Sunday, October 11, 2020

LOOTING THE WHITE HOUSE - THE TRUMP CRIME FAMILY AT LARGE

 

THIS FAMILY HAS NEVER EARNED AN HONEST DOLLAR IN THEIR PATHETIC LIVES!

Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.html

 “The legal ring surrounding him is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.” JONATHAN CHAIT

Eric Trump claims family 'lost a fortune' in pushback of pay-for-play report

 

ADAM KELSEY

Responding to a story that reported that hundreds of corporations, special interest groups and foreign governments seeking benefits patronized Trump Organization properties in recent years, the president's son argued Sunday that the groups represent a small proportion of their business and that his father has not benefited monetarily from his office.

"We've lost a fortune. My father lost a fortune running for president. He doesn't care," Eric Trump, an executive vice president with the Trump Organization, said on ABC's "This Week." "He wanted to do what was right. The last thing I can tell you Donald Trump needs in the world is this job."

The comments come a day after a New York Times story reported that President Trump "transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family's hotels and resorts -- and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration." The article, citing the president's tax records, reports that of the hundreds of individuals and entities seeking favor, "60 customers with interests at stake before the Trump administration brought his family business nearly $12 million during the first two years of his presidency."

"Almost all saw their interests advanced, in some fashion, by Mr. Trump or his government," the news story continued.

ABC News has not viewed the president's taxes and cannot confirm the Times' reporting.

On "This Week," Eric Trump echoed his father's rhetoric calling the story "fake news." He also implied without evidence that the report -- one of several in the past two weeks concerning the president's finances -- was timed to hurt his reelection campaign.

NEW: "My father has lost a fortune," Eric Trump tells @jonkarl when pressed on a NYT report that Pres. Trump turned "his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway's new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign." https://t.co/fsCP2um0H5 pic.twitter.com/MtZLiszs2K

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) October 11, 2020

Pressed by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl about the president's debt, which the Times reported as more than $400 million, Eric Trump characterized it as commonplace for someone with his level of wealth in the real estate industry. He also misleadingly claimed that all of the president's lenders are publicly known.

"It's in his financial disclosures," Eric Trump said, referring to the annual reports the president is required to issue under federal ethics regulations that do not list all of his creditors. President Trump has not voluntarily released his tax returns, as other past commanders-in-chief and candidates for the office have done. "You know exactly who the money's owed to … my father is worth billions of dollars, and on a proportion of his net worth, my father has very, very low leverage."

"If you own buildings, if you own real estate, you carry some debt. That's what developers do, that's what business owners do, they carry some debt," he continued. "We have a phenomenal company, but there's nothing new about that, and by the way, it's the same debt that he got elected on."

.@jonkarl: "Don't the American people have a right to know who (the president) is indebted to?"

"That's what developers do, that's what business owners do, they carry some debt, "Eric Trump says but President Trump still won't release his tax returns. https://t.co/fsCP2um0H5 pic.twitter.com/x3u8GcDpKy

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) October 11, 2020

In the interview, Eric Trump also responded to the president's refusal to participate in a virtual debate this coming week, as planned by the Commission on Presidential Debates following the president's COVID-19 diagnosis and subsequent hospitalization. The debate was canceled as a result and it is not immediately clear what format the next, and potentially final, scheduled debate will take in two weeks.

"My father wants to stand on stage with his opponent. That's how debates have been handled in America for the last 200 years, you've stood there and you've debated somebody," Eric Trump said, despite the fact that John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debated on-camera from opposite coasts, appearing on television in a split-screen in 1960.

"My father doesn't want to do it over a glorified conference call," he continued.

Karl noted that several members of the Trump family, including Eric and his siblings, defied protocol by watching the first debate maskless. Second lady Karen Pence also appeared at this past week's vice presidential debate without a mask.

"Given the concerns now, will you commit that the Trump team will abide by those safety precautions that the commission put in place at the next debate?" Karl asked.

