Biden backed brutal bankruptcy bill in 2005
In 1999, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) declared, “I’m not the senator from MBNA.” Apparently, Biden felt it was necessary to clarify that he did not exclusively represent credit card giant MBNA because his constituents were thoroughly confused, based on his track record of being a shill for credit card companies located in the First State.
Then, six years later, Biden inserted his foot directly into his mouth (again) when he championed the notorious (and ill-named) Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA). A more appropriate name could have been the Act to Protect Credit Card Companies and Shaft Students and Workers.
In short, BAPCPA was a terrible bill that favored credit card companies, big banks, and millionaires over working-class borrowers. It also is solely responsible for the fact that student loan debt is totally impossible to dismiss -- even after one has declared bankruptcy.
Wait a minute, I thought Joe Biden was the consummate defender and advocate of the working class and oppressed. Far from it. In reality,Biden’s political career of more than four decades was predicated upon protecting the interests of credit card companies.
And he and his son, Hunter, were compensated handsomely for doing so. According to a 2019 GQ article titled “How Biden Helped Strip Bankruptcy Protection From Millions Just Before a Recession” -- “one of the biggest credit card companies in Delaware, MBNA, hired Joe Biden's son Hunter in 1996. Even after Hunter became a federal lobbyist in 2001, he stayed on at MBNA as a consultant at a fee of $100,000 per year, meaning he was pulling in a six-figure salary at the same time his father was pushing for the industry's top priorities.” Can you say, quid pro quo, Joe?
As if the backroom deals and “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” shenanigans that Biden blatantly engaged in before, during, and after BAPCPA was passed were not bad enough, the bill wrought untold damage among the very people Biden constantly claims to protect.
According to Adam J. Levitin, professor of law at Georgetown University, BAPCPA “was perhaps the most anti-middle class piece of legislation in the past century.” And, as Levitin writes, “Biden used his clout to push for the law’s passage and to defeat amendments to shield servicemembers, women, and children from its harsh treatment. When votes were taken, ‘Middle-Class Joe’ was no friend to the middle class.” It sure seems that Biden abandoned his Lunchbox Joe persona when it came to voting in favor of BAPCPA, not to mention that he strongly supported amendments that made the bill even more hostile to the middle class!
And adding insult to injury, Biden also voted against several amendments that were specifically meant to help several “underprivileged” groups. As Levitin writes, “He voted against three amendments to ease bankruptcy requirements for consumers whose financial troubles stem from medical expenses. He voted against an amendment that would have helped seniors keep their homes. He voted against exempting servicemembers and widows of servicemembers killed in action from the law’s eligibility restrictions. He voted against an amendment to exempt women whose financial troubles stemmed from deadbeat husbands’ failure to pay child support or alimony. And Biden even voted against an amendment that would have ensured that children of debtors could still be given birthday and Christmas presents. Biden also voted against allowing debtors to pay their union dues during bankruptcy, potentially imperiling their employment and ability to achieve financial rehabilitation.” Could Biden’s voting record on this bill get any worse? Actually, yes.
Not only did Biden strongly oppose BAPCPA amendments aimed to help “disadvantaged” groups, he voted for two giant loopholes that effectively allowed millionaires to shield their assets from collectors after they filed for bankruptcy. What a joke, Joe.
As a senator, Biden vigorously voted for several similar bills. In short, based on his voting record, Joe Biden is not (and never was) a champion of disadvantaged Americans, unless you consider multi-billion-dollar credit card corporations and millionaires “disadvantaged.”
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is an editor at The Heartland Institute.
BLOG:
DURING THE EIGHT YEARS OF THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME WE NEVER HEARD GROPER
JOE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE LOOT HANDED OVER TO THEIR BANKSTER DONORS OR A COMMENT
ON SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (ENDORSED BIDEN) AND HER CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS
FARGO!
Biden
repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the
second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of
managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo
that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large
corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small
businesses.
Biden wants a new
stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and
Obama
administrations orchestrated the bailout
of
Wall Street, buying up all the bad
debts,
particularly in mortgage-backed
securities,
that had been used as vehicles for an orgy
of
speculation. As a result, social
inequality
increased to record levels. Corporate
cash
hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4
trillion
was funneled
into stock buybacks.
BLOG:
DURING THE EIGHT YEARS OF THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME WE NEVER HEARD GROPER
JOE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE LOOT HANDED OVER TO THEIR BANKSTER DONORS OR A COMMENT
ON SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (ENDORSED BIDEN) AND HER CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS
FARGO!
Biden
repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the
second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of
managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo
that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large
corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small
businesses.
