Biden Rewrites History of Supporting 2005 Bankruptcy Bill
Source: AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Former Vice President Joe Biden was caught in a massive lie on the debate stage Sunday night, by his last-standing opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT). Biden claimed that he had no hand in the 2005 bankruptcy bill, when called out by Sen. Sanders:
“This is a little bit about leadership as well. Joe talked about bankruptcy, Joe, you helped write that bankruptcy bill,” Sen. Sanders said.
Although Biden denies support of the bill, the evidence does not support his claim. Passed in 2005 by a bipartisan majority, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) altered the US Bankruptcy code, and made it more difficult to file for bankruptcy. The BAPCPA increased the threshold for bankruptcy in hopes of cutting fraud and abuse. The bill receives criticism from the far-left, including Sens. Sanders and Warren, who both claim that BAPCPA puts credit companies before consumers. Biden not only supported the bill, but sponsored it alongside GOP colleagues.
Biden’s denial of supporting BAPCPA is yet another example of the former Vice President running away from his record, in order to appease progressive voters.
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.
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.
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 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.
GRAPHIC: Gulf Cartel Gunmen Burn
Rivals Alive in Mexico near Texas Border
Mexico
Will Reject U.S. Designations of Cartels as Terrorists, Says AMLO
Mexico’s president announced Monday that he will reject any
designation of cartels as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
Enough Is Enough’: Josh Hawley Calls for Sanctions on Mexican
Cartels
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wednesday that
“enough is enough” and called on the U.S. government to sanction Mexican officials
and cartel members complicit in trafficking meth and killing Americans.
The architect of Mexico's war on cartels was just arrested in
Texas and accused of drug trafficking and taking bribes
'Another black eye for Mexico'
WHILE THE U.S. SQUANDERS HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS AND TROOPS TO
DEFEND THE BORDERS OF MUSLIM DICTATORS WHO HATE OUR GUTS, MEXICO IS OVERRUN
AMERICAN WITH DRUGS!
GRAPHIC: Gulf Cartel Gunmen Burn
Rivals Alive in Mexico near Texas Border
|
|
Mexico
Will Reject U.S. Designations of Cartels as Terrorists, Says AMLO
Mexico’s president announced Monday that he will reject any
designation of cartels as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
During his morning press conference, Mexican President Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) said he would not accept the U.S.’s potential
designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations–which could enable
direct actions in Mexico.
“We will never accept that, we are not ‘vendepatrias’ (nation
sellers),” Lopez Obrador said.
The president’s statements come
after the relatives of nine U.S. women and children who died in a cartel ambush in
Sonora revealed they would be meeting with President Donald Trump. The family is
expected to ask for some cartels to be labeled as terrorist organizations.
Last week, Tamaulipas Governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca used the
term “narco-terrorism” to refer to the brazen attacks on citizens of Nuevo
Laredo by a faction of Los Zetas Cartel called Cartel Del Noreste. Cabeza de
Vaca publicly called out Mexico City for past inaction in confronting Los
Zetas.
Earlier this year, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) filed legislation for the most violent
cartels in Mexico to be labeled as a foreign terrorist organizations, a move that would limit cartel members’ abilities to travel
and provide tools to better clamp down on financial transactions, Breitbart
Texas reported.
On Monday morning, Lopez Obrador’s foreign relations minister
Marcelo Ebrard called designations unnecessary and inconvenient, adding that
the U.S. and Mexico have a healthy working relationship in fighting cartels.
According to Ebrard, terrorist designations would give the U.S. the legal
avenue to take direct action on cartels on Mexican soil.
Ildefonso
Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded
Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior
Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted
at Iortiz@breitbart.com.
Brandon
Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He
co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and
senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.
Enough Is Enough’: Josh Hawley Calls for Sanctions on Mexican
Cartels
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wednesday that
“enough is enough” and called on the U.S. government to sanction Mexican officials
and cartel members complicit in trafficking meth and killing Americans.
Hawley called for harsh
retribution against the Mexican cartels complicit in ambushing and murdering
nine American women and children near the New Mexico border.
In the wake of the attack on
Americans, as well as the Mexican cartels’ complicity in Missouri’s meth
crisis, the Missouri conservative called for the U.S. government to sanction
the cartel members who are “openly slaughtering American citizens.”