"I'm happy to wear a mask," Eric Trump said, going on to accuse Democratic nominee Joe Biden of backing out the debate -- another mischaracterization. It was the commission that announced the plan to hold the second event virtually, and the president who chose not to participate. The Trump campaign said the president would also be willing to attend two more debates if they were each postponed a week to allow for an in-person format, but the Biden campaign rejected the idea.

"My father wants to stand on the stage with his opponent," and "doesn't want to do it over a glorified conference call," Eric Trump tells @jonkarl when asked if the Trump campaign will decline to participate in Oct. 22 presidential debate if it's virtual. https://t.co/R7EgB0oaON pic.twitter.com/s7Vl6T9MY6

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) October 11, 2020

On Saturday, the president's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, issued a memo stating that the president "is no longer a transmission risk to others" and "the assortment of advanced diagnostic tests obtained reveal there is no longer evidence of actively replicating virus." It remains unclear whether Trump has tested negative.

The memo came hours after the president delivered an address resembling a campaign speech from the White House South Lawn. The administration called the event a "peaceful protest for law and order," which Eric Trump echoed on "This Week." The president heads to Florida Monday to restart official in-person campaign events with a rally in Sanford.

Eric Trump also noted on Sunday morning that attendees at Saturday's outdoor White House event were temperature-checked and wore masks -- the latter measure, Karl noted, a less common sight at Trump campaign rallies prior to the president's diagnosis.

As the president prepares to return to the campaign trail, Karl challenged Eric Trump about his father's rhetoric following the vice presidential debate in reference to Biden's running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.

"Vice President Pence, when he debated Kamala Harris, said it was a privilege to be on the stage with her, recognized her history-making pick as Biden's running mate. And then the next day your father said that she was a monster," Karl said, referencing comments the president made on Fox Business Thursday. "Why? How is Kamala Harris a monster? Why did he say that?"

"Well, you know, there are a lot of stances that she takes are just -- they're mind-boggling to me," Eric Trump responded.

"But political differences are one thing. A monster? You're calling the Democratic vice presidential nominee a monster. Your father did," Karl pressed.

"You know, you're also dealing with a person who is willing to lie every single day," Eric Trump claimed, going on to misrepresent Biden and Harris' position on law enforcement funding.

Eric Trump claims family 'lost a fortune' in pushback of pay-for-play report originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

 

KAMALA HARRIS - I WILL MAKE A GREAT GLOBALIST DEMOCAT PRESIDENT AND SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS, BANKSTERS AND OUR PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS - "There's little doubt that today's Democrat Party is the party of the rich. Actually, that's an understatement. Far more than billionaires are involved. " PETER SKURKISS

Kamala Harris’s Expected Vice-Presidency Keeps Getting Bigger

If elected, ready to get to work. Photo: Michael A. McCoy/Getty Images

The debate on a distanced and plexiglassed stage on Wednesday night will bear little resemblance to the one Kamala Harris and Mike Pence started preparing for earlier this fall. When they began studying up for their Salt Lake City showdown, no one was speaking openly about presidential succession. But with the 74-year-old Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis and hospitalization upending the political universe late last week, it’s safe to bet that the question of preparedness for the top job is now inescapable. That goes not only for Pence, 61 and head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, but also for the 55-year-old Harris, whose own ticket partner, Joe Biden, is 77 and shared a debate stage with a possibly infectious Trump last week. And if elected, Biden would be several years older on day one of his administration than any previous president.

If the ex-VP and California senator do prevail in November, though, it’s looking more and more like — even under normal circumstances — Harris is poised to wield a whole new kind of influence as second-in-command. That’s not just because of the virus, or even because Biden seems intent on modeling the shape of her vice-presidency after his own unusually powerful tenure: As a condition of accepting the veep role, the Delaware senator had demanded he serve as Barack Obama’s senior-most adviser. (Biden ran point on Obama’s economic recovery legislation, the U.S. presence in Iraq, and their relationship with Congress — and he has still never tired of reminding anyone who will listen that he was always “the last guy in the room” for Obama’s big decisions.)

