"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
REPUBLICAN ‘KING OF FORECLOSURES’
STEVEN MNUCHIN IS A MAJOR DONOR TO KAMALA HARRIS. AS ATTORNEY GEN OF CA SHE
KEPT HIM OUT OF PRISON!
In reality,
as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on
top of the TARP bailout and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a
fake homeowner assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost
their homes as a result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement
than those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly
half of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be
legally recovered in the first place. She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015,
after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of
foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to
Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000
to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
ACCE plans to ask incoming California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to take up the prosecution of OneWest based on the newly released evidence. And the group vowed to fight the Mnuchin nomination. “No one who oversaw the defrauding of thousands of homeowners should be allowed to serve watch over our country’s money,” Mears said.
As the decay of American capitalism accelerates, it will be reflected in increasingly degenerate displays of greed and opportunism by the ruling class.
Gig workers hired to evict people from their homes as
millions struggle to pay rent
A
startup company by the name of Civvl is seeking to recruit temporary “gig”
workers to assist landlords in evicting tenants who have been unable to pay
rent in the midst of the economic depression triggered by the coronavirus
pandemic.
Civvl is owned by OnQall, a developer
that provides a platform for a number of other app-based services. However,
Civvl is markedly different from the other apps, some of which are used for
house-cleaning and mowing lawns.
The startup, described by VICE
News as “Uber, but for evicting people,” has posted ads across the US
looking for gig workers to join eviction crews to assist in what the company’s
website calls “debris removal.” In other words, it is hiring people to clear
out the possessions of evicted people.
Like opportunistic vultures, the
company’s owners seek to take advantage of an economic crisis in which millions
are unemployed and cut off from federal assistance. Desperate workers—in many
cases struggling to pay rent themselves—are now to be utilized by the startup
to evict other struggling people for the purpose of turning a profit.
The startup’s own website declares it
to be the “FASTEST GROWING MONEY MAKING GIG DUE TO COVID-19.” The website
assures its clients that “Civvl gets them out!” amid photos showing furniture
and other possessions being hauled out into the streets with police standing
by.
The problem with
Harris instead is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive
audiences while defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to
make tough decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama
administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning
scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under
the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state
in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she did.
She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015,
after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of
foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to
Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000
to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
"So in my background as attorney general
of California, I took on the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of
whom lost their homes and will never be able to buy another," Harris said
in late July during the second round of Democratic debates in Detroit.
Here's what really happened:
In fact, she and several other state attorneys
general were instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with
five of the top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other
financial services to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after
Harris secured those funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov.
Jerry Brown diverted $331 million from California's portion of the settlement
to pay off state budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.
Although Harris initially spoke out against
Brown's diversion of the funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court
battle that began in 2014 — even after she left the attorney general's office
and for the last year and a half while serving as senator and during her
presidential bid this year.
She
shook down some banks in the name of 'the people' and then went and used the
money for something else. No wonder she's always been popular with the
Democratic one-party blue-state establishment. I have a full blog on that here.
Joe Biden Touts Wall Street Support
for His Plan to Abolish American Suburbs
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
6 Sep 20207,907
2:37
Democrat
presidential candidate Joe Biden is touting Wall Street’s support for his $640
billion housing plan that would force low-income, multi-family housing
developments into America’s suburban communities.
During a
visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin — where the Black Lives Matter organization and
members of Antifa have led
riots for weeks — Biden told supporters that Wall Street
supports his housing plan because it “will increase the GDP.”
“And by the
way, it’s not a waste of money. Even the folks on Wall Street point out that
will increase the GDP, make it grow,” Biden said of the
plan. “People will do better, people will do better.”
Biden’s
housing plan, as Breitbart News has noted, would
implement an unprecedented expansion of Section 8 housing vouchers while
requiring that local communities abolish strict zoning laws in order to become
eligible for certain federal grants.
The plan provides a $300 million
investment “to give states and localities the technical assistance and planning
support they need to eliminate exclusionary zoning policies and other local
regulations that contribute to sprawl.”
