TRUMPERnomics IS ONLY AN EXTENSION OF THE
MASSIVE TRANSFER OF WEALTH UNDER THE
BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA-HOLDER-BIDEN!
This process was sped up by the 2008 financial crisis, in which the Obama administration took measures to gut autoworkers’ pay while funneling trillions of dollars to Wall Street.
According to a Bloomberg analysis of the data, the richest 50 Americans now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. The increased concentration of wealth at the top in the course of 2020 is the result of the unprecedented injection of money into the stock market by the Fed, which has led to an explosive growth in the fortunes of moguls such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla chief Elon Musk and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Richest 50 Americans now have as much wealth as bottom 165 million
The Federal Reserve released data this week on US household wealth that documents the acceleration of wealth inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic.
ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images
Democratic candidate Joe Biden is offering a green light to migrants who want to flee from Cuba and Venezuela.
“The Venezuelan people need our support to recover their democracy and rebuild their country,” Biden told a political event in Florida on October 7. “That’s why I would immediately grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans” in the United States, he said.
The TPS status allows foreigners to live and work in the United States, and to get welfare and access to K-12 schools. Since 2017, President Donald Trump has blocked TPS for Venezuelans, amid campaigns by Florida business groups and D.C.-based progressives. Trump has also worked to shrink TPS populations created by prior presidents.
Biden continued:
There are almost 10,000 Cubans languishing in tent camps along the Mexican border because of the administration’s anti-immigration agenda. That’s the administration actively separating Cuban families by not processing visas [and] through restrictions on family visits and remittances. I think we have to reverse that.
If implemented, Biden’s welcome policy “will set off a new exodus from those countries as people try to take advantage of the opportunity to stay in the United States,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Biden’s plan would hurt Americans, she said. “What scholars found specifically when they looked at the [1980] impact of Cubans in South Florida is that the wages of American workers who were competing for unskilled or less skilled jobs went down significantly … The usual suspects will benefit — the employers who will have a labor surplus and will get away with paying low wages, [and] the slumlords who can fill up their substandard affordable housing.”
The impact of low wages and surplus labor on Floridians was sketched in a June 2020 article in the Washington Post:
KISSIMMEE, FLA. — The pandemic had forced them from their home. Then they had run out of money for a motel. That left the car, which is where Sergine Lucien, Dave Marecheau and their two children were one recent night, parked in a lot that was tucked behind a row of empty storefronts.
Even when the economy was booming, Dave and Sergine had lived in a state of near homelessness, shuttling between seedy motels that had become a shelter of last resort for thousands in the Orlando area. Last year, after six years of the motel life, they had saved enough to finally make it out. They bought an RV and rented a spot in a quiet and clean mobile home community. Sergine promised the kids they would never go back.
Now all that was gone. In theory, they qualified for a $3,400 federal stimulus check, but they had no bank account or address to collect it. In theory, Dave was entitled to unemployment, but as of May only about 43 percent of the state’s 1.1 million claims had been paid.
“I would immediately grant temporary protected status to Venezuelans as President." 🇻
— @JoeBiden🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/4vGTctYTLX
— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) October 7, 2020
“We have to be extremely prudent in offering any kind of temporary humanitarian protection,” Vaughan told Breitbart News.
Politicians ignore the emotional incentive for migrants to get into the United States, Vaughan said. “For the privileged, it might be a dollars-and-cents calculation. But for others, it’s more than that — it’s an opportunity to live freely with the opportunity to have a decent quality of life [and] to put their children on a trajectory towards prosperity.”
TPS migrants are rewarded for being in the United States, she said. “They are allowed to immediately access welfare programs, as happened with the Cubans [in 1980 and 1994] and Haitians [in 2010] — unlike other asylum seekers or green card admission – at an enormous cost.”
Even apparently small changes in border rules can precipitate floods of migrants, she said. The Central American migration began as “a trickle at first [in 2010], and quickly turned into a flood because the smuggler started to take advantage and fed this idea of coming here with kids, or sending your kids.”