Setting aside the bewildering Pence, who’s effectively disappeared for months at a time only to resurface when it’s politically convenient, Biden’s own vice-presidency was part of a trend that’s been accelerating ever since Walter Mondale reinvented the VP gig back in the ’70s — never mind HBO’s skewering of the role as irrelevant and at least slightly pathetic. Biden had been in office for less than a year when the headlines started: “Second-Most Powerful Vice President in History?,” the New York Times Magazine asked in November 2009. Soon after he and Obama won reelection, the Washington Post debated, Was Biden now even “a more powerful vice president than Dick Cheney?” Around that time, National Journal nearly granted him the upgrade: “The Most Influential Vice President in History?” For his part, Cheney never needed any question marks. As he was leaving D.C., NPR profiled the man often caricatured as George W. Bush’s puppet master as “A VP With Unprecedented Power.”

Harris showed her value on the ticket right away, helping to spur a huge fundraising spike in the wake of her nomination. The campaign and the Democratic National Committee reported raising nearly $365 million the month she joined the ticket — at that point by far the highest monthly total in presidential-campaign history and a sign of the voting public’s enthusiasm for Harris, the first Black woman and first person of Asian descent on a major-party presidential ticket. And Democrats have recently been planning for Harris to take a star turn grilling Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett later this month.

But it’s the expanding outline of her expected post-November role that now has some party heavyweights curious as Election Day comes into sight, the Democratic polling lead looks stronger and stronger, and the sheer scale of the next administration’s task grows clearer. As the virus’s American death toll raced past 200,000 this summer, Biden spoke often with friends about how he considered his arrangement with Obama to be a model for his own government, which would surely face an even steeper uphill climb from its inception than Obama’s did, thanks to the pandemic’s devastation and the unrelentingly bitter division in D.C. that’s only grown worse since the September death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Many Democrats close to the ticket now expect Harris to take charge of a series of early projects like Biden did.

When he called Harris to offer her the job via video-chat in August, his first words were, “You ready to go to work?” She replied, “Oh my God, I am so ready to go to work.” Biden’s first job under Obama was to sell the new president’s economic stimulus, and Harris will likely take the lead on significant pieces of the COVID-19 recovery agenda — a broad and daunting enough lift that such a burden-sharing arrangement feels inevitable — even if she isn’t tasked with shepherding an initial bill through Congress, as he was. Biden and Harris have both also talked a lot about addressing injustice in policing and systemic racism in the judicial system early in their administration; Harris has been one of Washington’s most prominent voices on the subjects, and her role is likely to gain in prominence early next year, according to Democrats close to her. “The status quo’s not working,” she told me in June.

Meanwhile, in private, Biden has often spoken of the presidency as a job that’s principally concerned with global matters. A former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who spent long spells of the Obama years on international assignments, Biden is almost certainly planning to spend a significant time abroad early in his presidency rebuilding relationships that were strained or broken during the Trump years. That would likely mean handing significant chunks of the domestic agenda to Harris, who is well regarded by her colleagues in the Senate. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, was pulling behind the scenes for Biden to choose Harris, he revealed at a recent private fundraiser with Missouri donors, and so was Chuck Schumer. Aides to fellow senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand sometimes whispered to me early in the presidential primary that she was their second-choice candidate, after their bosses.

But even setting aside tangible factors, a considerable source of power for Harris would be her de facto elevation as the 2024 Democratic front-runner.
Biden won’t say it out loud, but if he wins, he is highly unlikely to run for a second term, and he likes to talk about himself as a bridge to a new generation of leadership. Choosing Harris was a clear first signal about the direction he envisions for his party: They are both consensus-seeking liberals with a nose for the party’s political center, not representatives of the insurgent left. Harris will immediately become a general for that faction of the party’s pending struggle with the activists who are already preparing to pressure the administration to follow through on its biggest-picture progressive campaign-season promises. One senior Democrat who’s worked with Harris predicted this would start even before the inauguration, as Biden builds his Cabinet. Another senior Democrat noted that Harris was no stranger to the party’s intramural fights after her own campaign’s struggles with health-care policy and the public reexamination of her time as a prosecutor. (“It is frustrating,” she told me on her campaign bus in Iowa in August, referring to attempts to categorize her ideologically. “It tends to oversimplify issues.”)