Communities unwilling to eliminate
their zoning laws to allow multi-family, mixed-income housing development in
their neighborhoods would be shut out of federal grants under Biden’s plan:
Exclusionary
zoning has for decades been strategically used to keep people of color and
low-income families out of certain communities. As President, Biden
will enact legislation requiring any state receiving federal dollars … to
develop a strategy for inclusionary zoning, as proposed in the HOME Act of
2019 by Majority Whip Clyburn and Senator Cory Booker. [Emphasis added]
Former New York Lieutenant Governor
Betsy McCaughey (R), has called Biden’s housing plan “disastrous” for suburban
families who would see rapid dense-housing developments pop up in their
communities.
“Biden’s
plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes
to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy
neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned,” McCaughey wrote in
July.
The plan is coupled with Biden’s
expansion of illegal and legal immigration, producing a model for packed suburbs
with record population growth, denser living spaces, and potentially a
migration from cities to smaller, middle-class communities.
John Binder is a reporter for
Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
More stiffing the little guy from haughty Kamala Harris
As we've said more than once, Kamala Harris has an authenticity problem.
This
characterization, from Thomas Lifson last month, pretty well sums her
up every time a Kamala Harris story comes to light:
Kamala Harris is scary in her pathological ambition, moral
flexibility, comfort with deception, and sheer ruthlessness.
So here's a new
one, from California watcher Susan Crabtree atRealClearPolitics, reporting Harris's soapboxing at the second presidential
debate:
“So in my background as attorney general of California, I took on
the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of whom lost their homes and
will never be able to buy another,” Harris said in late July during the second
round of Democratic debates in Detroit.
Here's
what really happened:
In fact, she and several other state attorneys general were
instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with five of the
top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other financial services
to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after Harris secured those
funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown diverted
$331 million from California’s portion of the settlement to pay off state
budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.
Although Harris initially spoke out against Brown’s diversion of the
funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court battle that began in 2014 –
even after she left the attorney general’s office and for the last year and a
half while serving as senator and during her presidential bid this year.
Which is pretty
outrageous. Harris shook down some banks in the name of "the people"
and then like a crooked lawyer, didn't give the "winnings" to the
clients. Whoever got wronged in this mortgage-lending mess didn't see a penny
of the won cash. It all just went to other Democrat priorities within the
one-party state.
Sound like the
kind of lawyer you'd want to have if you got stiffed in some bank deal?
Whatever this is, it's not the doing of the consumer advocate she's now
painting herself to be.
Any more than
she's the prison-rights advocate she claims to be - she threw thousands of them
in jail for petty offenses during her time as State Attorney General, kept
people in jail beyond their sentences in order to retain them to fight fires,
and refused to disavow false testimony from prosecutorial misconduct that would
have freed prisoners. She's never been about the little guy.
The
mortgage-payout story shows two distasteful things about Harris.
One, she plays
the old California political machine game (it probably happens in other crooked
one-party states, too) of amassing a vast pot of money for one purpose, a
virtue-signaling purpose, a purpose that press releases can be released on, and
political campaign speeches can be made ... and then spending the same pile of
cash on something thing else, something far less salable to the
voters, something that will cover up spending mismanagement or fatten pensions.
In California, this game is gotten away with all the time. Gas tax is approved
by voters to improve roads ... and ends up bankrolling bureaucrat and
administrative hiring sprees. Federal stimulus money is shoveled into the state
for shovel-ready bridges and road improvements --- and goes to cover
municipal budget holes brought on by mismanagement. Voters approve bond
measures in the name of hiring teachers and getting more school supplies
for kids in education -- and it goes to educrat pensions and union siphon-offs.
Harris is comfortable operating that way in taking on the big banks, shaking
them down -- and just letting the money head elsewhere.
Two, she's still
the teacher's pet of Democrats, the sidling, sucking-up, get-along-to-go-along,
slept-her-way-to-the-top errand girl the more powerful Democrats like. Crabtree
reports that Harris first protested the diversion of the funds, and then went
silent. Why would she do that? Obviouly, she heard from more powerful
Democrats, the kind who could make or break her career. An Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez-style boat-rocker she was not. The money was won, the cash was
collected, the whole thing went to the government instead of the little
guys, and she went along.
