After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama administrations orchestrated the bailout of Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts, particularly in mortgage-backed securities, that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of speculation. As a result, social inequality increased to record levels. Corporate cash hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion was funneled into stock buybacks.
Watch Live: Senate Hearing on Oversight of Banks During Coronavirus Pandemic
0:57
The Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee will hold a virtual hearing on Tuesday on oversight of financial regulators amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on Tuesday on the federal government’s financial and monetary response to the coronavirus outbreak.
The officials that will testify includes:
- Randal Quarles, the vice chairman for supervision for the Federal Reserve
- Joseph Otting, comptroller of the currency
- Jelena McWilliams, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
- Rodney Hood, chairman of the National Credit Union Administration
Follow Breitbart News for more coverage of this hearing.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama administrations orchestrated the bailout of Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts, particularly in mortgage-backed securities, that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of speculation. As a result, social inequality increased to record levels. Corporate cash hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion was funneled into stock buybacks.
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become
a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way
a great country is raided by its elite.”
Karen
McQuillan
Amid simmering crisis over sexual assault
charges Nancy Pelosi endorses Biden
28 April 2020
On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
formally endorsed Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party candidate in the
2020 presidential election. In an eleven-minute video, Pelosi lavished praise
on the pro-war, pro-corporate long-time senator and vice president under Barack
Obama, the most right-wing of the major contestants for the nomination.
Pelosi called the 77-year-old,
semi-senile political hack a “voice of reason” in the coronavirus crisis and
absurdly described him as “a leader who is the personification of hope and
courage, values and integrity.” In the midst of the greatest corporate
bailout in world history, she specifically praised Biden for his role in the
multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street during the 2008–2009 financial
crisis.
Pelosi’s endorsement followed
endorsements earlier this month by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, marking the line-up of the so-called “progressive” wing of the
party behind the candidate of the party apparatus, whose official imprimatur
was signaled by the endorsement the same week by Barack Obama.
But the unity at the top has not
resolved the party’s deep crisis. Biden is despised by broad sections
of the working class and especially youth and younger workers, and there are
many indications that large sections of those, especially young people, who
supported the Sanders campaign may not accede to Sanders’ post-capitulation
demand that they vote for Biden.
Their disquiet has been increased by the
news last week that Biden’s chief economic adviser is Larry Summers, a key
architect from the 1990s to the present of the policies of deregulation and
economic parasitism that have enabled the financial aristocracy to monopolize
ever greater portions of society’s wealth.
This has been compounded by a simmering
scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse against Biden by Tara Reade, a one-time
staffer in Biden’s Senate office, who filed a complaint with Washington DC
police in March accusing the then-senator from Delaware of having assaulted her
in 1993.
The alleged incident occurred 26 years
ago, there were no other witnesses, Reade did not file a complaint with the
police at the time, and the statute of limitations has long since expired.
Biden himself has said nothing, but his campaign has denied the charges.
has no way of knowing whether Reade’s
allegations are true. One thing is clear, however. The response of the
Democratic Party and media organizations aligned with it, such as the New
York Times and the Washington Post, which have
spearheaded the #MeToo witch hunt and reveled in the “take down” of dozens of
prominent men on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct,
has exposed their rank hypocrisy.
The Times and
the Post failed to report Reade’s allegations for weeks
after the story was broken by Sanders supporter Katie Halper on her podcast in
March. In mid-April they posted articles emphasizing inconsistencies in Reade’s
story and insisting that it had to be carefully examined and Biden given the
presumption of innocence before reaching any conclusion as to his guilt.
The Democratic National Committee has
said nothing, nor has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sanders, Warren or
most of the dozen or so women on Biden’s short list for his vice presidential
running mate. Pelosi has spoken publicly only once on the matter, telling MSNBC
on April 17 that she was “satisfied” with Biden’s denial. She appeared Sunday
on CNN’s “State of the Union” program and was not asked by moderator Jake
Tapper about the issue.
The contrast between the treatment of
Biden by the Democratic Party and the pro-Democratic media and the treatment of
a host of targets of #MeToo sex charges could not be more blatant. The mantra
“believe women” that was proclaimed repeatedly, including by Biden himself
during the September 2018 Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has been supplanted by a sudden (dishonest)
affirmation of the democratic principles of due process and the presumption of
innocence.
What has been exposed is the role of the
#MeToo campaign as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Its proponents have
changed their tune because the McCarthyite methods of #MeToo in this particular
case cut across the interests of the Democratic Party and substantial sections
of the ruling class that are backing Biden in the contest with Trump.