Struggling to land a convincing punch against Biden over the summer, Trump’s campaign team took to painting Harris as the secret far-left power behind the former vice-president’s throne. “It’s like we’ve been saying all along: Joe Biden is nothing more than a puppet for the Radical Left, and it looks like Kamala Harris will be helping pull the strings,” read a typical early-fall Trump-campaign fundraising email, riffing off a slip of the tongue from the VP candidate, who referred to a “Harris administration” on the trail. But there’s no actual evidence that she’s directly convinced Biden to budge an inch on any policy, and plenty of Democratic primary voters would laugh at the idea of Harris as anything close to a socialist. Still, some in Biden’s orbit remain sensitive about Harris’s attack on him over his busing position in the first presidential debate in Miami in June and bristle at the idea that she could be especially influential over him in Washington.

Nonetheless, Biden himself has embraced the idea of a notably tight relationship — as he had with Obama — and the two are already close. Over the course of the primary, Biden and Harris often ran into each other, and they went out of their way to carve out private time to catch up on the sidelines of debates and at charter air terminals when they had extra time before their respective takeoffs, much more than either did with just about any other candidate. Especially as the memory of the first debate faded, they regained a friendly footing that was first forged during the Obama administration — Harris, then California’s attorney general, was a close ally of the White House, at one point even fielding an offer from Obama to be considered as U.S. attorney general — but, more importantly, during the economic recovery from the Great Recession.

Then, Harris worked closely with Beau Biden, Joe’s son who was then Delaware’s attorney general and who died in 2015. When Harris first appeared as Biden’s running-mate in Wilmington this summer, she reminisced about their relationship and the former VP said she’d been “an honorary Biden for quite some time.” And, with no need for subtlety, he also revealed a bit about how he envisioned Harris’s job working: “I asked Kamala to be the last voice in the room.”

25 Questions Kamala Harris Should Be Asked 

REBECCA MANSOUR

6 Oct 2020421

9:03

Wednesday’s vice presidential debate provides an opportunity for the American public to get answers from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA).

The Democratic vice presidential nominee should be asked the following 25 questions. This list is by no means exhaustive.

Many of these questions were suggested by this author last month, but because they remain unanswered, I offer them again in the hope that the debate moderator will see fit to get answers from the California senator who, if elected, will be one heart beat away from the presidency.

1. After President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, many Democrats endorsed the idea of “packing” the Supreme Court by expanding the number of seats and filling them with liberal justices. You and Vice President Biden have refused to give your position on court-packing. Are you in favor of packing the court?

2. Do you believe Judge Barrett’s resume as a federal judge, former Supreme Court law clerk, and Notre Dame law professor qualifies her for the job? If not, why not? If so, how do you—as a feminist—justify your apparent ambivalence about even meeting with a qualified woman judicial nominee?

3. Judge Barrett has been attacked by members of your party because of her Catholic faith. This is of great concern to many millions of American Catholics because this appears to be a pattern with your party. In fact, you yourself once attacked a judicial nominee on the basis of his membership in the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, which is the largest fraternal organization in the world and includes among its past and present members many prominent Americans like President John F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-LA), and Vince Lombardi. Do you believe that being a member of the Knights of Columbus disqualifies a person from holding public office? Would you refuse to hire someone on the basis of their membership in the Knights of Columbus or any other Catholic organization? In your questioning of this Catholic judicial nominee, you singled out the issue of the Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. Would you disqualify a job applicant on the basis of their Catholic beliefs, including their beliefs about abortion? Do you believe that being pro-life disqualifies someone from employment?

4. Your history of attacking a judicial nominee solely on the basis of his membership in a Catholic organization led former Speaker Newt Gingrich to describe you as an “openly anti-Catholic bigot.” Do you disavow this characterization?