Which pretty
well tells us what kind of leader she would be if heaven forbid she should win
the presidency. In
winning the money and then allowing it to be diverted, she failed the little
guys she now says she was serving. And with that, she shows she's never
been about serving the people, she's about obeying the greater
interests of the Democratic political machine. No wonder she's so popular in those
circles - she's been kowtowing to these rich and powerful since the dawn of her
career. For voters, the real message, as she vows to take over their health
care, hand out reparations to black people, and offer free stuff for votes is
clear: That the cash she promises isn't going to get anywhere near
the little guys. Not even the illegal immigrants she's promising free health
care for can believe her.
“One, Biden has cut ties with
President Obama and no longer expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement
from him. He's been
sucking up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting
toward Kamala Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse
Biden at this point, after all those years of faithful service, was
quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter
what he did.”
In reality, as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the
settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on top of the TARP bailout
and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a fake homeowner
assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost their homes as a
result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than
those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly half
of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be
legally recovered in the first place. She also declined
to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered
over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank.
(OneWest donated $6,500
to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated
$2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
The problem with Harris instead
is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive audiences while
defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to make tough
decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama
administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning
scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under
the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state
in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she
did. RYAN COOPER
Joe Biden admits it: Obama stiffed the deplorables
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/joe_biden_admits_it_obama_stiffed_the_deplorables.html
It's getting weird out there in these dog days of the Democratic
presidential nomination race ahead of the Big One in 2020.
Departing from his nonstop praise for President Obama, former vice
president Joe Biden came up with this doozy in his interview
with the New York Times. Here's the money quotes picked out by Breitbart:
Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted
"a lot of people were left behind" during his and President Barack
Obama's tenure in the White House.
Biden, who has pitched himself as the only
Democrat capable of winning back the white working class in 2020, made the
admission when being interviewed for a profile in The New York
Times that was published on Tuesday.
"A lot of people were left
behind," the frontrunner said when discussing the Obama administration's efforts to combat
the recession. "In areas where people were hard hit, I don't think we
paid enough attention to their plight."
So some kind of reality has dawned on him. He's noticed
the Obama-era meth addicts and hollowed out cities, made that way by the Obama
"you didn't build that" agenda, but not quite enough to
recognize that a large portion of Trump voters were actually well
educated.
None of this makes Biden look like someone you'd like to elect
president.
Three possibilities are there for what is going on.
One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer expects
to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him. He's been sucking
up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting toward
Kamala Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at
this point, after all those years of faithful service, was quite a slap in
the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter what he
did. These Biden remarks suggest that maybe he's realized this
and is distancing himself, even as the Breitbart report noted that he tried to
soften the blame. Nope, blame is blame, even with sugarcoating.
Two, Biden is trying to draw negative attention to Obama...to
deflect from all the stuff he didn't bother to do. According
to Breitbart:
Despite the confession, Biden stopped
short of laying the culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the president and
others were preoccupied by more pressing issues during their eight years in
office.
"Everything landed on the president's
desk but locusts," Biden said in describing the early days of the
administration. He added that Obama was so busy he "didn't have time
to breathe."
The former vice president attributed the
"lack of messaging" and Obama's reluctance to "promote his
successes."
Obama was busy? Where the heck was Joe,
then? Vice presidents are supposed to be there to do all the work
the president can't do, such as go to funerals. Biden declaring
Obama busy only raises the question about what Biden was doing. Was
he doing anything at all — other than meddling in the internal affairs of
Ukraine in the name of business deals? Biden, like Obama, had
his priorities — and helping deplorables wasn't one of them. So now
he's trying to pin the whole thing on Obama.
Third, it may just signal that Biden doesn't have a strategy at
all, just bits and pieces and parts and particles, and he likes the sound of
his voice to interviewers. He's popping off and doing
gaffes. He doesn't recognize that what he's saying is damaging to
him because of what it reveals. What could it reveal? That
he's bitter at Obama, that he was a lazy, shiftless, do-nothing vice president,
that he doesn't know what he's talking about. What a picture of
incompetence.
