like I wish I had them, I can't remember them off by heart.
But if you look at the statistics of what prison laborers make in the United States, how much, how many products, what percentage of products they make, it's staggering.
It's like it's appliances, it's road signs.
So many things that, so many everyday objects that we take for granted.
So when people say that this is a modern form of slavery, that the slave system of the 19th, the early 19th century has just been replicated into this mass carceral system.
I mean, it's not hyperbole.
That really is basically what has happened.
Yeah.
I'm so glad you mentioned that because, you know, the cliche is like from Superman 2 or whatever, where they're just making license plates, which that makes sense, right?
It's a state good.
They make everyone have one.
And this is a machine shop and a low cost thing.
And it's a, why privatize license plates?
Make the guys do something.
That at least is, I'm not saying forcing them to do labor of any kind is really fair, but you understand what I mean?
But then no, like you're saying, actually all these products that you think are made in the market, actually many of them are made with prison labor.
And that includes, you know, the call center.
When you call and you're asking the nice lady for help, you don't realize she's chained to the desk.
You know, it's crazy.
It is.
Mike Bloomberg was using prison labor to work on his campaign.
Oh, to do like the calls on his behalf and stuff?
Yeah.
Oh, that's perfect.
Oh, that's perfect.
I got to get that link.
Oh, that's so funny.
Oh my God, that's great.
Now, listen, I'm sorry, because we got to do foreign drug wars and then Middle East wars real quick.
And I'll just be quiet and let you talk.
But first, you brought up the Waco massacre in your book and Joe Biden's position on that as a senator at the time.
Can you talk about that a little bit for us?
Yeah.
Biden's role, you know, as this kind of tough on crime warrior, maybe the preeminent tough on crime warrior through the 80s and 90s, at least on the Democratic side, he was an implacable defender of law enforcement of all kinds.
Of course, Waco happens and Biden really drags his feet on actually convening hearings.
People are saying, well, we have to get to the bottom of what actually happened.
He's saying, well, you know, if we're going to look into this, let's look into this with an attitude of not expecting malevolent intentions, but just mistakes.
These are just mistakes, you know.
So even before any inquiry is happening, he's sort of slow walking it, you know, trying to say that, like, you know, there's no way that anything was done here on purpose or anything malicious was done.
Law enforcement can only make mistakes.
It can never do anything bad intentionally.
And when he passes this anti-terrorism law in the mid-90s, which is sort of a precursor to the Patriot Act, there's a provision in there that's sort of about, you know, inquiring into law enforcement and looking at some of the things that it does.
And Biden, again, you know, says this is completely unnecessary.
It's ridiculous.
I can't remember.
I can't believe that we are doing this.
You know, why are we imputing law enforcement like this?
So, you know, that really shows you how loyal he is to defending the powers and privileges of law enforcement.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we don't want to dwell too long on that one because you got to talk to me a little bit here about Plan Colombia and the rest of his kind of very kind of paternalistic interventions in Latin America.
Again, over a very long career here.
Yeah.
Oftentimes in the name of drugs, right?
Yep.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So this is really the internationalizing of the war on drugs, the domestic war on drugs that Biden was pushing.
And now he's taking it beyond national borders and going, you know, south and sort of a case of sort of neo-imperialism, really.
And Plan Colombia is this is this plan to basically halt migration from Central and South America by, well, first of all, by giving military assistance to those countries, which already that's a red flag because part of the problem is that the militaries and the security forces in these countries are incredibly abusive and violent.
And that's part of the reason why people are fleeing.
So, of course, giving them more money is not actually helpful.
And in one case, it's actually the security forces are incentivized.
They're given more money if they kill more guerrillas or guerrilla fighters.
And so what they do is they will kill civilians and they dress them up in guerrilla uniforms and then say, well, hey, you know, we have a whole bunch of people over here to get more money.
At the same time, it's also pushing privatization and these kinds of economic policies that are making it a lot harder for people.
So it's not just violence, but also economic hardship.
It's pushing people to flee.
So actually, it fails at its own aim.
It actually drives the migration further towards the United States.
And, you know, this isn't a one time thing.