5. Should American Catholics or Catholic organizations be forced to pay for other people’s abortions? If elected, would you seek to force Catholics to fund abortions and other practices that are fundamentally in violation of their faith?

6. You recently claimed that you chose to become a prosecutor because you wanted to protect victims of sexual abuse. However, during your 13-year tenure as San Francisco’s district attorney and then California’s attorney general, you refused to prosecute any of the sexual abuse claims brought against Catholic priests, despite the pleas from victim groups. Why?

7. Also, why did your attorney general’s office refuse to release the documents obtained from the San Francisco archdiocese with all the information about priests accused of sexual abuse? Victims’ rights groups have criticized your office for deliberately burying these documents and thereby covering up the crimes and leaving the public unprotected. Why did you do this? The San Francisco district attorney’s office claimed in 2019 that they no longer have these documents in their possession. What happened to them? How can you claim to be a defender of children when you declined to prosecute the abusers of children?

8. Last June, you encouraged your Twitter followers to donate to a bail fund to assist protesters arrested in the Minneapolis, Minnesota, riots. Are you aware that in July this bail fund sprang from jail a man who was accused of sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl? In August, the fund posted bail for a man accused of assaulting a 71-year-old woman whose home he had burglarized. In June, the fund helped bail out a man accused of stomping and robbing a victim in Minneapolis on the same day George Floyd died. Between June and August, the fund helped bail out six men who were accused of domestic violence, including two who were accused of strangling women in their homes. Do you have any words for the victims of these crimes?

9. Why did your office decline to investigate the health supplement fraud cases involving companies your husband’s law firm represented? Did you, as California’s attorney general, ever purposefully decline investigating or prosecuting clients of your husband’s law firm?

10. You said you believed the women accusing Joe Biden of inappropriate touching. Do you believe Tara Reade? If not, why not? If so, how do you justify supporting him now?

11. Why did you single out journalist David Daleiden for prosecution for undercover journalism that others do without penalty?

12. Your chief-of-staff, Karine Jean-Pierre, wrote an op-ed last year attacking the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Americans who associate with it, stating “You cannot call yourself a progressive while continuing to associate yourself with an organization like AIPAC that has often been the antithesis of what it means to be progressive.” Do you believe that pro-Israel activism is incompatible with progressive values?

13. The Biden campaign has adopted a version of the Green New Deal that calls for 100 percent renewable electricity generation by 2035. California has adopted similar “green” goals, but now it can’t keep the lights on due to the state’s reliance on wind and solar energy. California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newson recently admitted that the Golden State needs a “backup” plan for energy because the current blackouts caused by lack of wind and overcast skies have shown the danger of relying solely on “green” energy. Why would the nation fare any better than sunny breezy California in keeping the lights on if we adopt 100 percent renewable energy?

14. You said in the past that we “need to hold China accountable” for trade violations, but you are against the use of tariffs. How do you intend to hold China accountable? You also said that “we need to export American products, not American jobs.” How do you intend to make sure we don’t export more American jobs to China? How would your policy differ significantly from the same policies that led to the loss of 4 million jobs to China?

15. You have supported the often violent Black Lives Matter uprisings and encouraged them to continue. Have you spoken to any victims of the riots — people who lost loved ones or businesses?

16. Do you believe that the looting of the Magnificent Mile in Chicago was a “form of reparations,” as one Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer claimed? Is looting an appropriate form of protest as a means of reparations?

17. Seattle Black Lives Matter protesters stormed a neighborhood, demanding that residents “get the f*** out” and “give black people back their homes” as reparations. Do you support that style of protest? If not, have you condemned it?

18. You recently claimed that it is both “outdated” and “wrongheaded” to think that adding police officers to the streets is the only way to make communities safer. What do you propose we do to stop the current wave of violent crime engulfing our cities?

19. What is the maximum number of illegal immigrants you would allow into the country before securing the border to stop more from entering?

20. The Obama administration deported an estimated 3 million illegal aliens. Was that a bad thing?

21. With 30 million Americans unemployed due to the coronavirus, would you support a halt on work visas for foreign workers competing with Americans for jobs? If not, explain to us why CEOs will not use this huge increase in the supply of labor to freeze and reduce salaries for American workers?