The Central American migration was largely stopped in 2020 — but only because President Donald Trump and his deputies fought numerous high-profile battles with the agencies, various pro-migration groups, the establishment media, and many judges to impose a set of migration curbs.
Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular restrictions on immigration and visa workers.
But Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegal aliens, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
“The number of [foreign] people who could potentially benefit [from Biden’s welcome] is limited only by the tolerance of our government,” Vaughan said. But Biden had his progressive supporters “live insulated from the effects of it, whether it is their schools, their job markets, or their neighborhoods … they live in a bubble.”
Biden’s allies “disregard the effects of their actions on regular Americans, which means it’s selfish elitism.” Like the characters in the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, she said, “they use working people for their own sexual and emotional gratification and cast them aside, caring nothing for the effects on people’s lives.”
Opposition to refugees is bigotry, sneers WashPo columnist.
If @crampell stepped outside the country club, she'd see cheap labor hurts Americans' income, society, productivity & competitiveness.
But snobs praise diversity to reject solidarity w/ citizens.https://t.co/WdcYgwNU0R
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) October 7, 2
Study finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four decades of increasing income inequality
25 September 2020
A new study from the RAND Corporation, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” written by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards, provides new documentation of the profound restructuring of class relations in America over the last 40 years.
The study, which looks at changes in pre-tax family income from 1947 to 2018, divided into quintiles of the American population, concludes that the bottom 90 percent of the population would, on average, make 67 percent more in income—every year (!)—had shifts in income inequality not occurred the last four decades.
In other words, any family that made less than $184,292 (the 90th percentile income bracket) in 2018 would be, on average, making 67 percent more. This amounts to a total sum of $2.5 trillion of collective lost income for the bottom 90 percent, just in 2018.
Furthermore, the study concludes, that had more equitable growth continued after 1975 (a date they use as a shifting point), the bottom 90 percent of American households would have earned a total of $47 trillion more in income.
Given that there were about 115 million households in the bottom 90 percent of the US in 2018 population (out of a total of 127.59 million in 2018), that would mean that each of these households would, on average, be $408,696 richer today with this lost income.
To reach these conclusions, the authors break down historical real, pre-tax, income into different quintiles of the population (bottom fifth, second fifth, third fifth, fourth fifth, highest fifth). Looking at the period between 1947 and 2018, they divide the years based on business cycles (booms and busts of the economy).
Growth in Annualized Real Family Pre-tax, Pre-Transfer Income by Quantile from RAND, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” by C. Price and K. Edwards.
Their data quantitatively expresses the restructuring of class relations that began at the end of the post-WWII boom. Facing intensified economic crisis, automation, and global competition, the US ruling class undertook an aggressive campaign of deindustrialization, slashing wages and clawing back benefits won in the previous period by explosive struggles of the working class, while simultaneously funneling money to financial markets, expanding the wealth and income of both the upper and upper-middle class.
As the data shows, while the bottom 40 percent of American households made significant percentile increases to their income, relative to the top 5 percent, for the 20 years between 1947 and 1968, in the 40 years from 1980 to the present, this trend was reversed. In 1980-2000, the bottom 40 percent of the population experienced a net income gain significantly below that of the top 5 percent. It must be noted that because these are percentile increases, the absolute differences between the gains of the rich versus the poor is far larger.
Furthermore, not included in this data is wealth. In the last 40 years, and especially the last 10 to 20 years, the stock market has become the principal means through which the top 10 percent of the population has piled up historic levels of wealth.
Significantly, the data from 2001 to 2018 shows a sharp slowdown in income gains for all sections of American society as per capita GDP growth slowed and US capitalism experienced a historic decline. However, while the income of the top 5 percent of the population may have only grown by about 2 percent between 2008 and 2018, the wealth of the top percentiles of the population exploded. For example, according to data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the wealth of the top 1 percent of the population increased from almost $20 trillion in the first quarter of 2008, just before the worst of the financial crisis, to almost $33 trillion at the beginning of 2018.
