Multi-Millionaire Joe Biden's Pre-2010 Political Record Revisited

As Jules Witcover recalled in his 2010-published book, Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, the former U.S. Democratic Vice-President and current 2020 Multi-Millionaire candidate for the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination, Joe Biden, was "elected to the New Castle County Council" in Delaware "at the age of 27 and to the U.S. Senate at 29" after the then "young Joe tap-danced through an elite...prep school, the University of Delaware, and the Syracuse Law School."

But, according to the same book, as late as 1972 "Biden told a Young Democrats' Convention in Dover...that he was against legalization of marijuana and...against granting amnesty to anyone who fled the country to avoid" the Vietnam Era "draft;" and that "he flatly opposed school busing to combat segregation."

So, not surprisingly, after Biden "became the first senator to endorse" Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter's presidential candidacy "and agreed to chair" Carter's "national campaign steering committee" in March 1976, Biden "joined Bill Roth, his senior Delaware Republican colleague, in sponsoring a bill to bar an federal court from ordering busing;" and "veteran NAACP leader Clarence Mitchell accused Biden and Roth of being motivated by `racism...deep in the state of Delaware," according to the Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption book.

During the 1980's, Biden became a member of the Corporate Democrats' Democratic Leadership Council that Multi-Millionaire Bill Clinton was also a member of during the 1980's; and in the 1990's and early 21st-century Biden apparently began representing the special corporate interests of the U.S. banking industry as a U.S. Senator. As Jules Witcover recalled in his Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption book:

"David Bakerian, president and CEO of the Delaware Bankers Association, said Biden was cooperative in the repeal of a Depression-era antitrust law that had built a `firewall' between the banking industry and businesses designed to inhibit ownership of banks by large corporations..."

According to the same book, "in 2006 Bank of America acquired MBNA [Maryland Bankers National Association] and became Delaware's top private employer;" and "after the 1996 election, records at the Federal Election Commission indicated that MBNA executives and employees had given Biden $62,850 [equal to over $105,000 in 2020], the largest bloc of contributions from any source, under another fund-raising approach known as bundling."

Coincidentally, the Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption book also noted in 2010:

"In 2008 the New York Times reported that in 2003 Biden's younger son, Hunter, after graduating from law school was hired by MBNA `as a management consultant and' MBNA `quickly promoted him to executive vice president.' Thereafter, the Times said, he became a partner in a Washington lobbying firm with an annual retainer of $100,000 `to advise it on the Internet and privacy issues,' and in June 2008 Senator Biden paid his son's law firm $143,000 [equal to over $174,000 in 2020] for `legal services.'...

"The New York Times meanwhile reported that Hunter Biden had received consulting fees from MBNA from 2001 to 2005 at a time when his father was working for passage of a bankruptcy protection bill sought by the credit card industry. The story said Biden voted four times for the bill before it finally cleared the Senate in 2005. It also said Biden was one of only 5 Democrats who voted against requiring credit card companies to give better warnings about the consequences to consumers of paying only minimum required monthly payments..."

And in the early 21st-century, 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries candidate Biden, himself, also recalled that "every current law on the books in America today regarding illicit drugs, drug abuse, drug sentencing, the courts--I wrote it, as chairman of the [U.S. Senate] Judiciary Committee, as a member of 30 years."

Yet most people in the United States in 2020 now realize that what helped create a system of mass incarceration of African-Americans and poor whites in the USA in the 21st-century were the "current law on the books in America today regarding illicit drugs, drug abuse, drug sentencing, the courts" that Biden apparently "wrote."