22. A number of prominent tech industry leaders have endorsed your campaign citing your support for increasing the number of H-1B foreign workers. Why is importing more foreign workers to compete with Americans a good idea right now?

23. Wall Street has praised Vice President Biden’s decision to choose you as his running mate. Why do you think financial special interests support you so much?

24. Will you be following the advice of your Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors in negotiating with China? If not, whose advice would you seek out in negotiating with China?

25. You have called on Congress to act on a coronavirus stimulus package, but you skipped a vote on a Republican proposal that would have provided relief to Americans. Are you putting any pressure on members of your party to stop blocking relief legislation for Americans?

Rebecca Mansour is a Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.

AS DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF SAN FRANCISCO AND THEN ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA, LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS DEMONSTRATED SHE WAS AS CROOKED AS FEINSTEIN, BOXER AND PELOSI HAS SHE HID THE LAW, PROTECTED CRIMINAL DONORS, AND SUCKED OFF CRIMINAL BANKSTER WELLS FARGO (WELLS FARGO IS A MAJOR DONOR TO KAMALA HARRIS).

SHE IS A WALKING FRAUD AND REMINDER THAT LAWYERS SHOULD BE BANNED FROM HIGHER OFFICE AS MOST ARE UTTERLY CONTEMPTUOUS OF THE LAW AND ARE COMMONLY SOCIOPATHS!

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. 

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.

Industry publication American Banker noted that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry professionals and their most trusted law firms.

Why the rich favor the Democrats

 

By Peter Skurkiss

 

There's little doubt that today's Democrat Party is the party of the rich.  Actually, that's an understatement.  Far more than billionaires are involved.  

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.

 

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

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.

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….WHY? BLOOMBERG IS AN ADVOCATE FOR AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS AND SUBSIDIZED HOUSING TO KEEP THEM COMING!


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.

 

Why the rich favor the Democrats

 

By Peter Skurkiss

 

There's little doubt that today's Democrat Party is the party of the rich.  Actually, that's an understatement.  Far more than billionaires are involved.  A better expression of reality would be to say a fundamental core of Democrat coalition is the managerial class, also known as the elite.  These are the people who run the media, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the big corporations, the universities and schools, the investment banks, and Wall Street.  They populate the upper levels of government bureaucracies.  These are the East and West Coasters. 

The alliance of the affluent with the Democrat Party can be seen in the widely disproportionate share of hefty political donations from the well-to-do going to Democrats and a bevy of left-wing causes.  It's also why forty-one out of the fifty wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats. 

BLOG: DEMS LOVE SOCIALISM FOR ILLEGALS TO KEEP THEM COMING AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE AND SOCIALISM FOR BANKS. TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF IT!

 Bernie Sanders is an exception.  But he's an anomaly viewed as dangerous to the party, which is why he's being crushed by the Democrat establishment. 

Why do the wealthy align with the Democrats?  The answer may seem counter-intuitive, but it is really quite simple.  It's surely not ideals or high-minded principles.  Nor is it ignorance.  Rather, it boils down to raw self-interest.  

In his book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Christopher Caldwell notes that rich Americans think themselves to be as vulnerable as blacks.  They are a relatively small minority of the population.  They fear being resented for their wealth and power and of having much of that taken from them.  Accordingly, the wealthy seek to protect what is theirs by preventing strong majorities from forming by using the divide and conquer principle. 

As R.R. Reno writes when reviewing Caldwell's book: "Therefore, the richest and most powerful people in America have strong incentives to support an anti-majoritarian political system."  He goes on: "Wealthy individuals shovel donations into elite institutions that incubate identity politics, which further fragments the nation and prevents the formation of majorities."