By using the data, the authors come up with a set of counterfactual incomes based on what would be the different income brackets in 2018 without a shift in income distribution. The top 1 percent, instead of making on average $1,384,000 would make $630,000. The 25th percentile, instead of making $33,000 would make $61,000.
Data source: RAND; Graphics by Marry Traverse for Civic Ventures; as published in TIME Magazine
The authors of the study also make several other important observations by breaking down their data on the basis of location, education, and race.
Over 40 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under are now food insecure in the US
A blog post on the website of The Hamilton Project
has revealed that hunger in the US has expanded to
historically unprecedented proportions since the
onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among
households with young children.
Reporting on evidence from two surveys, The Hamilton Project shows that by the end of April 2020, more than 20 percent of all US households and over 40 percent of mothers with children under the age of 13 were experiencing food insecurity. These figures are between two and five times greater than they were in 2018, when food insecurity data was last collected.
Households and children in the surveys are considered food insecure if a respondent “indicates the following statements were often or sometime true”:
- The food we bought just didn’t last and we didn’t have enough money to get more.
- The children in my household were not eating enough because we just couldn’t afford enough food.
Lauren Bauer, a fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution who specializes in social and safety net policies, wrote in her blog post on Wednesday, “Rates of food insecurity observed in April 2020 are also meaningfully higher than at any point for which there is comparable data” from 2001 to 2018.
A woman clutches a child while waiting with hundreds of people line up for food donations, given to those impacted by the COVID-19 virus outbreak, in Chelsea, Mass., Tuesday, April 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Further placing the present ability of families to put food on the table in historical context, Bauer writes, “Looking over time, particularly to the relatively small increase in child food insecurity during the Great Recession, it is clear that young children are experiencing food insecurity to an extent unprecedented in modern times.”
Bauer explains that the surveys conducted their own national sampling of mothers in late April by asking the same questions used by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in previous food insecurity studies.
Significantly, Bauer also explains that the USDA aggregates a battery of questions on access to food from the Current Population Survey in 2018. If the nearly two-to-one ratio between the percent of mothers with children under the age of 12 who had food insecure children in their household and the percent of families with children who were not eating enough because they couldn’t afford enough food were maintained today, the “17.4 percent [of] children not eating enough would translate into more than a third of children experiencing food insecurity.”
The Hamilton Project (THP) is a Democratic Party economic policy think-tank associated with the Brookings Institution. Launched in 2006, the THP featured then-Senator Barack Obama as a speaker at its founding event, who called the organization “the sort of breath of fresh air that I think this town needs.”
The publication of the US hunger data is part of an initiative by THP to push for increases in government spending on national food programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.
However, the Democratic Party proposal to increase food stamp benefits by 15 percent is being considered as a temporary measure “for the duration of the economic crisis,” according to the New York Times. In any case, the increase is still insufficient to provide the poor what they need to adequately feed their families, with the average monthly benefit of $239 going up by $36 to $274 under the Democrats’ proposal.
Meanwhile, with tens of millions who have lost their jobs during the pandemic unable to collect unemployment benefits due to delays and backlogs in government systems that are ill-equipped to handle the increase in applications, the same kind of bureaucratic mismanagement is certainly to be expected in the present wave of SNAP assistance applications.
Along with every social program over the past four decades, federal food stamp assistance has been attacked by Democratic and Republican administrations alike as “welfare” that is undeserved by those receiving it. Before the pandemic, President Trump boasted that he forced 7 million people off of food stamps since taking office and the Congressional Republicans were working on a plan to further reduce eligibility and expand work requirements to qualify for the benefit.
The return of mass hunger in America is an inevitable product of the response of the US government and ruling establishment to the pandemic, which has been a mixture of utter indifference to the suffering caused by the health crisis and outright cruelty toward the working class, poor and elderly who have been attacked by COVID-19 infection and death as well as the deprivation associated with the economic crisis.