Biden, as Obama's vice president, basically pushed the exact same thing again.
And he's written an op-ed recently.
Well, I mean, when I say recently, I think in the last year or two, where he was basically saying, well, you know, these plans worked once before.
Let's do it again.
So this is what he's going to do if he becomes president.
This is what he is planning to do again, basically the same exact failed policy that already increased people's misery south of the border and drove them to look for, you know, better fortunes in the United States.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny for all the hype about Plan Colombia and, you know, stopping the terrible drug traffickers and then stopping the war between the central government and the FARC, which, in fact, continued on for years anyway.
Ron Paul.
I like bringing up Ron Paul.
Oh, you bring him up in your book, too.
Oh, right.
No, that was something else I read.
I'm sorry.
I read too many things.
But Ron Paul one time told a story where, and he says this has happened numerous times and it's just the way it was.
Whenever Plan Colombia was up for discussion in Congress, the only interested parties up there lobbying that had any opinion on it whatsoever were there on behalf of the helicopter firms.
And that was it.
They were just there to sell some Hueys and Black Hawks or whatever it was and move on.
There's no one else even interested in the subject.
No one else even with an opinion.
They got to be made to show up.
And it's just a welfare program for a couple of companies at the expense of the Colombians.
Right.
Exactly.
Okay, so real quick before we blow up a wreck here.
Thacey, the leader of the KLA.
And is he still the ruler of Kosovo here?
Biden called him the George Washington of Kosovo.
I am actually not sure if he's still.
I feel like I remember reading a while back that he may have actually been under investigation and may have been in trouble with the law.
For stealing people's organs out of their bodies.
Yeah, that tends to bring up some red flags, I find, organ harvesting not usually that popular with people.
But yeah, I mean, Biden, you know, this was the results, again, of that shift in the 80s.
And, you know, to his credit, Biden did oppose the first Gulf War a little bit.
You know, he argued against it and was a fairly lonely voice saying that this would be a bad idea that, you know, let the embargo play out and stuff.
But then when Bush launched the war and, you know, it was considered a great success, Biden, you know, just basically said, well, you know, I was wrong.
Bush made the right decision.
That took a lot of courage.
Of course, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dead, many of them kids.
And Biden from there on, he realizes, you know, well, you know, there's a real political cost or a potential political cost to not supporting some of these wars.
So through the 90s, he ends up being funny enough, whereas it's the Bush and the Republicans who are pushing the Gulf War and Biden and some Democrats who are saying, oh, let's not do that.
In the 90s, it ends up being the Republicans who are reluctant to go to war in Yugoslavia as it's breaking apart.
And it's Biden who is the most gung ho who wants to go in, whether it's in Bosnia or Kosovo and, you know, ends up basically throwing Bush's words in his own face, you know, saying like, well, you know, you were happy to go in at this time.
So, you know, why don't the same logic applies here?
And it's not just Kosovo as well.
I mean, it's he's also by the end of the 90s, basically supporting an effort to foment regime change in Iraq, which, of course, then he really, really tries hard to do and succeeds once we get into the new millennium.
Yeah.
And, you know, someone was playing a clip of him talking with Scott Ritter back in 1998.
I guess it was right around the time of pushing through the Iraq Liberation Act, where he's just saying it's he's I forgot the words, but essentially completely rejecting the possibility of negotiation with Saddam Hussein or any result short of his removal from office in the near term as being acceptable.
Well, you know, if you're right there, if you're a weak politician and sort of always, always worried about being challenged, the easiest way to kind of shore up your credentials, your toughness is to push for a war that, you know, you're never going to have to fight that somebody else's kids are going to have to go and die for.
So that's really that that is what Biden ends up doing.
Yeah.
And he really did.
And you talk about this in the book that in the year 2002, he shepherded this thing through the Senate just as well as the Republicans.
They might as well have been ruling the Senate at the time.
Oh, absolutely.
He was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.
And so he had a tremendous amount of power.
You know, if he wanted to, he could have put roadblocks in front of Bush's attempts to foment war.
I mean, he basically did that in 2005, 2006, when again, when the political winds shifted and suddenly became advantageous to be a Bush opponent, Biden in many ways did the right thing.
