OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime
spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and
their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
by Ryan Cooper
America has long had a
suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over
the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had
only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But
in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during
the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went
wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations.
Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle
was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it
generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of
economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken
up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on
behalf of the citizenry.
Berle
exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get
his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial
Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production,
which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix
Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis
Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into
New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a
somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand,
antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to
play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and
pensions.
Lemann
then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The
New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative
businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided
major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like
Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social
Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a
lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the
Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social
order.”
Jensen
and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that
only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis
of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly
destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal
regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the
greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They
were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they
supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this
“principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on
irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and
share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To
Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more
active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The
best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington
policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much
to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative
blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable
level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of
citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit
neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was
intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he
writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations
that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning
democratic political economy.
Then
came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street
level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and
proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged
population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole
businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile
takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And
it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as
Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as
Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant
ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned
under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives
imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella
for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents
desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they
were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway
government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the
book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible
rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have
largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of
esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street
maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered
and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have
grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad
market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly
employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the
car industry once did.
In
his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy,
contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common
good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather
than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This
is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which
is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women
who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own
private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people
who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere
appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also
declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous
as government by organized mob.”
If
concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a
poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the
social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill
and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace
on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the
entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And
even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out,
especially African Americans.
Lemann
writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress
welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation
among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went
much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do
considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political
polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely,
for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of
vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently
calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,”
which is how far families are below the poverty line before government
transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.)
Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though
it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist
social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are
typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still,
Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive
history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written
illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives
of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a
national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington
Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington
Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
KAMALA HARRIS, LIKE SENILE JOE, HAVE A DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF SERVING
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND THE RICH.
All of this is, if we
can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already
proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful
at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote
last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s
pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted
that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry
professionals and their most trusted law firms.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the
trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack
Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over
the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is
the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity,
promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
The nomination of Kamala Harris and the
right-wing logic of identity politics
20 August 2020
The Democratic Party concluded the third night of its
convention on Wednesday, culminating in the official nomination of California
Senator Kamala Harris as the vice-presidential candidate of Joe Biden.
Wednesday’s proceedings were in line with the inane and
insipid character of the event as a whole. Various reactionaries and
multi-millionaires, from Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi, declared the urgent
need to elect Biden, the corrupt corporate shill from Delaware recast as a
living saint, to right all wrongs and restore America to the path of prosperity
and righteousness.
No actual program was advanced to deal with the massive
social and economic catastrophe produced by the coronavirus pandemic and the
bipartisan response of the ruling class to it. Everything was reduced to the
fictionalized narrative of the life of Biden and his comrade in arms, Kamala
Harris.
The selection of Harris was presented as a “historic”
moment in American politics. This appraisal was based entirely on the fact that
Harris is the first African American and Indian American woman selected by the
world’s oldest political party to run for vice president. There were the
inevitable proclamations that young girls throughout the country will conclude
from this fact that they too can someday be vice president of the United States
of America.
All of this is, if we
can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already
proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful
at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote
last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s
pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted
that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry
professionals and their most trusted law firms.
Just before she ended her bid for the presidency in
December 2019, Harris’ campaign boasted the most billionaire backers, including
oil fortune heir Gordon Getty and vulture capitalist Dean Metropoulos.
As San Francisco District Attorney from 2004 to 2011,
Harris pursued an agenda that included the implementation of a law to fine and
jail the parents of truant students for up to a year. As California’s attorney
general from 2011 to 2017, she warned parents across the state that they would
face “the full force and consequences of the law” if their children missed out
on too many days of school.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMAL HARRIS IS AN ADVOCATE FOR
BIDEN’S AMNESTY FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR. SHE APPEARS TO LIKE TO EXPLOIT SLAVE
LABOR!
During her tenure, Harris also oversaw California’s
resistance to a Supreme Court order that it release prisoners from the state’s
overcrowded prisons. Her attorneys (“for the people,” as Harris put it last
night) argued in court that releasing too many prisoners would deplete the
cheap labor pool of inmates who fight the state’s notorious wildfires for less
than $2 a day.