“With Mexico, enough is enough. US
government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing
assets, who won’t confront cartels,” Hawley tweeted Wednesday. “Cartels are
flooding MO [Missouri] w/ meth, trafficking children, & openly slaughtering
American citizens. And Mexico looks the other way.”
Hawley said that just over the last
14 days, there had been over 40 drug overdoses coming from drugs across
America’s southern border.
Hawley continued, “In SW Mo last two
weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses & multiple deaths from drugs coming
across [the] southern border. Story is the same all over the state. Cartels
increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for our own security, we cannot
allow this to continue.”
With Mexico, enough is enough. US
government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing
assets, who won’t confront cartels. Cartels are flooding MO w/ meth, trafficking
children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the
other way
In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug
overdoses & multiple deaths from drugs coming across southern border. Story
is the same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico,
and for our own security, we cannot allow this to continue
Hawley spent much of his August
recess traveling across rural Missouri, learning what matters to the average
Missourian.
This AM I had the great privilege of
meeting Brittany Tune, a nurse, a mother of two, a follower of God, and a remarkable
woman. Born & raised in rural Shannon Co., she has raised two kids on her
own while putting herself through nursing school & dedicating her life to
others
Brittany says meth is hammering this
community. She has many friends & family members who have been touched by
this epidemic. She worries about what it means for her own kids, ages 15 &
10. It’s much worse now than when she was growing up, she says
In an interview with Breitbart News
in September, Hawley said that meth coming from
Mexico is destroying local Missouri communities.
“Come with me to any town, any town
in the state of Missouri of any size, and I will show you communities that are
drowning in meth, drowning in it. It is literally killing people; it is
destroying families it is destroying schools and whole communities,” he said.
“Missouri is a border state,” Hawley
said, adding that “we have to got to secure the border to stop the meth” and
“stop the flow of illegal immigration.”
Hawley’s remarks about the Mexican
cartel attack on Americans mirrors that of President Donald Trump, who said Tuesday that the
United States was ready for war against the drug cartels.
“This is the time for Mexico, with
the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them
off the face of the earth,” the president tweeted.
Trump has campaigned on cracking
down on violence on the southern border as well as handling the drug cartels.
During an exclusive interview with
Breitbart News, Trump said he is “very seriously” thinking of designating the
drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).
“It’s psychological, but it’s also
economic,” Trump told Breitbart News in March. “As terrorists — as terrorist
organizations, the answer is yes. They are.”
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told Breitbart News in May
that he would back Trump’s potential designation of the Mexican cartels as FTOs
and that seizing cartel leader El Chapo’s assets would build the wall and make
the cartels pay for it. In a similar manner to Missouri, Daines told Breitbart
News about how Montana has been ravaged by meth from Mexican cartels.
Daines said that by seizing
“billions” of El Chapo’s assets, it “would absolutely fulfill President Trump’s
promise to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. In this case, it would be
a Mexican cartel paying for it would be an excellent idea.”
The architect of Mexico's war on cartels was just arrested in
Texas and accused of drug trafficking and taking bribes
LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images
·
Genaro
Garcia Luna, who was Mexico's public-security secretary between 2006 and 2012,
was arrested in Texas on Monday.
·
Garcia
Luna, the architect of Mexico's campaign against organized crime in the late
2000s, is the latest Mexican official accused of corruption and involvement in
drug trafficking.
A former high-ranking Mexican security official who led the
country's crackdown on organized crime in the mid-2000s was arrested in the US
and been charged with drug-trafficking conspiracy and making false statements.
Genaro Garcia Luna, 51, was arrested in Dallas by US federal
agents, according to the US district attorney for the Eastern District of New
York, which said it plans to seek his removal to face charges in New York.
"Garcia Luna stands accused of taking millions of dollars
in bribes from 'El Chapo' Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel while he controlled Mexico's
Federal Police Force and was responsible for ensuring public safety in Mexico,"
US Attorney Richard P. Donoghue said in the release.
Garcia Luna faces three counts of conspiracy to import and
distribute cocaine and a fourth count of making false statements with regard to
an immigration naturalization application.
Garcia Luna began his career with Mexico's Center for National
Security and Investigation in the late 1980s before moving to the federal
police in the late 1990s. He was then head of Mexico's federal investigation
agency, AFI, between 2001 and 2005 and secretary of public security, then a
cabinet-level position in control of the federal police, between 2006 and 2012.