Clearly, the staggering magnitude of the impact of the pandemic on families has been revealed by the findings of The Hamilton Project food insecurity study. As dire circumstances confronting millions of people persist and deepen, the crisis is pointing directly to social convulsions that have not been seen in the US since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Kamala Harris Touts Wall
Street’s Support for Joe Biden
During VP Debate
JOHN BINDER
7 Oct 2020
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) touted Wall
Street’s support for Democrat presidential
candidate Joe Biden during the vice
presidential debate Wednesday evening.
As Breitbart News reported this week, economists with Moody’s Analytics on Wall Street cheered a Biden presidency, citing their support for his globalist agenda centered on more free trade and more immigration to the United States.
At the debate, Harris touted that Wall Street support.
“Joe Biden economic plan, Moody’s, which is a reputable Wall Street firm, has said will create seven million more jobs than [President] Donald Trump’s,” Harris said.
In recent months, Wall Street and nearly all of the nation’s biggest banks have lined up support for Biden and Harris against Trump’s economic nationalist agenda.
Economists with Goldman Sachs, a huge donor to Biden and Harris, have issued a similar report where they say a “blue wave” on November 3 will help return the U.S. to an economic status quo.
Biden’s campaign has raked in nearly $280,000 from Goldman Sachs employees. Trump has taken less than $9,000 from Goldman Sachs employees this election cycle.
JPMorgan Chase employees have given three times as much campaign cash to Biden as Trump. Biden has taken nearly $380,000. At Morgan Stanley, Biden has taken more than twice as much as Trump, nearly $258,000 from the bank’s employees compared to Trump’s $96,010.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT NO CAPS ON IMPORTING CHEAPER FOREIGN WORKER.
Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
Millionaire Democrat Donor Says Joe Biden Will Be Good for Wall Street
Scott Olson/Getty Images
15 Sep 2020395
2:53
A millionaire Democrat donor, who was once listed as a billionaire by Forbes, says Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden will be good for Wall Street in the long run.
Michael Novogratz, the former Goldman Sachs executive and hedge fund manager, told CNBC in an interview that while a Biden win against President Donald Trump may initially drag the market down, Wall Street will stand to benefit.
“I think Biden’s going to win. I hope Biden wins,” said Novogratz, who now runs an investment firm. “But if he wins, I think the market will go down, at least initially because he’s going to raise capital gains tax … he’s going to raise corporate taxes some and he’s going to raise personal income tax.”
“I think it’s probably better for the markets [if Biden wins] because the chaos Trump brings every week, every day just gets tiring,” Novogratz said.
Novogratz donated $200,000 to the Biden Action Fund in June.
Despite endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Novogratz said Biden and running mate Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) platform “sounds a lot more conservative than the Republican team when you’re talking about their plans.”
“There’s going to be so much pressure to start redistributing wealth whether it’s paying for college, paying for loans, if it’s Medicare for All,” Novogratz said. “Those are things the Democrat Party cares about and there’s going to be pressure and maybe we’re not going to get all of those but we’ll be heading in that direction. So I don’t see our deficits miraculously collapsing.”
Biden and Harris have sought to distance themselves from their large Wall Street backing in recent weeks. Although Biden blasted Wall Street executives in a town hall with the AFL-CIO union, a new report revealed that the former vice president’s campaign has assured Wall Street donors that his administration will maintain an economic status quo to their benefit.
This month, Biden touted Wall Street’s support for his plan to abolish America’s suburbs by seizing control of local zoning laws to construct housing developments and multi-family buildings in neighborhoods. Likewise, Wall Street is fully behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.