There are, however, forces aligned with
the Democratic Party that are pushing Reade’s allegations and calling out the
party apparatus for seeking to quash them. The Intercept has
published a number of articles as have some pseudo-left Sanders promoters,
including Jacobin magazine.
This opposition has increased since the
posting Friday by Newsbusters of a video clip from an August 1993 CNN “Larry
King Live” program in which a woman, identified by Reade as her mother, calls
in and cites the case of her daughter, who was “working for a prominent senator
and could not get through with her problems at all.” The caller does not
identify the senator and does not mention sexual harassment, but the clip seems
to confirm Reade’s claim that she told her mother of the incident with Biden at
the time.
The video has been widely reported by
Fox News and other right-wing media, but largely suppressed by the rest of the
corporate media.
Fox News reported Monday that the
hashtag #dropoutbiden was trending on Twitter on Sunday, until it was allegedly
removed. Nick Brana, Sanders’ former national outreach coordinator, tweeted
over the weekend that the Democratic National Committee should either force
Biden to drop out or “admit that suppressing progressives is the true purpose
of your party.”
Another former Sanders senior adviser,
Winnie Wong, tweeted: “The video of Tara Reade’s late mother calling into Larry
King to blow the whistle about Tara’s sexual assault is being met with relative
silence from a cadre of progressives right now and I want you all to know that
I see you. We all do.”
Within this context, Pelosi’s abrupt
endorsement of Biden appears to be an effort to contain and silence the voices
calling for him to step aside and make explicit the party’s demand that the
matter be dropped. Pelosi’s video appears to be part of a circling of the
wagons around Biden.
On Monday, the co-chair of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal (Democrat from
Washington state), endorsed Biden, after having served as the Sanders
campaign’s national chair for health policy. Biden was the most
strident opponent of Sanders’ call for “Medicare for all” during the primary
contest, repeatedly denouncing it on the grounds that it would cost several
trillion dollars. Of course, both he and Sanders are now supporting a bailout
of the corporate-financial elite that has already reached some $10 trillion.
“I am ready to work with him [Biden] to
craft and then implement the most progressive agenda of any candidate in
history,” Jayapal said in a statement.
Her endorsement followed that of two
other former Sanders campaign officials. The Progressive Congressional Caucus’s
other co-chair, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, endorsed Biden last week, as did
Representative Ro Khanna of California. Pocan and Khanna served as co-chairmen
for Sanders.
There is nothing progressive in the
efforts of disaffected Democrats and their pseudo-left allies to dislodge Biden
on the basis of unsubstantiated sex allegations. Even assuming that Reade is
telling the truth, in which case Biden should be held to account, the fact is
that Biden and his party are guilty of far greater crimes.
The wars Biden supported in Afghanistan
and Iraq alone killed hundreds of thousands of people, including women and
children. The Obama administration, in which Biden served as second-in-command,
made drone assassination a major instrument of US foreign policy, asserting the
right to murder US citizens and carrying out the assassination of at least
three Americans. In 2010, Biden himself declared persecuted journalist Julian
Assange to be a “hi-tech terrorist.”
It is not a question of replacing Biden
with some other servant of American imperialism and Wall Street and promoting
the middle class politics of racial and gender identity. The crisis requires
the mobilization of the mass of workers, who are increasingly fighting back
against the return-to-work campaign of both big business parties, and behind
them all genuinely progressive elements in the middle class, on the basis of a
revolutionary socialist program in opposition to the entire two-party system
and the ruling class it defends.
After the 2008
crisis, the Bush and Obama
administrations
orchestrated the bailout of
Wall Street,
buying up all the bad debts,
particularly in mortgage-backed
securities,
that had been
used as vehicles for an orgy of
speculation. As a
result, social inequality
increased to
record levels. Corporate cash
hoards rose to $2
trillion. Some $4 trillion
was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced to pay for the economic consequences
of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply
been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale.
Once
again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity
to
restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
BLOG:
DURING THE EIGHT YEARS OF THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME WE NEVER HEARD GROPER
JOE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE LOOT HANDED OVER TO THEIR BANKSTER DONORS OR A COMMENT
ON SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (ENDORSED BIDEN) AND HER CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS
FARGO!
Biden
repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the
second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of
managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo
that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large
corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small
businesses.