Biden wants a new
stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion
By Michael
Grunwald
Joe Biden wants a more progressive approach to
economic stimulus legislation than Washington has taken so far, including much
stricter oversight of the Trump Administration, much tougher conditions on
business bailouts and long-term investments in infrastructure and climate that
have so far been largely absent from congressional debates.
In a fiery half-hour interview with POLITICO,
the presumptive Democratic nominee sounded a bit like his angrier and less
moderate primary rivals, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, though
in unexpurgated Biden style. The former vice president said that the next round
of coronavirus stimulus needs to be “a hell of a lot bigger” than last month’s
$2 trillion CARES Act, that it needs to include massive aid to states and
cities to prevent them from “laying off a hell of a lot of teachers and cops
and firefighters,” and that the administration is already “wasting a hell of a
lot of money.”
Biden has been running a low-profile campaign
during the pandemic, tweeting, filming videos and appearing on Sunday shows
from his Delaware home while President Donald Trump has briefed the nation
daily from the White House. Biden has let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speak for the Democratic Party during the debates
over economic relief, offering supportive public statements that have faded
into the background.
But stimulus is a subject close to his heart,
and he passionately contrasted his own management of President Barack Obama’s
$800 billion Recovery Act in 2009 with President Donald Trump’s approach to the
trillions of dollars flowing out of Capitol Hill.
The Obama stimulus was wildly controversial,
but it won bipartisan praise for its strict oversight and unusually low levels
of fraud. In the interview, Biden was at his most indignant when he recounted
how he recruited a gruff law enforcement veteran and government watchdog named
Earl Devaney to oversee the Recovery Act in 2009, and how President Donald
Trump fired the Pentagon inspector general who had been selected to oversee the
CARES Act almost immediately after he signed it.
“I wanted to bring in the toughest
son-of-a-b***h in the country—I really mean it, I’m not joking—because we
wanted to make sure we did it by the numbers with genuine oversight,” Biden
said. “Right now, there’s no oversight. [Trump] made it real clear he doesn’t
have any damn interest in being checked. The last thing he wants is anyone watching
that $500 billion going to corporate America, for God’s sake.”
The Trump campaign said it would not comment on
the firing of Pentagon inspector general Michael Atkinson beyond the
president’s public comments on April 4, when he attacked Atkinson for giving
Congress the original whistleblower report about his call with the Ukrainian
president that eventually led to his impeachment. “I thought he did a terrible
job. Absolutely terrible,” the president said at the time. “He took a fake
report and brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay? Not a big Trump
fan—that, I can tell you.”
Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and
big banks, noting that “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,”
accusing the Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit.
He railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the
American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot at CARES
Act aid intended for small businesses. Over the last month, 26 million Americans have
lost their jobs, and Biden said many of those jobs could be gone for good if
mom-and-pop operations get left behind.
“We knew from the beginning that the big banks
don’t like lending to small businesses,” Biden said. “I’m telling you, though,
if Main Street businesses don’t get help, they’re gone.”
The CARES Act and three smaller coronavirus
relief bills have all passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and
Biden was careful to avoid criticizing Pelosi and Schumer even as he criticized
the results of the compromises they negotiated. He said he’s “in constant
conservation” with both Democratic leaders, letting them know his priorities
without interfering with their negotiations; he credited them with securing
major increases in unemployment benefits and other improvements to Republican
proposals that were initially skewed even further towards big business.
He was clearly disappointed that Pelosi and
Schumer failed to secure any new aid to states in this week’s $484 billion
package, but he suggested that could work out politically, because in the next
round they’ll be able to blame Trump and other Republicans for looming state
budget cuts and layoffs of first responders.
“They got what they could get,” Biden said.
“I’ve been in too many negotiations to second-guess anybody else’s.”
Still, Biden suggested that after four rounds
of legislation designed primarily to stanch the economic bleeding, the next
round should include more forward-looking investments that could help the
economy start to recover and grow once the virus is contained. He suggested a
“trillion-dollar infrastructure program that can be implemented really
rapidly,” as well as “dealing with environmental things that create good-paying
jobs.”
Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell have suggested that “green stimulus” would be a non-starter with
Republicans, but Biden said investments in light rail, clean drinking water,
and half a million electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s highways could
help retool the economy for the future.
Biden also argued that long-term growth
initiatives are America’s only hope to rein in a budget deficit that has
suddenly ballooned to an unprecedented $4 trillion, and is sure to continue to
expand as Washington continues to spend. He said that repealing the bulk of
Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut would help limit the red ink—“It wasn’t worth the
powder it will take to blow it to hell”—but ultimately, restoring jobs and
investing in the future is “the only thing that grows the economy back so the
deficit doesn’t eat you alive.”
Biden has loved talking about stimulus ever
since he ran the Recovery Act, and he sounded comfortable returning to the
topic from his Delaware home, although there were a couple of typically
hard-to-follow tangents, and one brief coughing interruption that he attributed
to swallowing a peanut the wrong way.