The Biden-Harris ticket has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to the Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Biden’s Billionaires
By Steve McCann
Many years ago, while participating in a voter registration drive, I came upon a grizzled and disheveled old man sitting in the overgrown and weed-infested yard of his paint-starved house calming smoking his pipe. Despite his gruff demeanor, Ully (Ulysses) was very pleasant and loquacious as we talked for over an hour on topics ranging from the weather to the innate foibles of mankind. It turned out that he had to leave school after the fourth grade in order to work in the fields to help support his family and had toiled in a variety of menial and labor-intensive jobs ever since. Yet, he had a deep and thorough insight into human nature. Among his comments about the rich and ostensibly well-educated was: “All the money in the world cain’t buy a fool a lick of common sense.”
I was reminded of that observation after reading an article describing the 131 billionaires who are pouring millions into the coffers of the Democrat party and Joe Biden’s campaign in their mindless obsession to defeat President Trump in November. Among the prominent names are Jeff Skoll, a founder of eBay who has contributed $4.5 million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner of The Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million, and Josh Bekenstein, Chairman of Bain Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5 million.
Far more Wall Street financers have also jumped on the Biden/Democrat party bandwagon than are supporting Donald Trump, whose policies have overwhelmingly revived the economy after the stagnation of the Obama-Biden years. The tech billionaires, not content to simply cough up untold millions in direct political contributions, are also funding massive voter drives, promoting mail-in balloting, creating divisive partisan news sites, aiding and designing the Democrat party’s digital campaigns and unabashedly censoring the social media accounts of the Trump campaign and innumerable conservatives.
The political party they are gleefully underwriting in order to oust Trump is no longer the party of the middle and working class (which is now one and the same) but a two-tier assemblage in which the prey is sleeping with the predator. The witless wealthy and socially aware are in bed with the avowed socialists and militant Marxists. What is holding this marriage of convenience together is a mutual hatred of Donald Trump and the undoable promises made by Joe Biden and the Democrat party hierarchy.
In a 2019 meeting with 100 super-wealthy potential donors, Biden assured the gathering that he would not demonize the rich and would only increase their taxes slightly while ensuring that their standard of living would not be affected by any of his policies. He also stated: “I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 Billionaires are the reason why we are in trouble”. Further, he unabashedly emphasized that the wealthy are not the reason for income inequality and “If I win this nomination. I won’t let you down. I promise you.”
Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
When the time came to deal with the Marxist/socialist wing of the Democrat party’s anti-Trump coalition, policy commitments, many diametrically opposite of what was promised the wealthy donors, were also guaranteed with a non-verbal pledge of we won’t let you down.
The first step was a de facto party platform. The 110-page Biden-Sanders Manifesto which includes, among other commitments, a massive job killing $2+ trillion climate agenda to phase out fossil fuel usage within 15 years, the elimination of cash bail, redirecting (i.e. cutting) funding for the police, dismantling all border protections, legalizing virtually all illegal immigrants and massively raising corporate and individual tax rates on the wealthy. This manifesto is a socialist screed that would destroy the middle class and permanently neuter the economy and nation.
An effusive Bernie Sanders proclaimed to the world that Biden and the Democrats have embraced his socialist agenda and that Biden would be the most progressive president since FDR. Sanders exposed not only the behind the scenes reality of today’s Democrat party but Biden’s figurehead role.
Further confirmation of the radicalization of the Party came about unexpectedly as the militant Marxist faction of the Sanders coalition forced the issue. Impatient and unwilling to wait until after the 3rd of November, Antifa and Black Lives Matter used the death of George Floyd as a pretext to take to the streets and begin their long-hoped for revolution. They claimed that rioting, looting, committing arson and attacking law enforcement was a necessity as this was a systemically racist country. Yet, they openly demanded immediate changes rooted in their radical Marxist ideology of class warfare not so-called systemic racism. As two of their preferred chants and graffiti slogans “eat the rich” and “abolish capitalism now” confirms.
Biden, the Democrat party hierarchy as well as virtually all Democrat elected officials refused to address the violence and those responsible. Thus, they tacitly approved of the lawlessness and by doing so flashed a green light to continue the riots. When forced to acknowledge the reality on the streets of the nation’s cities, they instead blamed Trump, the police, white supremacists and even the Russians. Due to their spinelessness, the armies of anarchy and revolution Biden and the Democrats unleashed will never be defeated or mollified by them.