You know, he blocked John Bolton.
He did everything to try and block John Bolton from being appointed.
And he opposed the surge.
He opposed Bush's plan to kind of go into Syria and Iran and all this stuff.
And he used his perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to really make that happen.
But of course, that's 2005, 2006.
In 2001, 2002, we have a very different political situation.
On the one hand, you have September 11, you know, this terrible event.
A lot of people die.
A lot of Americans, very traumatic.
People are enraged and fearful.
And of course, the Bush administration uses that to fan the flames of war, to fan the flames of vengeance.
And Biden is facing re-election in 2002.
And, you know, like I said, in 1978, he kind of learned that, well, if he kind of adopts his opponent's positions and takes them for his own, that's a good way to insulate himself from attack and to be able to win.
And so in 2002, he's challenged by this guy, Ray Clatworthy, who's this right-wing Republican, very pro-Bush.
He challenged him before in 96.
He's really the only opponent up to that point that can rival Biden in fundraising, because Biden is just, you know, taking money from big business and wealthy donors, you know, this entire time, outspending his opponents, you know, two, three to one.
But this guy gets him a little bit scared.
He makes it clear, you know, he's going to attack Biden for not being supportive enough of Bush.
And I think Biden basically looks at the electoral calculus and, you know, he sees, he at one point says in a speech that if the U.S. just keeps bombing Afghanistan but doesn't actually send troops on the ground, it could be accused of being a, quote, high-tech bully.
And that bit kind of gets taken out of context.
And then he gets a torrent of criticism for this, and he gets called un-American and all this stuff.
And I think that's another thing that spooks him.
And so, yeah, through 2002, even though the only thing we ever hear about is Biden voted for the Iraq war like Hillary Clinton, that's actually not true.
Biden was integral to actually selling the war to the public, not just by holding hearings on the wisdom of going to war against Saddam and stacking it with pro-war voices and completely leaving out skeptics like Scott Ritter and other people who are saying that, you know, hey, wait a minute, maybe there aren't WMDs in Iraq.
But also then, you know, using this testimony that he himself arranges, this completely lopsided testimony that's pro-war, he then goes on to meet the press and other shows and he goes, well, you know, these experts are saying that Saddam definitely has WMDs and he's definitely in cahoots with al-Qaeda.
So, you know, I mean, what are our options?
And, you know, Biden now is really trying to claim that and he's been factually doing this repeatedly and he keeps saying it.
So, you know, I think you can no longer say that he's just getting something wrong or that he's confused.
I mean, you know, I think he is definitely lying.
He knows that this is not true.
But he claims that as soon as we vote for the war, he didn't think the war was actually going to happen.
That's one claim.
And he also says, well, the war was not something that I supported really once it started.
As soon as it started, I said, you know, this is wrong and I was against it.
Both those are not true.
After voting for the war, Biden actually does a little world tour, a mini world tour.
And the Delaware Republican Party kind of gives him a send off and says, thank you, Senator Biden.
Please keep supporting President Bush and his foreign policy.
He meets a Iraqi opposition leader in Germany.
He goes to Israel, Qatar, Jordan, basically trying to shore up support for the impending war, make sure that it's going to go smoothly.
He goes to northern Iraq, to the Kurdish enclave and he speaks to the Kurdish parliament and he says, you know, we have your back, basically signaling that if war breaks out and the Kurds want to fight, the United States will stand with them.
And once the war is launched, Biden is enthusiastic.
He's kind of a bit wishy washy when the war is about to begin.
He says, well, you know, we have no other choice at this point.
You know, diplomacy is finished.
We just have to do this.
It's not the best option, but we can.
And then the war starts and he goes, I was always in favor of the war.
You know, this is great.
This is exactly what I wanted.
And the war obviously doesn't, well, it starts going badly after some months.
It becomes more and more popular.
And even as the public and his own party is turning against it, Biden is staunchly pro war.
And as late as August 2003, he's calling for an infusion of 40 to 60,000 more troops into Iraq.
And of course, yeah, so he's right now trying to whitewash this record.
For some reason, it hasn't really stuck.