His main theme was the contrast between his
legendary harassment of the Cabinet secretaries, governors and mayors in charge
of spending Recovery Act dollars—he reminded me that he spoke with every
governor except Alaska’s Sarah Palin, most of them repeatedly—and “the
malpractice of this administration.”
“There’s no coordination. There’s no
accountability. Come on, the guy waits to hold up money because he wants to
make sure his name is on the checks!” Biden said.
Biden has been firing off a steady stream of
tweets attacking Trump for failing to make sure America has enough tests and
protective equipment, for complaining about his media coverage, and most
recently for suggesting that drinking bleach might help cure the virus. But
while Biden clearly hopes to persuade some 2016 Trump voters to back him in
November, he also needs to make sure that progressive Sanders and Warren
supporters don’t stay home.
BLOG: HERE’S GROPER JOE’S NEW PERFORMANCE OF
THE WEEK. THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY IS NOW A ‘POPULIST’
This week, Biden has taken flak from the left
for including the corporate-friendly Democratic economist Lawrence Summers on
internal calls. But on Friday night, he denounced corporate America as “greedy
as hell,” echoing the structural critiques of the modern economy that fueled
the Sanders and Warren campaigns.
He called for stronger assurances that
small-business loans will go to small businesses, and that aid to larger
corporations will come with strings prohibiting stock buybacks, executive
bonuses or worker layoffs. But he also went beyond policy prescriptions, saying
the pandemic might convince Americans that grocery clerks “and all the other
folks out there saving our rear ends and risking their lives for eight bucks an
hour” deserve a better deal. He thinks there could be a backlash against big
corporations who have poured their profits into buybacks and dividends rather
than worker training and research and development. He thinks the virus could
deal a blow to short-term economic thinking and anti-government political
thinking.
“I think there’s going to be a willingness to
fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time,”
Biden said. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
Amid
simmering crisis over sexual assault charges Nancy Pelosi endorses Biden
28 April 2020
On Monday, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally endorsed Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic
Party candidate in the 2020 presidential election. In an eleven-minute video,
Pelosi lavished praise on the pro-war, pro-corporate long-time senator and vice
president under Barack Obama, the most right-wing of the major contestants for
the nomination.
Pelosi called the
77-year-old, semi-senile political hack a “voice of reason” in the coronavirus
crisis and absurdly described him as “a leader who is the personification of
hope and courage, values and integrity.” In the midst of the greatest
corporate bailout in world history, she specifically praised Biden for his role
in the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street during the 2008–2009
financial crisis.
Pelosi’s endorsement
followed endorsements earlier this month by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, marking the line-up of the so-called
“progressive” wing of the party behind the candidate of the party apparatus,
whose official imprimatur was signaled by the endorsement the same week by
Barack Obama.
But the unity at the
top has not resolved the party’s deep crisis. Biden is despised by
broad sections of the working class and especially youth and younger workers,
and there are many indications that large sections of those, especially young
people, who supported the Sanders campaign may not accede to Sanders’
post-capitulation demand that they vote for Biden.
Their disquiet has been
increased by the news last week that Biden’s chief economic adviser is Larry
Summers, a key architect from the 1990s to the present of the policies of
deregulation and economic parasitism that have enabled the financial
aristocracy to monopolize ever greater portions of society’s wealth.
This has been
compounded by a simmering scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse against
Biden by Tara Reade, a one-time staffer in Biden’s Senate office, who filed a
complaint with Washington DC police in March accusing the then-senator from
Delaware of having assaulted her in 1993.
The alleged incident
occurred 26 years ago, there were no other witnesses, Reade did not file a
complaint with the police at the time, and the statute of limitations has long
since expired. Biden himself has said nothing, but his campaign has denied the
charges.
has no way of knowing
whether Reade’s allegations are true. One thing is clear, however. The response
of the Democratic Party and media organizations aligned with it, such as
the New York Times and the Washington Post,
which have spearheaded the #MeToo witch hunt and reveled in the “take down” of
dozens of prominent men on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of sexual
misconduct, has exposed their rank hypocrisy.
The Times and
the Post failed to report Reade’s allegations for weeks
after the story was broken by Sanders supporter Katie Halper on her podcast in
March. In mid-April they posted articles emphasizing inconsistencies in Reade’s
story and insisting that it had to be carefully examined and Biden given the
presumption of innocence before reaching any conclusion as to his guilt.
The Democratic National
Committee has said nothing, nor has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,
Sanders, Warren or most of the dozen or so women on Biden’s short list for his
vice presidential running mate. Pelosi has spoken publicly only once on the
matter, telling MSNBC on April 17 that she was “satisfied” with Biden’s denial.
She appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program and was not asked by
moderator Jake Tapper about the issue.
The contrast between
the treatment of Biden by the Democratic Party and the pro-Democratic media and
the treatment of a host of targets of #MeToo sex charges could not be more
blatant. The mantra “believe women” that was proclaimed repeatedly, including
by Biden himself during the September 2018 Senate confirmation hearings for
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has been supplanted by a sudden
(dishonest) affirmation of the democratic principles of due process and the
presumption of innocence.
What has been exposed
is the role of the #MeToo campaign as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Its
proponents have changed their tune because the McCarthyite methods of #MeToo in
this particular case cut across the interests of the Democratic Party and
substantial sections of the ruling class that are backing Biden in the contest
with Trump.
There are, however,
forces aligned with the Democratic Party that are pushing Reade’s allegations
and calling out the party apparatus for seeking to quash them. The Intercept has
published a number of articles as have some pseudo-left Sanders promoters,
including Jacobin magazine.
This opposition has
increased since the posting Friday by Newsbusters of a video clip from an
August 1993 CNN “Larry King Live” program in which a woman, identified by Reade
as her mother, calls in and cites the case of her daughter, who was “working
for a prominent senator and could not get through with her problems at all.”
The caller does not identify the senator and does not mention sexual
harassment, but the clip seems to confirm Reade’s claim that she told her mother
of the incident with Biden at the time.
The video has been
widely reported by Fox News and other right-wing media, but largely suppressed
by the rest of the corporate media.
Fox News reported
Monday that the hashtag #dropoutbiden was trending on Twitter on Sunday, until
it was allegedly removed. Nick Brana, Sanders’ former national outreach
coordinator, tweeted over the weekend that the Democratic National Committee
should either force Biden to drop out or “admit that suppressing progressives
is the true purpose of your party.”
Another former Sanders
senior adviser, Winnie Wong, tweeted: “The video of Tara Reade’s late mother
calling into Larry King to blow the whistle about Tara’s sexual assault is
being met with relative silence from a cadre of progressives right now and I
want you all to know that I see you. We all do.”
Within this context,
Pelosi’s abrupt endorsement of Biden appears to be an effort to contain and
silence the voices calling for him to step aside and make explicit the party’s
demand that the matter be dropped. Pelosi’s video appears to be part of a
circling of the wagons around Biden.
On Monday, the co-chair
of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal
(Democrat from Washington state), endorsed Biden, after having served as the
Sanders campaign’s national chair for health policy. Biden was the most
strident opponent of Sanders’ call for “Medicare for all” during the primary
contest, repeatedly denouncing it on the grounds that it would cost several
trillion dollars. Of course, both he and Sanders are now supporting a bailout
of the corporate-financial elite that has already reached some $10 trillion.
“I am ready to work
with him [Biden] to craft and then implement the most progressive agenda of any
candidate in history,” Jayapal said in a statement.
Her endorsement
followed that of two other former Sanders campaign officials. The Progressive
Congressional Caucus’s other co-chair, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, endorsed Biden
last week, as did Representative Ro Khanna of California. Pocan and Khanna
served as co-chairmen for Sanders.
There is nothing
progressive in the efforts of disaffected Democrats and their pseudo-left
allies to dislodge Biden on the basis of unsubstantiated sex allegations. Even
assuming that Reade is telling the truth, in which case Biden should be held to
account, the fact is that Biden and his party are guilty of far greater crimes.
The wars Biden
supported in Afghanistan and Iraq alone killed hundreds of thousands of people,
including women and children. The Obama administration, in which Biden served
as second-in-command, made drone assassination a major instrument of US foreign
policy, asserting the right to murder US citizens and carrying out the
assassination of at least three Americans. In 2010, Biden himself declared
persecuted journalist Julian Assange to be a “hi-tech terrorist.”
It is not a question of
replacing Biden with some other servant of American imperialism and Wall Street
and promoting the middle class politics of racial and gender identity. The
crisis requires the mobilization of the mass of workers, who are increasingly
fighting back against the return-to-work campaign of both big business parties,
and behind them all genuinely progressive elements in the middle class, on the
basis of a revolutionary socialist program in opposition to the entire
two-party system and the ruling class it defends.
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and
Obama
administrations orchestrated the bailout
of
Wall Street, buying up all the bad
debts,
particularly in mortgage-backed
securities,
that had been used as vehicles for an orgy
of
speculation. As a result, social
inequality
increased to record levels. Corporate
cash
hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4
trillion
was funneled
into stock buybacks.
Far from being
forced to pay for the economic consequences
of the pandemic, the
banks and corporations have simply
been bailed out
again, this time on a far larger scale. Once
again, the crisis is
being utilized as an opportunity to
restructure class
relations in the interests of the rich.
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