There aren't any other scenarios. Biden's remarks on
this, after years of effusive praise of the Obama years, is some kind of truth
coming out. Truth is not going to help old Joe.
Image credit: Obama Library,
public domain.
Hat tip: Roger Luchs.
Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She
Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank
FORMER CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY General Kamala Harris on Wednesday
vaguely acknowledged The Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute
Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered
no explanation.
“It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to
questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest
U.S. senator.
“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a
decision my office made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case.
We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”
Mnuchin is Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury
Department, and served as CEO of OneWest from 2009 to 2015. In an internal memo
published on Tuesday by The Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney
general’s office said they had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure
laws by his bank during that time, and predicted that further investigation
would uncover many thousands more.
But the investigation into what the memo called “widespread
misconduct” was closed after Harris’s office declined to file a civil
enforcement action against the bank.
Harris’s statement on Tuesday doesn’t explain how involved she
was with the decision to not prosecute, or why the decision was made. She also
would not say whether the revelations would disqualify Mnuchin for the position
of treasury secretary. “The hearings will reveal if it’s disqualifying or not,
but certainly he has a history that should be critically examined, as do all of
the nominees,” Harris told The Hill. She added that she would review the
background and history of all Trump cabinet nominees.
Senate Democrats have vowed to put up a fight over Mnuchin —
even creating a website inviting homeowners to list their complaints against
OneWest. And yet not one senator has commented publicly on the leaked memo,
which received media coverage in Politico, Bloomberg, the New York Post, CBS
News, Vanity Fair, CNN, CNBC, and other outlets.
The Intercept has reached out to half a dozen Senate Democratic
offices, including those of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and leading Mnuchin
critics Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, receiving no response.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., retweeted the story, as did the
Twitter account of the Democratic National Committee. But another DNC tweet
just hours later hinted at the bind Democrats are in when it comes to using the
information against Mnuchin. That tweet praised Harris’s swearing-in. Her
decision not to prosecute may make her new colleagues wary of pursuing it.
Progressive groups have not been so reluctant. Three groups —
the Rootstrikers project at Demand Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy’s
Fed Up Campaign, and the California Reinvestment Coalition – have called for a
delay of Mnuchin’s confirmation hearing until he publicly discloses all
settlements and lawsuits OneWest has faced from its foreclosure-related
activities, responds fully to all questions submitted by members of the Senate
Finance Committee, and publicly discloses his role in obstructing the
California attorney general investigation, or any others.
The California Reinvestment Coalition followed that up on
Thursday by asking OneWest to release the obstructed evidence, which involved
loan files held by a third party then known as Lender Processing Services (it’s
now called Black Knight Financial Services). “That’s something the Senate
Finance Committee should ask him for, prior to scheduling their hearing with
him,” said Paulina Gonzalez, executive director of the California Reinvestment
Coalition.
Mnuchin has already declined to answer a detailed list of
questions from Finance Committee member Sherrod Brown, which Brown sent before
the release of the leaked memo.
After The Intercept story was published, Mnuchin spokesperson
Barney Keller called it “meritless,” and highlighted OneWest’s completion of a
foreclosure review with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (which
involved completely separate issues from the California inquiry) and what he
claimed was OneWest’s issuance of over 100,000 loan modifications to borrowers.
“Memos like this belong in the garbage, not the news,” Keller
said.
Meanwhile, the Alliance of Californians for Community
Empowerment, an organizing group that made headlines in
2010 by protesting on Mnuchin’s front lawn over
OneWest’s
foreclosure practices, expressed disbelief that he could
now
become treasury secretary. “My family lived first hand the fraud
and unethical behavior under his leadership when I was told
to
default before they could help me, and (was) instead pushed
into
foreclosure,” said Peggy Mears, a OneWest victim.
ACCE plans to ask incoming California Attorney General Xavier
Becerra to take up the prosecution of OneWest based on the newly released
evidence. And the group vowed to fight the Mnuchin nomination. “No one
who oversaw the defrauding of thousands of homeowners should be allowed to
serve watch over our country’s money,” Mears said.