Serving as the junior senator from California since 2017,
Harris sits on the committees overseeing the federal budget, the judiciary, homeland
security and the intelligence agencies.
Through her position on the Intelligence Committee, Harris
has been privy to the most sensitive information about American imperialism’s
criminal operations all over the world. In this role, she has backed the
Democrats’ anti-Russia campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration
into taking a more hostile posture towards Moscow.
BLOG EDITOR: JULIAN ASSANGE IS UNPOPULAR WITH CORRUPT DEM
POLS. ASSANGE EXPOSED THE OBAMA-BIDEN AGENDA OF SURRENDERING U.S. BORDERS TO
NARCOMEX AND CHARACTERIZED HILLARY CLINTON AS A ‘SADISTIC SOCIOPATH’, NOT
SOMETHING HILLARY HAS MUCH DEFENSE ON.
She also supports the persecution of WikiLeaks and its
founder Julian Assange, who faces 175 years in a US prison for exposing
American military war crimes, declaring that the organization had done
“considerable harm” to the US.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMALA HARRIS SENATE COLLEAGUE DIANNE
FEINSTEIN IS THE BIGGEST WAR PROFITEER IN U.S. HISTORY. HER HUSBAND, RICHARD
BLUM, HAS HANDED OUT GENEROUS ‘CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS’ TO VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE
DEM POLS CLASS SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT FEINSTEIN-BLUM’S STAGGERING
SELF-SERVING CORRUPTION.
While feinting to the left as a proponent of cutting the
Pentagon’s $750 billion-plus annual budget, in July Harris voted against a
proposal by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that would have cut funding by a
meager 10 percent, saying she supported the idea but that any cuts to the
military should be done “strategically.”
Harris represents the Democratic Party, a party of Wall
Street billionaires, the intelligence agencies and the military. Her nomination
Wednesday came just one day after the Democrats paraded a number of Republicans
who endorsed Biden, including Colin Powell—the first African American chairman
of the joint chiefs of staff and a chief architect of the 2003 war in Iraq—and
the widow of the notorious warmonger, Senator John McCain.
Harris’ closing remarks at the convention last night were
preceded by those of Obama, of which we will have more to say later. Suffice it
to say that Obama, the first African American to be nominated by the Democrats
and win the presidency, proceeded to bail out the banks, continue the wars of
George W. Bush, implement a policy of drone murder, and deport more immigrants
than any of his predecessors.
It was the right-wing policies of the Obama administration
that paved the way for the ascension of Trump to the presidency.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the
trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack
Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over
the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is
the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity,
promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
However, the elevation of an increasing number of women,
African Americans and other ethnic minorities into positions of power, from
city councils, to mayoral offices, police departments and the presidency
itself, has done nothing to advance the interests of the working class. In fact, over the last
four decades wealth inequality has grown most rapidly within racial groups, as
a small layer of the population has been elevated into positions of power and
privilege while conditions for those of all races and genders in the bottom 90
percent have deteriorated.
In addition to
Obama, the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, national security advisors
Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and,
one might add, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel—have shown that women and racial minorities can pursue the
interests of the financial oligarchy as ruthlessly as any other representative
of the ruling class.
There is something fitting in the selection of Harris to
co-lead the Democrats’ ticket. The response of the Democrats to the mass
multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests against police violence that erupted
earlier this year was to divert them into the politics of racial division,
using the reactionary and false claim that what was involved was a conflict
between “white America” and “black America,” rather than a conflict between the
working class and capitalism. This effort now culminates in the selection of
the former “top cop” of California as the Democrats’ vice presidential
candidate.
This is aimed at blocking the emergence of a powerful,
united movement of the working class. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the
criminal indifference of the entire ruling elite to the lives of the working
class. As was shown with the near unanimous passage of the trillion-dollar
CARES Act bailout, their concern is for their stock portfolios and corporate
profits at the expense of more than 175,000 people who have now died and the
more than 5.5 million who have been infected by coronavirus.
The fight to advance the interests of the working class
will have to be waged through the methods of class struggle, in opposition to
the Democrats and Republicans and the capitalist system which they defend.