Considering the vast dichotomy in the litany of promises made and actions taken, it is inevitable that either the moneyed elite or the mob of passionate true believers will be betrayed. There is no middle ground. Who will prevail?
Will it be the elites whose only weapon is money and fleeting political influence or the passionate mob whose weapons are unconstrained violence and intimidation? Will it be those who believe a revolution could never happen here or those who are currently inciting revolution with the implicit blessing of a major political party? Will it be those who believe that Biden and the Democrats, if elected, will be able to forcefully deal with the insurgents or the insurgents who now know that riots and extortion causes Democrat politicians to cower in the corner?
Beginning with the French Revolution and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, history has recorded that passionate mobs always prevail when dealing with a feckless ruling class or party. And the first casualties have inevitably been the wealthy elites.
I can envision sitting with my old friend, Ully, and asking him if he thought the wealthy elites, indiscriminately tossing money at the Democrats for the sole purpose of defeating President Trump, understood the pitfalls involved. He would lean back, slowly exhale a puff of smoke from his well-worn pipe and with uncontrollable anger in his eyes would say: “Nope. Those damn fools ain’t got a lick of common sense.”
Report: Joe Biden Promises Wall Street Donors the Status Quo in Private Calls
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
8 Sep 2020343
3:50
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is promising Wall Street donors the economic status quo that they became used to before President Donald Trump’s administration, according to a report.
An investment banker on Wall Street told the Washington Post that in private calls with financial executives two months ago, Biden’s campaign assured them that talk of populist reforms on the campaign trail was nothing more than talking points.
The Post reports:
When Joe Biden released economic recommendations two months ago, they included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers: allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account. [Emphasis added]
But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden’s agenda. [Emphasis added]
“They basically said, ‘Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into it,’” said one investment banker, referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls. [Emphasis added]
In a statement to the Post, Biden’s campaign downplayed the influence of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — left populists on trade and economic policy — on the former vice president’s agenda.
“The Biden-Sanders task forces made recommendations to Vice President Biden and to the [Democrat National Committee] platform drafting committee,” Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo said. “This anonymous source appears to be confused and uninformed about this very basic distinction.”
The report comes as Biden told AFL-CIO members on Labor Day that he will be the “strongest labor president” union workers “have ever had.”
“You can be sure you’ll be hearing that word, ‘union,’ plenty of times when I’m in the White House,” Biden pitched. “The words of a president matter. Union. We’re going to empower workers and empower unions.”
In the Democrat presidential primary, Biden told a group of rich Manhattan donors at a private fundraiser that “nothing would change” for them or their wealthy lifestyles if elected.
“I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money,” Biden said at the June 2019 fundraiser.
“The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished,” Biden said. “No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”
Like failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Biden has enjoyed a cozy relationship with Wall Street executives, along with his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA).
Most recently, Biden touted Wall Street’s support for his plan to abolish America’s suburbs by seizing control of local zoning laws to construct housing developments and multi-family buildings in neighborhoods. Likewise, Wall Street is fully behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.
The Biden-Harris ticket has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to the Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
As Bloomberg pledges $100 million, Wall Street boosts Biden campaign
15 September 2020
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has pledged to spend at least $100 million to support the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in Florida. This announcement Sunday is only the largest pledge of support from the financial oligarchy for the Democratic campaign.
Bloomberg aide Kevin Sheekey said the pledge of virtually unlimited financial backing to Biden in Florida, the most critical “battleground” state in the 2020 election, “will allow campaign resources and other Democratic resources to be used in other states, in particular the state of Pennsylvania.”
Florida has 29 electoral votes, the most of any closely contested state, following California with 55, overwhelmingly Democratic, and Texas with 38, leaning Republican. New York state, also with 29 electoral votes, is heavily Democratic.