Some of the rotten fruit of the wealthy taking this approach include multiculturalism, massive immigration of diverse people, resistance to encouraging assimilation, racial strife, trying to turn white males into pariahs, and the promotion of gender confusion.  Through it all, society is bombarded with the Orwellian mantra that "diversity is strength," as if repeating it often enough can make it so.  It is also why patriotism and a common American culture are so disparaged today.  Those from the upper strata of society project the idea that if you're a flag-waving American, you must be some kind of retrograde mouth-breathing yokel.  

The wealthy as a groups are content to dissolve the glue that holds the U.S. together.  And it is all done to enhance and preserve their power, wealth, and influence.  This is why they so hate Donald Trump.  He strives to unite people and the country, although you'd never know that that is what the president is doing  if you live in the media bubble.  Trump's MAGA agenda is an anathema to the managerial class.

To quote Reno one final time:

The next decade will not be easy.  But it will not be about what preoccupied us in the sixties, and which Caldwell describes so well.  Rather than the perils of discrimination we are increasingly concerned with the problem of disintegration — or in Charles Murray's terms, the problem of "coming apart."

Trump and the GOP he is molding are the vehicles to restore and strengthen national solidarity.  Trump said at the Daytona 500, "No matter who wins, what matters most is God, family, and country."  That is not the Democrat agenda.  As seen in Democrat politicians, their policies, and the behavior of their major contributors, the aim is to further weaken the social and national bonds in America.  There is a lot at stake here.  If solidarity wins, the Republic can survive and prosper.  If the Democrats and their wealthy cohorts do, then the middle class withers, the Republic dies, and the rich and their managerial class get to rule the roost.  That is what it comes down to.

ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY AND HELL NO TO E-VERIFY!

In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor without incurring any of the social costs.

 

This is why the SEIU supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.

 

 

Democrats: The Party of Big Labor, Big Government...and Big Business

 

By Antonio R. Chaves

There is a widespread perception that the Democrat Party is the party the working class and the Republican Party is the party of big business.  Even though Republicans on average received slightly more from corporate employees prior to 2002, the overall difference between both parties from 1990 to 2020 is statistically insignificant (Table 1).  In fact, Democrat reliance on big labor gradually shifted toward big business following the involvement of solidly Democrat corporate giants in 2002, and from 2014 to 2020, Democrats consistently surpassed Republicans in corporate donations (Tables 1 & 2).

Based on data compiled by Open Secrets, Soros Fund Management, Fahr LLC (Tom Steyer), and Bloomberg LP ranked among the top ten for political contributions that gave over 90% to Democrats.  In sharp contrast, the right-leaning Koch Industries made the top ten only in 2014.  In nearly all other years, Koch ranked well below the top twenty.

Whether or not this trend is long-term, there is no denying that large corporations on average no longer lean right.  But what does it mean to be "the party of big business"? Donations are not definitive evidence.  What ultimately matters is what politicians do once they get elected.

Many liberals believe that big government is needed to "rein in" big business and that in the absence of federal intervention, corporations will "run roughshod" over the average American.  Many liberals also believe that corporations are the main beneficiaries of laissez-faire economics and that free-market conservatives who want to scale back regulations are somehow "in the pocket" of big business.

In reality, the opposite is true: big business and big government 

go hand in hand because government meddling in the economy 

encourages rent-seeking by businesses that can afford to pay 

for the lobbyists.  This crony capitalism grew exponentially as 

a result of New Deal regulations that squeezed out competitors 

during the 1930s.  Establishment politicians and well 

connected corporations are beneficiaries of the myth that big 

government and big business are adversaries because it hides 

their unholy alliance.

In all fairness, neither party has had a monopoly on the dispensation of corporate welfare: the TARP funds that propped up financial institutions deemed "too big to fail" during the Great Recession were released by the Bush administration.  In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor without incurring any of the social costs.

If both parties are playing this game, what is the basis for labeling the Democrat party "the party of big business"?  What policies from Republicans support small business?

Free-market conservatism benefits small businesses because the government does not pick the winners and losers by means of subsidies, tax breaks, and cumbersome regulations.  You will not see policies like these coming from Washington in a major way because proposals for shrinking the federal government rarely see the light of day in Congress.