Kamala’s Lies
Duplicity aside, perhaps the only
details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her
inability to tell the truth about virtually anything.
By David Keltz
Last
week when Joe Biden officially announced Kamala Harris as his running mate on
August 12th, 2020, Harris made what amounted to one of the most dishonest
speeches by a vice-presidential candidate in recent memory. “This is a
moment of real consequence for America. Everything we care about, our economy,
our health, our children, the kind of country we live in, it’s all on the
line,” she said. Harris, who appears to have been honing her acting
skills during the pandemic, unleashed a bevy of emotions during her remarks, as
she went from “cheerful,” to “empathetic,” to “nostalgic,” to “indignant,” and
finally back to “cheerful,” all in a matter of seconds. In a desperate attempt to
portray herself as humanizing, relatable, and down to earth, she instead
reminded us all why the robotic Hillary Clinton was seen as untrustworthy and
was immensely unpopular. Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of
Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to
tell the truth about virtually anything.
Harris
heavily criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus,
blaming him for the death toll, the economic contraction, the high unemployment
rate, the closure of schools, homelessness, hunger, and poverty. “The
case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut. Just look where
they’ve gotten us, more than 16 million out of work, millions of kids who
cannot go back to school, a crisis of poverty, of homelessness afflicting
black, brown, and indigenous people the most, a crisis of hunger afflicting one
in five mothers who have children that are hungry and tragically, more than
165,000 lives that have been cut short, many with loved ones who never got the
chance to say goodbye.”
Aside
from the fact that Trump has been a huge advocate
for the reopening of schools, Harris did not mention that seven of the top ten states with the most COVID
deaths are run by Democrats, including New York, which has more deaths than
Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona combined. Not only was NY
the hardest hit state in the U.S., but it has far more
deaths per million, when compared to any other country, at 1,692. By
comparison, the country with the next highest death toll per million residents
is Peru, at only 796. Harris also did not bother to explain how Trump was
responsible for the 32,920 deaths in New York state, considering that it
was Governor Andrew Cuomo who chose to allow seniors who tested positive for
the virus to return to nursing homes, resulting in thousands of avoidable
deaths. The state’s death toll for nursing home residents is listed as 6,600, but the official number
is likely significantly higher. The AP reported that the real number may
be as high as 11,000, with some estimates
indicating that it could be closer to 14,000, considering that 21,000 nursing beds are currently
vacant,
compared to just 13,000 from one year ago.
In
addition to ramping up testing, and sending thousands of ventilators to the
state of NY, Trump allocated 350 million dollars to the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers for construction of alternate care facilities in NY,
including sending the USNS Comfort ship, and turning the
Javits Center into a military field hospital. For what it’s worth, Cuomo
praised Trump back in April at the time when his state was in desperate need of
the president’s help saying, “He has
delivered for New York. He has." Harris did not bother to ask Cuomo or
Mayor Bill De Blasio why they chose not to efficiently use the resources that
the federal government provided them with. None of those facts fit into
Harris’s narrative, so instead she moved ahead and blamed Trump for an economy that is
recovering quicker
than many economists predicted.
Harris
also bizarrely compared COVID-19 to Ebola. “It didn’t have to be this
way. Six years ago, in fact, we had a different health crisis, it was called
Ebola. We all remember that pandemic, but you know what happened then? Barack
Obama and Joe Biden did their job.” As of this writing the coronavirus has
killed 775,000 people
worldwide,
and 21,927,114 people have tested
positive for
the virus. Ebola, by comparison, killed 11,310 people
worldwide, while only 28,616 people tested positive for it. To put in
perspective, nearly as many people have tested positive for the coronavirus as
the total number of people residing in Sri Lanka, a country that has the
world's 58th largest
population at just over 21 million. Meanwhile, roughly the same number of
people that can attend a football game at Princeton Stadium (27,800), tested positive for
Ebola.
The
Democratic vice-presidential candidate also professed her supposed patriotism
and love for the country by calling the U.S. a country that is rooted in
institutional racism. She praised the “Black Lives Matter Movement,”
while failing to condemn violent protests, the rioting, the looting, the
burning of businesses, churches, and courthouses, and the destruction of
property that has swept across major cities including: Portland, Seattle,
Minnesota, Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C. and many other places.