Biden wants a new
stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion
By Michael Grunwald
Joe Biden wants a more progressive approach to
economic stimulus legislation than Washington has taken so far, including much
stricter oversight of the Trump Administration, much tougher conditions on
business bailouts and long-term investments in infrastructure and climate that
have so far been largely absent from congressional debates.
In a fiery half-hour interview with POLITICO,
the presumptive Democratic nominee sounded a bit like his angrier and less
moderate primary rivals, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, though
in unexpurgated Biden style. The former vice president said that the next round
of coronavirus stimulus needs to be “a hell of a lot bigger” than last month’s
$2 trillion CARES Act, that it needs to include massive aid to states and
cities to prevent them from “laying off a hell of a lot of teachers and cops
and firefighters,” and that the administration is already “wasting a hell of a
lot of money.”
Biden has been running a low-profile campaign
during the pandemic, tweeting, filming videos and appearing on Sunday shows
from his Delaware home while President Donald Trump has briefed the nation
daily from the White House. Biden has let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speak for the Democratic Party during the debates
over economic relief, offering supportive public statements that have faded
into the background.
But stimulus is a subject close to his heart,
and he passionately contrasted his own management of President Barack Obama’s
$800 billion Recovery Act in 2009 with President Donald Trump’s approach to the
trillions of dollars flowing out of Capitol Hill.
The Obama stimulus was wildly controversial,
but it won bipartisan praise for its strict oversight and unusually low levels
of fraud. In the interview, Biden was at his most indignant when he recounted
how he recruited a gruff law enforcement veteran and government watchdog named
Earl Devaney to oversee the Recovery Act in 2009, and how President Donald
Trump fired the Pentagon inspector general who had been selected to oversee the
CARES Act almost immediately after he signed it.
“I wanted to bring in the toughest
son-of-a-b***h in the country—I really mean it, I’m not joking—because we
wanted to make sure we did it by the numbers with genuine oversight,” Biden said.
“Right now, there’s no oversight. [Trump] made it real clear he doesn’t have
any damn interest in being checked. The last thing he wants is anyone watching
that $500 billion going to corporate America, for God’s sake.”
The Trump campaign said it would not comment on
the firing of Pentagon inspector general Michael Atkinson beyond the
president’s public comments on April 4, when he attacked Atkinson for giving
Congress the original whistleblower report about his call with the Ukrainian
president that eventually led to his impeachment. “I thought he did a terrible
job. Absolutely terrible,” the president said at the time. “He took a fake
report and brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay? Not a big Trump
fan—that, I can tell you.”
Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and
big banks, noting that “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,”
accusing the Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit.
He railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the
American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot at CARES
Act aid intended for small businesses. Over the last month, 26 million Americans have
lost their jobs, and Biden said many of those jobs could be gone for good if
mom-and-pop operations get left behind.
“We knew from the beginning that the big banks
don’t like lending to small businesses,” Biden said. “I’m telling you, though,
if Main Street businesses don’t get help, they’re gone.”
The CARES Act and three smaller coronavirus
relief bills have all passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and
Biden was careful to avoid criticizing Pelosi and Schumer even as he criticized
the results of the compromises they negotiated. He said he’s “in constant
conservation” with both Democratic leaders, letting them know his priorities
without interfering with their negotiations; he credited them with securing
major increases in unemployment benefits and other improvements to Republican
proposals that were initially skewed even further towards big business.
He was clearly disappointed that Pelosi and
Schumer failed to secure any new aid to states in this week’s $484 billion
package, but he suggested that could work out politically, because in the next
round they’ll be able to blame Trump and other Republicans for looming state
budget cuts and layoffs of first responders.
“They got what they could get,” Biden said.
“I’ve been in too many negotiations to second-guess anybody else’s.”
Still, Biden suggested that after four rounds
of legislation designed primarily to stanch the economic bleeding, the next
round should include more forward-looking investments that could help the
economy start to recover and grow once the virus is contained. He suggested a
“trillion-dollar infrastructure program that can be implemented really
rapidly,” as well as “dealing with environmental things that create good-paying
jobs.”
Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell have suggested that “green stimulus” would be a non-starter with
Republicans, but Biden said investments in light rail, clean drinking water,
and half a million electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s highways could
help retool the economy for the future.