And for some reason, I don't know why Sanders doesn't slam him on some of this, some of this worse stuff, you know, not just a vote for it, but they actually he continued to push for it.
Perhaps we'll see that in the next debate.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
Now, so a couple of things are real quick of all the most important Democratic senators at the time, like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and Joe Biden.
I think any one of them could have stopped the war if they really tried.
And especially him, as you said, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, if he had had Scott Ritter, probably just Scott Ritter alone could have made the case against the war and completely destroyed the case for the pretended belief in all of these weapons being amassed against us and all that.
But with him and just a few others, and with Kerry determined to make that point that this ain't right, that the fact that Saddam Hussein wears a beret and shaves his chin is meaningful.
OK, this kind of thing.
He could have stopped the war.
And instead, as you say, he tried his very best to lead the way and shepherd the whole thing through the Senate in that way.
And I just Google Biden Afghanistan to see what he's saying about the new Afghanistan deal.
And the first thing that comes up is a picture of him putting a freedom medal around George W. Bush's neck in one of these stories.
Well, he's also praised Dick Cheney and all these people.
Karl Rove recently wrote an op-ed saying that Biden's the right nominee for the Democrats.
So there's a reason all these people like him, I think.
They know that he's, one, he shares some of their foreign policy views, but also that he's kind of a pliant person, that he will roll over and just let them do whatever they want.
And it should be added as well, beyond the Iraq debacle, if you happen to like Obama's foreign policy, if you happen to like his drone program and his use of special forces, special force strikes, that's Biden.
That was Biden's strategy, the counterterrorism plus strategy is what he called it.
He pushed for that.
Of course, we're seeing the tragic result of that now.
We were seeing it under Obama as well.
But Obama sort of limited his murders of random people to low-level terrorists and stuff, whereas now it's been inherited by Trump.
And then what did Trump do?
He nearly started a war with Iran by killing Soleimani.
And we can thank Biden for that policy.
Yeah.
Well, and he told the New York Times just a couple of weeks ago that essentially, as far as he's concerned, it's still 2009, and it's the same advice he gave Obama then, don't do the big surge, just do the counterterrorism plus, as you said.
And so he says, well, that's all I'll leave.
I'll end the war.
I'll just leave the counterterrorism troops there forever, starting at the beginning of my presidency and presumably through the end of it.
So that's his position now, which I don't know if he's commented specifically on Trump striking a deal with the Taliban now or not, but I presume he would oppose it then.
Yeah, I'd say so too.
I mean, it reminds me of his position on the withdrawal in Iraq, when he came up with his partition plan, which is basically to implement kind of Jim Crow-esque segregation onto Iraq, but even more extreme.
And this was supposed to be part of the withdrawal plan for the United States.
He succeeded in accomplishing that, as Bush would call it, a catastrophic success.
But yeah, he sure divided them and conquered them all right.
But the funny thing about that as well is that as part of this withdrawal, he said, well, we'll leave a small residual force, and the small residual force happened to be 20,000 soldiers.
That was his plan.
Right.
So, you know, not really even a withdrawal.
Right.
Yeah.
That was the Porridge to Cold plan, you know, back as they were setting up Obama.
That was his minimum that he could choose from, basically, at the time, instead of just firing all of them.
But anyway, and I like too how you mentioned, I would have forgotten probably, but he tried to get us to invade, tried to get Obama to invade Western Sudan to intervene in the war between the nomads and the farmers there.
Sounds like a really good one to get in there.
I mean, you know, on the one hand, I will give him credit because he was against the war in Libya.
He thought the assassination of Saad bin Laden should have gone ahead, although I think probably for different reasons.
You know, I think he probably just thought if it didn't work out, it would have been bad.
And he did oppose the surge in Afghanistan.
So it's not all bad.
But the problem with Biden is that he has this propensity to, whenever there's a panic, whether it's over terrorism or whether it's over crime or drugs or something else, he tends to go way, he gets carried away and he goes way, way onto the extreme, often more extreme than even people on the right.
And so the trouble is, if you have this guy in power, I mean, who knows what could happen?
Of course, events are always shifting.
History goes in many different directions.