“We’re experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that
has brought a new coalition of conscience to the streets of our country,
demanding change,” she said. The beneficiaries from this “moral reckoning,”
or non-social distancing exercise that has made our streets much less safe was
not something Harris was willing to explore.
Harris
also claimed that she, along with Joe Biden, would bring the jobs back, “We’ll
create millions of jobs and fight climate change through a clean energy
revolution, bring back critical supply chains so the future is made in
America, build on the affordable care act.” Harris and Biden somehow plan
on increasing employment while raising taxes
by more than three trillion dollars, including increasing the marginal,
federal, and payroll tax rates, and eliminating thousands of jobs in the energy
sector if the “Green New Deal,” is implemented. Harris spoke of
implementing many of the things that Trump not only talked about, but already
succeeded in accomplishing before the Chinese virus struck the world. All
of these outright lies might explain why Harris was forced to drop out of the
presidential race last December, after running her campaign into
insolvency coupled with her anemic poll numbers. Not to worry, the
mainstream media continues to tell us Harris is not only a moderate, but much
more exciting, and invigorating the second time around. She is none of
those things, but one constant remains: she is as dishonest as ever.
Image: PD, Cali National Guard
Report: Democrat Says Barack Obama Warned That Joe Biden Could Still ‘F*ck Things Up’
Former President Barack Obama warned during the Democrat primary that his former Vice President Joe Biden could “f*ck things up,” an anonymous Democrat said according to a report in Politico.
The line was originally attributed to an anonymous Democrat source cited by Politico‘s Marc Caputo from a conversation the Democrat claims to have had with the former president about the 2020 primary. It suggests that Biden was not Obama’s first choice for the Democrat party’s presidential candidate in 2020.
“One Democrat who is neutral in the 2020 race and spoke to Obama about Biden’s gaffe-prone nature recalled the former president saying: ‘Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,'” Caputo wrote.
That quote was first reported in January, but was revisited in a Politico story last week by Alex Thompson recalling how Obama supported his formal rival for the presidency Hillary Clinton in 2016 instead of his own vice president.
As both Obama and Clinton speak Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, with Biden set to formally assume the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night, these rifts between the top Democrats seem particularly relevant.
Thompson’s piece noted that Obama himself formally declined to be interviewed for the story that includes the quote about Obama warning about Biden’s capabilities as a candidate.
Instead, Obama’s spokesperson provided a generic statement that said, “President Obama has been unequivocal in his respect for Joe’s wisdom, experience, empathy, and integrity.”
But Thompson did speak to several top former Obama White House officials, such as former Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, among others. Jarrett, in particular, has been working to smooth over any hard feelings from the past and back Biden, after the former vice president won the nomination.
Thompson also reported that Biden’s allies are still displeased with how Obama and his top aides anointed Hillary Clinton as his successor in 2016.
Even Biden was a little hurt by the actions of Obama’s team.
“I knew a number of the president’s former staffers, and even a few current ones, were putting a finger on the scale for Clinton,” Biden wrote in his political memoir after leaving office.
While Biden was still pondering a run for president in 2016, Clinton was figuring out how to stop him, Thompson reported.
Clinton campaign manager John Podesta estimated that Biden would run for president and even drafted opposition research on him, while negative stories about his career made its way into the media.
Biden himself wrote in his memoir that Obama “was not encouraging” about him possibly running against Clinton in 2016.
As Biden began exploring a campaign against Trump in 2020, the New York Times also reported that Obama “cast his doubts” about it in a conversation with Biden.
“You don’t have to do this, Joe,” Obama told Biden, according to a source familiar with their conversations, cited by the Times. “You really don’t.”
The August 2019 story, by Times reporter Glenn Thrush, also detailed that Obama believed Biden should not run in 2020, but became more active in his former vice president’s campaign.
In March 2019, Obama requested a briefing on the state of the campaign from top Biden aides
“Win or lose,” Thrush reported about Obama’s message to the team, “They needed to make sure Mr. Biden did not ’embarrass himself’ or ‘damage his legacy’ during the campaign.”