Biden also argued that long-term growth
initiatives are America’s only hope to rein in a budget deficit that has
suddenly ballooned to an unprecedented $4 trillion, and is sure to continue to
expand as Washington continues to spend. He said that repealing the bulk of
Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut would help limit the red ink—“It wasn’t worth the
powder it will take to blow it to hell”—but ultimately, restoring jobs and
investing in the future is “the only thing that grows the economy back so the
deficit doesn’t eat you alive.”
Biden has loved talking about stimulus ever
since he ran the Recovery Act, and he sounded comfortable returning to the
topic from his Delaware home, although there were a couple of typically
hard-to-follow tangents, and one brief coughing interruption that he attributed
to swallowing a peanut the wrong way.
His main theme was the contrast between his
legendary harassment of the Cabinet secretaries, governors and mayors in charge
of spending Recovery Act dollars—he reminded me that he spoke with every
governor except Alaska’s Sarah Palin, most of them repeatedly—and “the
malpractice of this administration.”
“There’s no coordination. There’s no
accountability. Come on, the guy waits to hold up money because he wants to
make sure his name is on the checks!” Biden said.
Biden has been firing off a steady stream of
tweets attacking Trump for failing to make sure America has enough tests and
protective equipment, for complaining about his media coverage, and most
recently for suggesting that drinking bleach might help cure the virus. But
while Biden clearly hopes to persuade some 2016 Trump voters to back him in
November, he also needs to make sure that progressive Sanders and Warren
supporters don’t stay home.
BLOG: HERE’S GROPER JOE’S NEW PERFORMANCE OF
THE WEEK. THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY IS NOW A ‘POPULIST’
This week, Biden has taken flak from the left
for including the corporate-friendly Democratic economist Lawrence Summers on
internal calls. But on Friday night, he denounced corporate America as “greedy
as hell,” echoing the structural critiques of the modern economy that fueled
the Sanders and Warren campaigns.
He called for stronger assurances that
small-business loans will go to small businesses, and that aid to larger
corporations will come with strings prohibiting stock buybacks, executive
bonuses or worker layoffs. But he also went beyond policy prescriptions, saying
the pandemic might convince Americans that grocery clerks “and all the other
folks out there saving our rear ends and risking their lives for eight bucks an
hour” deserve a better deal. He thinks there could be a backlash against big
corporations who have poured their profits into buybacks and dividends rather
than worker training and research and development. He thinks the virus could
deal a blow to short-term economic thinking and anti-government political
thinking.
“I think there’s going to be a willingness to
fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time,”
Biden said. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
The Great Wall
Street Heist of 2020
28 April
2020
The economic fallout from the COVID-19
pandemic continues to have devastating consequences for the vast majority of
the population in the United States. The new month begins on Friday, which
means that rents and mortgages will come due for tens of millions of workers
who have no income to pay for them.
More than 20 million people have filed
for unemployment benefits over the past five weeks. In March, less than 30
percent of those who filed received any benefits. Millions more are ineligible
for any assistance.
Millions of people have yet to receive
anything, including the $1,200 federal cash stimulus, and are desperately
attempting to stave off destitution. Food banks are overwhelmed by demand and
are running out of staple goods. According to the Economic Policy Institute,
more than nine million people who lost their jobs have also lost their health
insurance through April 11, with millions more in the weeks that have followed.
There are, however, two realities,
two
Americas. While the economic destitution
of
workers is being used in an effort to
drive
them back to work over widespread
opposition, the corporate and
financial
oligarchy has seen its fortunes
increase.
Gigantic corporations, many of which
have massive cash hoards, are laying off employees while continuing to pay
executives. Entertainment
giant Disney recently came under public scrutiny over the fact that it has
furloughed more than 100,000 workers while maintaining its executive
compensation program. But this is the general rule.
US billionaires, since mid-March,
have
increased their wealth by $282 billion.
The
collective fortune of these 614
individuals,
which totals $3.2 trillion, has been
buoyed by
the continued rise of share values on Wall
Street, which increased sharply again
on
Monday.
A headline in the German
newsweekly Der Spiegel yesterday captured the economic
situation: “The death toll in the US is rising—so are the markets.” Noting that
while businesses remain shut down and joblessness exceeds by far anything seen
in American history, Der Spiegel writes: “So if the
fundamental economic data actually offer so little incentive to buy, what is
behind the rally? The solution to the riddle has three letters: Fed.”
The Fed—that is, the US Federal
Reserve—has made clear that it will do everything in its power to support Wall
Street. As a consequence, the markets keep going up. “If you wanted to bet on
price losses,” Der Spiegel remarks, “you would have to bet
against an institution whose funds are practically infinite.”