Only once in the last 60 years—Bill Clinton in 1992—has a candidate won the presidency while losing Florida. The last Republican to lose Florida and still win the White House was Calvin Coolidge in 1924, when the state was lightly populated swampland.
Early voting begins in Florida September 24, and Bloomberg’s money will pay for massive campaign advertising on behalf of Biden, in both English and Spanish. Campaign officials said the funds would be devoted almost entirely to television and digital ads.
Even before the Bloomberg commitment, the Biden campaign and supporting Democratic groups had outspent Trump and the Republicans by $42 million to $32 million. The flood of cash from the billionaire media mogul will give the Democrats a three- or four-to-one advantage over the final seven weeks of the campaign.
The efficacy of Bloomberg’s huge financial commitment is open to question. The media billionaire spent $1 billion (a mere one-fiftieth of his gargantuan personal fortune) on his own pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination. He launched his campaign at a time when he believed Biden’s candidacy was near its demise, hoping that his money might forestall the nomination of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
The sudden revival of Biden’s campaign with his victory in South Carolina in February and then in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3 led Bloomberg to abandon his own efforts and endorse the former vice president, since their right-wing views on a range of topics, and particularly on foreign policy, were virtually identical.
Since then, Bloomberg has transferred $20 million from his abortive presidential campaign to the Democratic National Committee, as well as pumping in another $120 million to local, state and congressional campaigns, making him by far the largest single backer of the Democratic Party.
Florida is only the most glaring example of the general trend in the 2020 election, in which the financial oligarchy and Wall Street have indicated a distinct preference for Biden and backed it up with heavy financial commitments.
During August, the Biden campaign broke all records for fundraising in a single month, raking in $365 million, nearly double the previous record of $203 million set by the campaign of Barack Obama in September 2008, and more than Hillary Clinton and Trump combined to raise, in August 2016, $233 million. The Trump campaign also broke the Obama record, but its total of $210 million in August was far behind the pace set by the Democrats.
Approximately $205 million of the $365 million came through online donations, including 1.5 million new donors. This is more an indication of the widespread hostility to Trump among millions of working-class and middle-class people than any groundswell of support for Biden, who personifies the corrupt US political establishment, having spent 36 years in the Senate before his eight years as Obama’s vice president.
That means that $160 million—a near-record amount by itself—was raised through large donations from wealthy supporters of the Democratic Party. While Trump continues to rake in the lion’s share of support from industries such as oil and gas, mining and real estate, Biden has collected the bulk of financial backing from the banks, hedge funds and insurance industry.
Under rules set by the Federal Election Commission, a wealthy donor can now give as much as $830,600 to support a presidential candidate, routing much of the money through federal and state party committees rather than the candidate’s own campaign.
The result of the disparity in fundraising throughout the summer is that the Democratic presidential campaign has now caught up with and even surpassed Trump’s war chest. The Trump reelection campaign, despite raising an unprecedented $1.1 billion, has less cash on hand for the fall than the Biden campaign. According to press accounts, more than one-third of the money raised by the Trump campaign was used to pay the expenses of fundraising itself.
There were several reports last week that the Trump campaign was experiencing a “cash crunch,” and was unable to sustain advertising in all 15 of the so-called battleground states. Both the Washington Post and Bloomberg News reported that Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien has halted television advertising in Michigan and Pennsylvania at least temporarily, and that Biden was outspending Trump in nearly every closely contested state.
Stepien replaced Brad Parscale as campaign manager in July, at least in part because of concerns that Parscale had squandered Trump’s substantial initial fundraising advantage.
According to the media tracking firm Advertising Analytics, the Biden campaign spent $17 million in television and digital advertising in nine battleground states during the week of September 3, compared to $4 million by the Trump campaign.
The Clinton campaign outspent Trump by similar margins in 2016, but Trump campaign aides had boasted they would not face such a deficit in 2020. Trump has hinted he would seek to make up the difference from his personal fortune, but there has been no sign yet of any direct outlay by the billionaire to back his own campaign.
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