Devastating Trump campaign video portrays the dramatic mental decline of Joe Biden over the last few years
The Democrats are hiding their radical platform and the party's capitulation to the Sanders-AOC socialists and instead touting the personality and purported character of Joe Biden as a guarantor of moderation.
It's a phony appeal on two counts. One is that the lefty rads are totally in control, and they know it. They just have to keep a low profile and count on the media to hide them and their views.
But the other count is harder to conceal: Joe Biden's mental decline is severe. Maybe they think they can limit his spontaneous interactions to interviews with Cardi B and People Magazine (which implies they will try to cancel the scheduled debates). Alzheimer's is no joke, and a substantial portion of the public knows someone who has been afflicted, so people can recognize the symptoms when they see them in Biden. And that's a big problem, because while Biden has his moments of lucidity, he also has offered plenty of evidence that he is not the same man he was five years ago.
The old gaffe-prone Biden was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, but the video below from the Trump campaign put the lie to the contention that his mental wandering off is just "Joe being Joe." It is barely over a minute long:
"You can't beat somebody with nobody" is a political dictum (attributed to Jack Abramoff) that carries a lot of truth. By nominating a candidate whose mental capacity is rapidly falling, the Democrats are trying to beat somebody with nobody.
This video argues against both counts of the Democrats' fraud. Biden lacks the focus and energy to keep the radicals reined in, even if that were possible). And his character, even if voters accept the fiction that it is sterling (ignoring his corruption in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere), now that nobody is home upstairs, it doesn't matter.
Undignified Obama
What an ex-president’s inflammatory and hateful nominating-convention address was made of.
Thu Aug 20, 2020
Last night Barack Hussein Obama gave what was probably the most undignified, inflammatory, hateful nominating-convention address of a former president in the history of the United States.
“This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,” he said August 19, puffing himself up with a studied indignation.
This is the same, shameless, Saul Alinsky-worshiping liar who presided over a seditious plot, a rolling coup attempt, to overthrow his successor using the CIA and FBI, the early outlines of which this writer sketched in Obama’s Insurrection.
The real-life conspiracy to oust Trump, though not (yet) successful, has allowed Democrats and their Deep State allies to practice these dark arts over the past four years that they may soon use to remove the mentally incompetent Joe Biden from the Oval Office to pave the way for Kamala Harris, who is not black despite what her publicists in the media say, to become president.
No one in the media seems to have noticed that the party of LGBT and racial utopia is now headed by a man who is apparently not completely convinced of the rectitude of those causes.
Biden has said homosexuals shouldn’t receive security clearances because “my gut reaction is that they are security risks.”
A friend of segregationists, Biden worried aloud that his children would grow up in “a racial jungle,” and patronizingly observed that Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Another of his legendary race-tinged gaffes went like this: “In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
This is relevant now that the Indo-Caribbean Harris, is on the Democrats’ presidential ticket.
The Wednesday night of the virtual convention highlighted the endlessly expanding thicket of lies, hoaxes, and paranoia upon which the modern Democratic Party is built. It was low-information propaganda for the ignorant and the gullible.
America is hopelessly, systemically racist, and so are police, the criminal justice system, and the prison system, the audience was told. People with money, the hated rich, run everything and do so with malice towards everyone else. The novel coronavirus that causes the occasionally deadly disease COVID-19 is racist, somehow having a greater impact on visible minorities. Climate change, which human beings are definitely causing, is on the verge of ending life on this planet if we don’t do something very, very expensive right away. Presumably racism is involved. Illegal aliens are the incredibly talented would-be saviors of America and anyone who wants to deport them or enforce the nation’s borders is racist. Donald Trump and the Republicans are shutting down the U.S. Postal Service so Democrats can’t vote.
That’s probably racist, too, come to think of it.
BLOG EDITOR: YOU WILL NEVER HEAR A WORD ON THE PLIGHT OF AMERICA’S MIDDLE CLASS RESULTING FROM MEXICO’S INVASION, OCCUPATION AND SUPREMACY AS IT IS ALL BY INVITATION OF THE DEM PARTY!