Genaro Garcia Luna Felipe Calderon Mexico
ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/GettyImages
He was 38 when appointed to the latter position by
then-President Felipe Calderon but already had nearly 20 years of experience in
Mexico's security services, much of it spent tracking organized crime and drug
trafficking.
"By his late 20s, he was considered something of a
wunderkind," according to a 2008 New York Times
profile.
"He really was the architect of Calderon's war on
drugs," said Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the
US Drug Enforcement Administration, who worked with Garcia Luna in Mexico in
the 1990s.
That war comprised major military deployments inside the country
and the kingpin strategy, which entailed targeting high-level cartel figures in
an effort to weaken the cartels. This approach has been criticized for
fostering more violence, both by state
forces and fragmented cartels.
According to the release, Garcia Luna received millions of
dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. In return, the release states, the
cartel received safe passage for drug shipments, sensitive law-enforcement
information about investigations targeting it, and information about rival
cartels — all of which allowed it to move multiton quantities of drugs into the
US.
Financial records obtained by the US government showed that by
the time Garcia Luna relocated to the US in 2012, he had a personal fortune
worth millions of dollars, according to the release, which said he is also
accused of lying about those alleged criminal acts on an application for
naturalization submitted in 2018.
'Another black eye for Mexico'
El Chapo Joaquin Guzman
Reuters
One detail in the release mirrors allegations made
during the trial of
Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who was convicted on
drug trafficking and other charges in the Eastern District of New York in
February.
"On two occasions, the cartel personally delivered bribe
payments to Garcia Luna in briefcases containing between three and five million
dollars," the release states.
During testimony in November 2018, Jesus "El Rey"
Zambada — the youngest brother of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, who is
considered Guzman's peer at the top of the Sinaloa cartel and now its de facto
leader — said the cartel twice made multimillion-dollar payments to Garcia Luna.
A $3 million payment, which "El Rey" said was to
Garcia Luna at a restaurant in Mexico City between 2005 and 2006, was to ensure
he would pick a specific official as police chief in Culiacan, the capital of
Sinaloa state and the cartel's home turf.
"El Rey" said the other payment, between $3 million
and $5 million, was in 2007 and was to make sure "he didn't interfere in
the drug business" and that "El Mayo" was not arrested. Zambada
also said that the Sinaloa cartel and its partners also pooled $50 million in
protection money for Garcia Luna.
A press officer for the Eastern District of New York did not
immediately respond when asked by email whether the charges unsealed Tuesday
against Garcia Luna stemmed from allegations made during Guzman's trial.
At the time, Garcia Luna denied Zambada's claims, calling them a
"lie, defamation
and perjury."
On Tuesday, Calderon said he had heard of Garcia Luna's arrest but was awaiting
confirmation and further details, tweeting that his "position
will always be in favor of justice and the law."
El Chapo Guzman home town
REUTERS/Roberto Armenta
Vigil, who was the DEA assistant country attache to Mexico
during the 1990s, was skeptical of the allegations made during the Guzman trial
and said he was "surprised" by the arrest on Tuesday.
"I worked with Genaro Garcia Luna," Vigil said.
"We, DEA, had a very good working relationship with Genaro. At that time
there were no allegations of corruption. There we coordinated investigations
with them, and we never saw any evidence of compromise."
The allegations made during that trial seemed "less than
credible," Vigil said, in large part because Guzman was arrested twice
during the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who followed
Calderon into office in 2012.
But it was possible that a high-ranking Mexican official could
obscure activities in one area from their work with the US in another area.
"In terms of what the US sees, [it's] very different than
what occurs within the Mexican government, but through time if he were taking
bribes, obviously some of those investigations, you would've known if they had
been compromised," Vigil said. "But there's some areas that could be
compartmentalized in terms of efforts by the Mexican government."
If convicted on the drug-conspiracy charge, Garcia Luna faces a
mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life in jail.
"Today's arrest demonstrates our resolve to bring to
justice those who help cartels inflict devastating harm on the United States
and Mexico, regardless of the positions they held while committing their
crimes." Donoghue, the US attorney, said in the release, thanking the DEA,
the Department of Homeland Security Investigations, as well as police in New
York City and New York state.
Regardless of the outcome of the case, it tarnishes a bilateral
relationship in which cooperation against organized crime and drug trafficking
has been a major component.
"I don't know what the evidence is against Genaro Garcia
Luna," Vigil said Tuesday, "but it certainly is another black eye for
Mexico."
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