Beginning in March, as the Trump
administration and the media were downplaying the danger posed by the
coronavirus pandemic, the Federal Reserve began funneling money into the
markets—first by reducing interest rates to zero, then by initiating a raft of
programs to buy up assets from banks and corporations, providing them with cash
to purchase stocks.
The activity of the Federal Reserve was
endorsed unanimously by the US Congress in late March, when it passed the
“CARES Act,” which allocated $454 billion to finance up to $4 trillion in asset
purchases. Every single senator voted for the CARES Act, including the
erstwhile “democratic socialist” from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
The Fed is spending something on the
order of $80 billion every day. The central bank’s balance sheet
is expected to increase to as much as $11 trillion, from less than $4 trillion
last year and less than $1 trillion before 2008. This would bring the overall
value of assets held by the Fed to nearly half the entire annual economic
output of the United States.
One should call things by their right
names. Terms such as “asset purchases” and “quantitative easing” tend to
obscure what is happening. This is plunder, thievery, robbery on an
unprecedented scale. Since stock ownership is overwhelmingly concentrated among
the rich, it is the rich who are benefiting.
The Great Wall Street Heist of 2020 has
been aided and abetted at every stage by the Democratic and Republican parties.
The various institutions of the state, including the mainstream media, have
exposed themselves as nothing more than the paid hirelings of Wall Street, to
put the matter delicately. Others might have more expressive terms.
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and
Obama administrations orchestrated the bailout of Wall Street, buying up all
the bad debts, particularly in mortgage-backed securities, that had been used
as vehicles for an orgy of speculation. As a result, social inequality
increased to record levels. Corporate cash hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4
trillion was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced to pay for the
economic consequences of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply
been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale. Once again, the crisis
is being utilized as an opportunity to restructure class relations in the
interests of the rich.
Everything turned over to Wall Street
will be paid, in one form or another, by the working class--through austerity,
the further destruction of social programs and intensified exploitation. Hence
the relentless campaign to return everyone back to work, risking a new wave of
the pandemic and the deaths of countless thousands of people.
Such measures, we are told, are
necessary to “save the
economy.” But “the economy,” like the “American people,” is an abstraction. “The economy” that has been “saved” is the economy of the rich, capitalism. Every measure taken has been based on protecting the interests of the oligarchy at the expense of society.
economy.” But “the economy,” like the “American people,” is an abstraction. “The economy” that has been “saved” is the economy of the rich, capitalism. Every measure taken has been based on protecting the interests of the oligarchy at the expense of society.
Every policy has been guided by class interests.
A socialist response, that is, one based
on the interests of the working class, is of an entirely different character.
Trillions must be allocated, not to bail out Wall Street, but to implement an
emergency program to build up health care infrastructure and provide protective
equipment to all essential workers.
The loans and other mechanisms through
which the income of workers is earmarked for payments to the banks must be
immediately forgiven. Student debt ($1.5 trillion), car loans ($1.3 trillion)
and credit card debt ($1.08 trillion) could all be wiped out with the money
that has been turned over to Wall Street, with trillions still left over.
All workers must continue to receive
their full income for the duration of the pandemic. The highest quality health
care must be available to all, free of charge and on a completely equal basis.
There must, moreover, be real assistance
to small businesses. The so-called Paycheck Protection Program passed by
Congress, ostensibly to aid small businesses, has turned out to be another
massive swindle for large corporations, including restaurant chains, hotel
conglomerates and hedge funds.
Such actions and other emergency
measures to secure the interests of the working class, in the United States and
internationally, could not and cannot be secured within the framework of the
existing state institutions.
The entire response to the pandemic—from
the initial downplaying of the threat to the failure to organize any
significant response, the massive handout to Wall Street and the present
campaign to force workers back to work even as the pandemic rages—is proof of
the Marxist theory of the state. The state is not a neutral body. The financial
oligarchy rules. It is their state. The politicians
are their politicians. The media is their media.
The logistics, food production, health
care, energy, manufacturing and other basic industries must be restructured to
meet social needs, under the democratic control of the working class. The massive
bailouts of Wall Street must be reversed, with the social resources redirected
to securing the financial well-being and health of the working class.
Such policies cannot be realized within
the existing political system. They raise the necessity for the revolutionary
mobilization of the working class to take political power in its own hands
through the establishment of a workers’ government—that is, a government of the
workers, by the workers and for the workers—that will implement the socialist
policies required to save mankind from disaster.
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