The pandering to Latinos was in full effect.
Illegal aliens showed up. One spoke in Spanish, and an entertainer named Prince Royce sang in Spanish. Michelle Lujan Grisham introduced herself as governor of “Nuevo Mexico,” where, she said, we “embrace our multicultural identity as our greatest strength.”
Gun-grabbers, included former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, made an appearance. She is the gun-control fanatic who had a littoral combat ship, a vessel of war designed to fire weapons that kill people, named after her, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, because a mentally unbalanced man shot her.
But the highlight of the evening was Obama, who continued slamming his successor in unpresidential fashion. It was cheap shot after cheap shot.
And Obama was doing all this for a guy he doesn’t even like.
Pretending to be a solid supporter, Obama described newly minted presidential nominee Joe Biden last night as a “friend” and a “brother,” even though the 44th president reportedly once said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
Obama said: “But we should also expect a president to be the custodian of this democracy. We should expect that regardless of ego, ambition, or political beliefs, the president will preserve, protect, and defend the freedoms and ideals that so many Americans marched for and went to jail for; fought for and died for.”
“I have sat in the Oval Office with both of the men who are running for president. I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.
“But he never did. For close to four years now, he has shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.
“Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe: 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.”
So many lies.
President Trump didn’t cause COVID-19 and he didn’t fail to act as it spread across the country. The weaponized novel coronavirus came to our shores from Communist China in the form of a biological attack on America. Trump shut down flights from the epicenter of the so-called outbreak. He did this while Democrats bent over backwards early this year urging people to ignore the virus and buy from businesses in the nation’s many Chinatown districts to prove they weren’t prejudiced against Asians.
If America’s democratic institutions are now “threatened like never before,” it wasn’t President Trump’s doing. He didn’t unleash the angry, surprisingly well-organized mobs terrorizing American cities after the death of career criminal George Floyd.
BLOG EDITOR: OBOMB HAS LONG BEEN IN BED WITH MUSLIMS AND MUSLIM DICTATORS. IT WAS A SAUDIS BILLIONAIRE WHO PAID FOR HIS HARVARD EDUCATION. WHAT DID THIS CLOWN KNOW ABOUT THE OBOMB? OBAMA SERVED THE SAUDIS WELL FOR 8 YEARS. THEY ARE PROBABLY FUNDING HIS PHONY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY WHICH WILL NOT CONTAIN HIS PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS AS HE CONTINUES TO HIDE HIS TRAIL.
Obama said the U.S. should be “a nation that stands with democracy, not dictators,” even though he supported the late Islamist strongman in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, and openly seethed with contempt for Israel, the only actual democracy in the Middle East.
Obama continued fetishizing democracy, even though the United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
Biden and Harris “understand that in this democracy, the Commander-in-Chief doesn’t use the men and women of our military, who are willing to risk everything to protect our nation, as political props to deploy against peaceful protesters on our own soil. They understand that political opponents aren’t ‘un-American’ just because they disagree with you; that a free press isn’t the ‘enemy’ but the way we hold officials accountable; that our ability to work together to solve big problems like a pandemic depend on a fidelity to facts and science and logic and not just making stuff up.”
“None of this should be controversial. These shouldn’t be Republican principles or Democratic principles. They’re American principles. But at this moment, this president and those who enable him, have shown they don’t believe in these things.”
No one in the media will challenge Obama’s claim that under Trump the military was deployed against allegedly “peaceful protesters on our soil,” even though Democrat governors and mayors invited anarchy in the streets by refusing to use law enforcement resources available to them to put down the recent riots.
In the White House, Obama frequently bashed those who disagreed with him. He trashed the Supreme Court during a State of the Union Address like a Latin American caudillo over its Citizens United ruling while the justices were seated mere feet away.
BLOG EDITOR: AT A LA RAZA ‘The Race’ RALLY, THE OBOMB ALSO REFERRED TO AMERICANS NOT FOR OPEN BORDERS AS ‘OUR ENEMIES’.
