The Unholy Alliance of Big Business Billionaires and the Democratic Party
Destroying tax-paying middle class Americans.
Ten years ago, Democrats were insisting that wealthy business tycoons and Wall Street fat cats who didn’t “pay their fair share” were the single greatest threat to America. “We are the 99 percent!” was soon to become the battle cry of millions of Obama voters who believed that big businesses were preying upon everyday Americans, and that they were too influential in shaping politics.
Last year, those same multi-billion-dollar corporations and their fat cat leadership were vital allies of the Democrats, central players in a “well-funded cabal” that was “working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change the rules and laws, steer media coverage and the flow of information” so that the Democratic nominee would win the election. Those aren’t the words of a right-wing conspiracy theorist, as you may know, but the words of TIME magazine detailing “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”
What changed in those ten years? When did the Democrats go from loathing big corporations to loving them, and when did big corporations go from being loathed by Democrats to carrying their water and undermining the political will of everyday Americans to curry their favor? After all, if it were the will of everyday Americans to elect a Democratic president in 2020, why would a “well-funded cabal” be needed to “change the rules and laws” or manipulate the “flow of information” to achieve that outcome?
I remember the precise moment where it had become obvious that Obama was betraying his constituents on this issue. Barack Obama, tasked with tearing down the structural power of big business billionaires, spent 2011 demonizing Bank of America and its leadership for their greedy practices, like charging customers a monthly fee for debit card usage. As you can imagine, Bank of America executives were shocked by Obama’s “audacity” to invite them to help finance the 2012 Democratic National Convention. To entice the bank’s executives, Democrats even moved the president’s acceptance speech to Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, where they courted wealthy donors and sold them million-dollar skyboxes that allowed them to sit high above the masses below that hated their guts because the president had whipped them into a jealous frenzy.
Obama spent his days winking at Occupy Wall Street protestors, and his nights undermining them entirely by ensuring that big corporate lobbyists would have a seat at the Democratic policymaking table. And it seems to have worked, because in 2016 and 2020, big money donors, particularly in the securities and investment industry, provided financial support to the Democratic presidential candidates that dwarfed the big money donors’ contributions to Donald Trump.
One can only imagine the furor about how dark corporate money was influencing the outcome of the election if the contributions in those years were so decidedly in Trump’s favor, but since they weren’t, Democrats haven’t seemed to notice. But one might think that they should have, because Democrats’ historic distaste for these globo-corporate profiteers, who are currently financing Democratic political victories to advance their own self-interests, is ostensibly rooted in something fundamental to the Party’s professed nature, and that is the protection of American workers.
But the Democrats’ labor priorities saw a marked change in recent years from their labor union roots. No longer were they seeking wage protections for the employees of XYZ Widgets in Lansing, or to protect the workers of entire American industries. No, they began arguing that it is a human rights imperative to allow any foreigners, and particularly those from impoverished nations, to enter America illegally, and thus illegally compete for and undercut the wages of American workers.
This benefits illegal aliens, the big businesses who reap excess profits on illegal labor, and Democrats who are importing new voters. But, lucky enough for Democrats, their constituents seem to have forgotten altogether that they were once in favor of protecting the wages of American workers and taxpayers, who unquestionably suffer due to illegal immigration.
This symbiotic arrangement between big business and the Democratic Party is parasitic and destructive to the unwilling host that is the American citizenry, and not only in a financial sense. Giant, multi-national corporations are now the leading spokespersons for Democrats’ social initiatives and policy propositions. It’s incredibly likely that the first multi-national corporation that comes to your mind is one of countless that have entered a coalition of businesses supporting of the Equality Act, a radical proposition that is laden with vague language that is incredibly susceptible to broad abuses by politicians with power, and which will utterly destroy religious liberty in America.
With the Equality Act, the federal government is now seeking the broad authority to demand that a confused young boy must be allowed to shower with your sixteen-year-old daughter after volleyball practice, or that nuns must finance abortions. Global corporations, headed by multi-billionaires who have profited tremendously by undermining American voters and workers, have signed on in droves to support this broad, seemingly illimitable assault on individual liberty.
What unites the Democratic Party today isn’t the protection of blue-collar workers, as it once was, but the coddling of former college students who incurred large debts to get their socialist indoctrination, and who want their neighbor, the plumber, to pay those debts for them. Big business profits and lobbying are no longer a problem, of course, now that the profits are being used to benefit the Democratic Party and its platform exclusively. Big-tent concepts like tolerance and liberty are out of fashion, replaced by demands for coerced acceptance of countless provable and evil untruths, such as the notion that white people are inherently arrogant and ignorant, or that a boy is no different than a girl, or that to be an American citizen means nothing more meaningful than managing to get your feet on American soil.
And Democratic Party simply no longer seems to care about the obvious and objective madness in any of that.
The Democrats’ villains today are no longer rich business tycoons who don’t “pay their fair share” while exercising their power and influence to undermine American workers and strangle individual liberty. Today, it’s only too clear that the villains they seek to destroy are the very same taxpaying, middle-class Americans that they claim to have been championing.
William Sullivan is an author whose work discussing politics, economics, history, and culture in America has been frequently featured at American Thinker for over a decade.
Senate Dems Drop For-Profit College Criticism to Appease Biden Nominee
Elizabeth Warren ignores SEC pick's for-profit college ties after attacking industry
Top Democrats have long attacked "predatory" for-profit colleges for exploiting low-income students of color. But when it came to President Joe Biden's pick to head the Securities and Exchange Commission—who made millions representing one of the industry's infamous actors—they remained silent.