Obviously, the climate crisis is kind of intensifying and you have to wonder, you know, if some sort of panic hits, the kind of panic that we're starting to see with coronavirus, what would a President Biden do about that?
You know?
Well, and think about running him for the next six months against Trump, where Trump wants out of Afghanistan.
And his point is that that's irresponsible, that we shouldn't be making that mistake now.
And, you know, you probably saw it went around the other day where these veterans have confronted him and said that he was disqualified because of his support for Iraq War II.
And he hid behind his son and said, well, my son was over there, too.
And I think he probably meant to say he was making the connection that his son, Bo, the one that wasn't a crackhead, died of brain cancer that he got from the burn pit in the war that his father, Joe, had caused.
And Joe Biden knows that now.
Somebody had pointed out to him, you know, where he got that brain cancer from was from the burn pit.
And so he's now finally made that connection.
I think he commented on the fact that there's that his son was mentioned in a book about the burn pit.
Oh, I guess.
Is that what's going on there?
But now he just hides behind him and says, like, he didn't say he was sorry and that that's the price he paid is that he had to lose his son over it, too, and that he's sorry.
He just said, oh, yeah.
Well, in fact, what he did was he goes, he goes, well, my son was over there.
And the guy says, well, I didn't say anything about your son.
And he goes, well, you better not.
Which is like, yeah, but you're the one who brought him up.
I didn't say that.
I said you lied me into war.
You're the one who sent me there.
You know, so he's going to have to deal with that for the next half a year.
Good luck.
Well, it's worth pointing out that there was a study, I believe, in twenty eighteen that looked at, you know, counties in those those states that went from from from blue to red, you know, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and did a very deep dive and found that some of these counties that flipped were were places that were disproportionately affected by by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and others that, you know, they either had people that died in those wars or were, you know, traumatized or physically maimed.
And that may well have been what cost Clinton the election, because, of course, I mean, even though Trump has expanded military involvement of the United States in the places that already exists, he did kind of campaign as someone who wasn't going to start, you know, any more wars and Clinton was exact was the exact opposite.
And that may have been one of the things that swung those states.
And I will also add, you know, I realized this maybe a few months ago that what's remarkable is that Trump, you know, not for lack of trying, but, you know, completely accidentally, I think, given that the the war with Iran did not start.
He's going to be going into 2020 as the first president in 40 years to not start a new war, because, you know, like I said, he's expanded the presence where it is, but I don't believe he's actually started anything new.
Whereas Obama, you got Libya, Bush, obviously, you know, take your pick.
Clinton, you have Somalia and Yugoslavia, Reagan, Bush, you got Panama and Iraq, Reagan, you have Granada and Libya and some others.
And then Carter, Carter, I think, got the U.S.
You know, he's been giving U.S. support to to the Taliban.
But I don't believe that he actually involved the U.S. in any war.
Green light for Saddam.
And yeah, covert support for the war in Afghanistan.
So he got a couple of big balls rolling there and declared the Carter doctrine that counts.
Well, I mean, that makes it even worse, because that means you go even further back.
So Trump, you know, I mean, you know, we should criticize the fact that Trump has expanded these things.
But to me, I mean, I don't want personally, I don't want Trump in power for another four years.
And the fact that he's going to be going into that election and being able to say that, if his, you know, campaign people actually realize that he's going to be able to say, hey, I haven't started a new war.
Unlike every president before that.
And as you were saying, if he actually winds up the Afghanistan war, if he manages to succeed in that, he is going to look very, very strong going into that election, particularly against someone like Biden, who was part of an administration that we now know was basically just keeping the Afghanistan war going for no reason, you know, basically just to save face and has this history of supporting not just the Iraq war, but all sorts of other military measures.
Yep.
All right.
Well, listen, there's so much more in this book still that we didn't get a chance to talk about.
But it's really great to have you on.
A great interview here and a really fun read.
Yesterday's Man, The Case Against Joe Biden, published by Verso Books, brand new, and you can find it there on Amazon and everything easy for you there, by Bronco Marchteach.
And it's not spelled like that, but you can find him at Jacobin and there at Amazon.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
No, thanks for having me.