Based on data collected by Gallup and Thumbtack, red states far outscore blue states in small business friendliness (Table 3).  This may be why less affluent Americans are fleeing states that score abysmally like CaliforniaIllinoisNew York, and Hawaii.  This might also be why small business–owners are more likely to vote Republican.

The Trump administration has been good for businesses of all sizes mainly due to the unprecedented rate at which it scaled back stifling regulations.  This may be why some of the president's highest approval ratings now come from small businesses.

Donald Trump set himself apart from the ruling class when he latched onto the third-rail issue of illegal immigration and called out the corporate darling Jeb Bush (AKA "Low Energy Jeb") for his lack of grassroots support.  This may explain in part why Bain Capital, the firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, switched teams and contributed solidly Democrat in 2018.  In 2012, Democrats accused Bain Capital of destroying jobs by systematically dismantling the companies it bought off.  Times have changed...

Small businesses generate well over half of all new jobs.  Most importantly, many are family-owned, have strong ties to their communities, and provide upward mobility for millions of Americans who never attended college.  The Democrats' undermining of this quintessentially American institution is shameful and disqualifies it as the "party of the working class."  Contributions from big labor do not count toward "labor-friendliness" because mega-unions care more about recruitment than about the welfare of working Americans.  This is why the SEIU supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.

Democrats fed up with the corporate status quo are now choosing their own anti-establishment candidate, not realizing that socialism is just a more impoverished version of the crony capitalism they are rejecting.  Many Sanders-supporters are also morally shallow because they want to harness the power of the state to muscle in on the wealth of Americans who borrowed responsibly and worked hard to pay their bills.

After the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin said, "This Constitution ... is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism ... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government."  If Democrats implement the dystopian policies of California on a national level, their corporate allies will do fine.  It is small business–owners and working-class Americans with nowhere to flee who have the most to lose. Be careful what you wish for.


To view the tables below, click the links.

Table 1: Top contributors to Democrats and Republicans as compiled by Open Secrets.

*The red lettering highlights a funding advantage for Republicans.  The blue lettering highlights a funding disadvantage for Republicans.

**Based on a T-test, the difference is insignificant at P = 0.46

Table 2: Top ten contributors to Democrats and Republicans by category (union, corporate, and ideological) as compiled by Open Secrets:

*In 2008 Goldman Sachs donated 74% to Democrats.  All other groups in this column donated between 40 and 69% to both parties.  This column does not differentiate between giving equally to both parties and giving 70–79% to Democrats or Republicans.

**This number includes the "City of New York."  Although it is officially listed as "other" by Open Secrets (not corporate, union, or ideological), I was personally informed by someone from the organization that Michael Bloomberg was the main source of this funding.

Table 3: Small business scores states scored by Thumbtack ranked according to their Democratic advantage by Gallup:

*GPA scores are based on the following numerical equivalents: A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0, A+ = 4.3, A- = 3.7, etc.

** Not scored.

***Mean GPA ± standard error. Based on a T-test, the difference is significant at P = 0.00001.

 

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. DAVID KELTZ

 

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.

“The president’s mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” she said.  The ability to create an alternate reality is nothing new for Harris.  This is the same person who said that the Trump economy was failing a year ago, at a Democratic debate on June 28th, 2019.  “You know, this president walks around talking about and flouting his great economy, right? My great economy… You ask him, well, how are you measuring this greatness of this economy of yours and they point to the jobless numbers and the unemployment numbers... Working families need support and need to be lifted up, and frankly this economy is not working for working people.” At the time that Harris made those factually incoherent remarks, the unemployment rate sat at a robust 3.7 percent (the 16th consecutive month that it was at or below the 4 percent threshold), African-American unemployment stood at a solid 6 percent, Asian-American unemployment was at 2.1 percent, 192,000 new jobs were created each month over a twelve-month period, and average hourly earnings rose by 3 percent from the previous year.  In other words, when the U.S. economy was thriving and perhaps stronger than at any point in our history, Harris wanted Americans to believe that we were still living in the Great Depression.

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