Obama referred to political adversaries as “enemies,” and demonized Fox News because the cable news network didn’t always depict him as he wanted. A decade before George Floyd’s death, Obama’s interior secretary, Ken Salazar, promised to keep his “boot on the neck” of BP after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
As for Obama’s “political props” smear directed at Trump, two uniformed U.S. Army soldiers were used as scenery by the DNC. During the virtual roll call vote, delegates from American Samoa pledged the territory’s delegates for the party’s nominee with the enlisted personnel in-frame. This violates Department of Defense rules. The Pentagon is reportedly investigating the incident.
Obama mentioned the passing of former civil rights leader and corrupt longtime Georgia congressman John Lewis last month, calling him “a giant of American democracy.”
The former president left out the fact that Lewis, who has been lionized in death, played the race card during the Obamacare debate in 2010, falsely claiming that the bill’s Tea Party opponents called him the N-word when he walked past them.
Unsurprisingly, Obama whitewashed the Black Lives Matter-Antifa-Democrat riots after the death of George Floyd, refusing to acknowledge the violence and looting carried out across America by the Left.
“To the young people who led us this summer, telling us we need to be better -- in so many ways, you are this country’s dreams fulfilled,” Obama said in a new, wordier iteration of his “yes, we can” mantra.
“Earlier generations had to be persuaded that everyone has equal worth. For you, it's a given -- a conviction. And what I want you to know is that for all its messiness and frustrations, your system of self-government can be harnessed to help you realize those convictions.”
“Messiness” and “frustrations” are Obama’s shorthand for the things known as “law and order” and “police” that prevent the radical street activists he focused much of his presidency on fostering, from forcing unwanted change on society by violence.
After Obama’s address, Kamala Harris’s speech was anticlimactic despite her perky, game show host-like demeanor.
Interestingly, she wore purple attire, just like Hillary Clinton did at her concession speech in 2016.
She rehashed the themes of the convention in uninteresting, politically correct ways.
COVID-19 “touches us all, let's be honest, it is not an equal opportunity offender,” Harris said.
“Black, Latino, and indigenous people are suffering and dying disproportionately. This is not a coincidence. It is the effect of structural racism. Of inequities in education and technology, health care and housing, job security and transportation. The injustice in reproductive and maternal health care. In the excessive use of force by police. And in our broader criminal justice system. This virus has no eyes, and yet it knows exactly how we see each other—and how we treat each other. And let's be clear—there is no vaccine for racism. We've gotta do the work.”
Whatever that means.
Harris wrapped up her address to tepid applause from the 20 or so people in the TV studio or whatever it was in Wilmington, Delaware, and then “Work That,” by hip hop artist Mary J. Blige, was played as if to reinforce the politically all-important myth that Harris is black.
No one mentioned how Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii knocked Harris out of contention during last year’s primary debates with a single, devastating colloquy about the senator’s tough-on-crime policies while she was California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney.
Harris said she was a “progressive prosecutor,” yet in state and local office she did things progressives don’t like, such as defending capital punishment, emphasizing truancy enforcement, and allegedly ignoring those sexually abused by clergy.
Harris’s campaign for her party’s presidential nomination ended when Gabbard said, “I’m concerned about this record of Senator Harris. She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”
Gabbard added: “She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”
There was no worthwhile comeback.
Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s convention speech was a snoozer.
“I wish Donald Trump knew how to be a president because America needs a president right now,” she said.
“As Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders warned us, if Trump is reelected things will get even worse. That’s why we need unity now more than ever.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi uttered bogus statistics, saying “more than 5 million Americans are” –present tense— infected by COVID-19.
According to Worldometers.info, at the very moment she offered that figure, a cumulative total of 5,700,931 Americans had contracted the disease. But Pelosi left out the fact that 3,062,331 recovered from it, which means that only 2,638,600 –or half the number she claimed— now have the disease.
Presumably, Pelosi thought that doubling the number of those currently infected made President Trump look worse.
Mariska Hargitay spoke about domestic violence, even though the audience consisted of the same people who tried to have her long-running television show, “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” canceled in recent months after George Floyd’s death reset the calendar to the beginning of Year Zero.
The Left made an attempt on the show’s life because it portrays police positively. Never forget that the Democratic Party officially endorsed Black Lives Matter and its pro-cop-killing worldview in 2015.