During a Tuesday confirmation hearing, Gary Gensler avoided scrutiny from Senate Banking Committee Democrats over his eight-year tenure on the board of Strayer University. The for-profit college has faced criticism for "aggressively" targeting "vulnerable" students in urban areas using celebrities such as Queen Latifah and Steve Harvey. Gensler accumulated between $1 million and $5 million in stock options for his work at Strayer, according to a 2009 financial disclosure. An updated filing obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows that Gensler has since sold the stock, raking in a sizable profit in the process.
Leading committee Democrats ignored Gensler's stint at Strayer despite having derided for-profit colleges for years. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio), for example, joined forces on a 2019 bill aimed at ending taxpayer subsidies to the industry. Warren accused schools such as Strayer of "sucking down billions in taxpayer dollars as they cheat students and load them up with debt for worthless degrees." Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) also turned a blind eye to Gensler's for-profit college ties, even though he denounced Trump administration education secretary Betsy DeVos for hiring industry executives who he said "cheated or defrauded" students.
Strayer's use of insistent ad campaigns to recruit students in urban areas is also a tactic that Warren, Brown, and other Senate Democrats have criticized in the past. A 2019 Black Entertainment Television report noted that such ads were "expertly designed to attract those most unfamiliar with higher education" in an attempt to entice "those who are victims of institutionalized barriers." Veterans Education Success senior director Aniela Szymanski said that the strategy is par for the course in the for-profit education industry. She highlighted a 2012 Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee report, which found that Strayer spent $2,448 per student on marketing, compared with just $1,329 per student on instruction.
"Almost to a tee, every for-profit university spends vastly more money on marketing than they do on education," Syzmanski said. "It's easy to put profits before product in circumstances where you're publicly traded on the Nasdaq."
Warren, Brown, and Warner did not return requests for comment.
Strayer—like many for-profit colleges—offers an abysmal graduation rate, varying between 3 percent and 27 percent for an eight-year program. At the end of Gensler's Strayer tenure in 2009, the school also held a loan default rate of 31 percent, according to a Brookings Institution report. Students owed Strayer nearly $6.7 million in 2014, placing the school among the top institutions for debt in the country.
The school's chairman and CEO made nearly $42 million in 2009, while its chief operating officer received $10.8 million.
Senate Democrats' disdain for the for-profit college industry is echoed by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden's July 2020 "unity task force" stated that education "is a public good and should not be saddled with a private profit motive," calling for banning "for-profit private charter businesses from receiving federal funding."
Harris, meanwhile, announced a $1.1 billion judgment she obtained against "predatory" for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges in 2016 by saying that the institution "profited off the backs of poor people." She went on to tout the effort in her August 2020 speech accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president.
"I took down one of the nation's largest for-profit colleges," Harris said. "I know a predator when I see one."
The White House did not return a request for comment.
This is not the first time Warren and other Senate Democrats have failed to apply their own past attacks to Biden nominees. The Massachusetts Democrat on Tuesday brushed aside questions about Consumer Financial Protection Bureau nominee Rohit Chopra's past work for consulting giant McKinsey & Company. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, however, she demanded that rival Pete Buttigieg release his McKinsey client list so that voters could "know about possible conflicts of interest."
The Senate Banking Committee is expected to vote on advancing Gensler's nomination this week.
Elizabeth Warren Abandons McKinsey Disclosure Demands
Warren gives ex-McKinsey consultant, Biden nominee a pass
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) was unrelenting on her demand that Pete Buttigieg reveal who his clients were when he worked for consulting giant McKinsey & Company. Beating the drum that people need "to know about possible conflicts of interest," Warren persuaded her political rival to release his client list just as he moved to the top of the Iowa polls.
Warren's dedication to digging into former work at McKinsey appears, however, to have ended with the close of her political spat with Buttigieg. On Tuesday morning, neither Warren nor any of her colleagues on the Senate Banking Committee raised questions about Biden nominee Rohit Chopra's past work for McKinsey as they evaluated his qualifications to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Warren is far from a rival of Chopra, who worked with Warren to establish the CFPB and has been described as one of her "acolytes." Before his work for the consumer protection agency, though, he was a consultant for McKinsey, where according to the Washington Post he worked on financial issues, including student debt and consumer credit markets. His LinkedIn page says his work at McKinsey was on financial services and technology. His financial disclosure forms make no mention of his McKinsey work or any of his clients.
Warren did not respond to requests for comment on her lack of interest in Chopra's McKinsey work. She praised Chopra during the Tuesday morning hearing, saying, "I have no doubt that you are the right person to lead the bureau at this moment."
During his first stint at the CFPB, Chopra was hired by Warren herself to work as its student loan ombudsman. In the years since, Warren has taken keen interest in advancing his political career. In 2015 she praised Chopra, at the time still working at CFPB, as "smart as a whip, independent, hard-working, and loaded with integrity," and recommended him to head New York's powerful department of financial services.
Chopra was not nominated for the position, instead moving on to a short stint in the Obama administration's Department of Education. He has since worked as a senior fellow at Neera Tanden's Center for American Progress, on Hillary Clinton's ultimately unnecessary 2016 transition team, and for the past three years as a Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.
Republicans have homed in on Chopra's ties to Warren, characterizing the pair as two ideological peas in a pod. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R., N.C.), the House Financial Services Committee's top Republican, said Chopra’s nomination "will make Elizabeth Warren very happy" and called the decision "proof that the Biden team is pandering to members of the far-left who want to weaponize the CFPB to go after financial services companies they simply don't like."
Neither the White House nor Chopra responded to requests for comment about his client list at McKinsey.
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