Rolling Stone leftist E.J. Dickson attacked Hargitay in June for daring to portray a good cop on TV, because cops are “embedded … in a system that perpetuates racism and misogyny and brutality.” The character, Olivia Benson, “plays a major role in perpetuating the idea that cops are inherently trustworthy and heroic.”
Even worse, Dickson wrote, “[a] not-insignificant number of police officers have credited the show with their deciding to enter law enforcement.”
The August 19, 2020, episode of the Democratic National Convention was fiction, like the popular police procedural show.
And it’s finished now, just like America will be if the radicals get their way.
Exclusive — Donald Trump on the Bidens: ‘It’s a Corrupt Family’
President Donald Trump told Breitbart News exclusively in the Oval Office last week that his general election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his entire family are “corrupt.”
Trump, the incumbent Republican, will face off against Democrat Biden in November. Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee, will formally accept the Democrat nomination for president, thereby officially becoming the party’s presidential nominee at the Democrat National Convention on Thursday night.
In his Oval Office interview with Breitbart News last Monday, the president made clear that his opponent and his whole family are “corrupt,” as evidenced by not just Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s business dealings with the Chinese Communist Party and Ukrainian oligarchs, but also other Biden family members, such as Biden’s brothers, James and Frank Biden and more.
Trump started by ripping into Hunter Biden for the $1.5 billion deal he cut with the Chinese. Hunter Biden accompanied his father, then the sitting vice president, to China on Air Force Two. Then just weeks later, he secured a $1.5 billion deal from the Bank of China, as Peter Schweizer—Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute president—has exposed. Hunter Biden also had a deal through Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, through which he made tens of thousands of dollars a month—even though he had never been to Ukraine before accepting the position. Joe Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma while his son Hunter worked for the firm.
“Hunter Biden came away with $1.5 billion, of which he gets big fees on. It’s not a possible thing to do,” Trump told Breitbart News in the Oval Office. “You can’t do that. It doesn’t—nobody has done that. Nobody has done that. China doesn’t do that. But he walked away in ten minutes with one-and-a-half-billion dollars. He gets fees on it. Ukraine, the same thing.”
But Hunter Biden’s questionable international dealings were not limited to China and Ukraine. As Schweizer’s most recent book, Profiles in Corruption, released earlier this year exposed, Hunter Biden’s firms had deals that secured hundreds of millions of dollars in other deals with the Chinese and with the Russians and Kazakhs as well.
“Other countries,” Trump said, noting next that the whole Biden family has been in on the graft: “The same thing for the family.”
Trump is correct about that. Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption exposed Biden’s two brothers, Frank and James, for various questionable deals in which they each engaged.
Despite having no experience whatsoever, Schweizer revealed this year that Frank was linked to $54 million in taxpayer loans from the Obama administration provided to help with U.S. relations in the Caribbean. Schweizer also revealed that Biden’s other brother, James, was employed at a firm to which the Obama administration funneled more than $1.5 billion in contracts over the course of Biden’s time in the nation’s second-highest office.
“It’s a corrupt family,” Trump told Breitbart News of the Bidens. “It’s a corrupt family, okay?”
In addition to Frank, James, and Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, is exposed in Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption as steering millions of dollars to a consulting firm she owned during her stints in her brother’s two previous presidential bids as his campaign manager. What’s more, Biden’s son-in-law, Howard Krein, who is married to Biden’s daughter Ashley, launched a firm from the Oval Office and repeatedly briefed investors privately, as Schweizer exposed in the book.
The president’s comments came in response to Breitbart News asking him about Biden’s attempts to frame him as weak on China, something that is hard to argue given the president’s and his administration’s work on the issue. Nonetheless, Biden’s team has tried to flip the script against Trump on China, something the president laughed at during his Oval Office interview as he laid out his successes in holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
“Weak on China? He’s weak period,” Trump told Breitbart News. “Weak on China? China has never—they’ve paid us billions and billions of dollars. They were having the worst year ever that they’ve had in 67 years. Weak on China? Those guys were pathetic. If Biden got elected, they’d own the United States within a very short period of time. China would own the United States.”
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