By David Dayen
Joe Biden Touts Wall Street Support
for His Plan to Abolish American Suburbs
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
6 Sep 20207,907
2:37
Democrat
presidential candidate Joe Biden is touting Wall Street’s support for his $640
billion housing plan that would force low-income, multi-family housing
developments into America’s suburban communities.
During a
visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin — where the Black Lives Matter organization and
members of Antifa have led
riots for weeks — Biden told supporters that Wall Street
supports his housing plan because it “will increase the GDP.”
“And by the
way, it’s not a waste of money. Even the folks on Wall Street point out that
will increase the GDP, make it grow,” Biden said of the
plan. “People will do better, people will do better.”
Biden’s
housing plan, as Breitbart News has noted, would
implement an unprecedented expansion of Section 8 housing vouchers while
requiring that local communities abolish strict zoning laws in order to become
eligible for certain federal grants.
The plan provides a $300 million
investment “to give states and localities the technical assistance and planning
support they need to eliminate exclusionary zoning policies and other local
regulations that contribute to sprawl.”
Communities unwilling to eliminate
their zoning laws to allow multi-family, mixed-income housing development in
their neighborhoods would be shut out of federal grants under Biden’s plan:
Exclusionary
zoning has for decades been strategically used to keep people of color and
low-income families out of certain communities. As President, Biden
will enact legislation requiring any state receiving federal dollars … to
develop a strategy for inclusionary zoning, as proposed in the HOME Act of
2019 by Majority Whip Clyburn and Senator Cory Booker. [Emphasis added]
Former New York Lieutenant Governor
Betsy McCaughey (R), has called Biden’s housing plan “disastrous” for suburban
families who would see rapid dense-housing developments pop up in their
communities.
“Biden’s
plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes
to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy
neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned,” McCaughey wrote in
July.
The plan is coupled with Biden’s
expansion of illegal and legal immigration, producing a model for packed suburbs
with record population growth, denser living spaces, and potentially a
migration from cities to smaller, middle-class communities.
John Binder is a reporter for
Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
More stiffing the little guy from haughty
Kamala Harris
As we've said more than once, Kamala Harris has an authenticity problem.
This
characterization, from Thomas Lifson last month, pretty well sums her
up every time a Kamala Harris story comes to light:
Kamala Harris is scary in her pathological ambition, moral
flexibility, comfort with deception, and sheer ruthlessness.
So here's a new
one, from California watcher Susan Crabtree atRealClearPolitics, reporting Harris's soapboxing at the second presidential
debate:
“So in my background as attorney general of California, I took on
the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of whom lost their homes and
will never be able to buy another,” Harris said in late July during the second
round of Democratic debates in Detroit.
Here's
what really happened:
In fact, she and several other state attorneys general were
instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with five of the
top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other financial services
to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after Harris secured those
funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown diverted
$331 million from California’s portion of the settlement to pay off state
budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.
Although Harris initially spoke out against Brown’s diversion of the
funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court battle that began in 2014 –
even after she left the attorney general’s office and for the last year and a
half while serving as senator and during her presidential bid this year.
Which is pretty
outrageous. Harris shook down some banks in the name of "the people"
and then like a crooked lawyer, didn't give the "winnings" to the
clients. Whoever got wronged in this mortgage-lending mess didn't see a penny
of the won cash. It all just went to other Democrat priorities within the
one-party state.
Sound like the
kind of lawyer you'd want to have if you got stiffed in some bank deal?
Whatever this is, it's not the doing of the consumer advocate she's now
painting herself to be.
Any more than
she's the prison-rights advocate she claims to be - she threw thousands of them
in jail for petty offenses during her time as State Attorney General, kept
people in jail beyond their sentences in order to retain them to fight fires,
and refused to disavow false testimony from prosecutorial misconduct that would
have freed prisoners. She's never been about the little guy.
The
mortgage-payout story shows two distasteful things about Harris.
One, she plays
the old California political machine game (it probably happens in other crooked
one-party states, too) of amassing a vast pot of money for one purpose, a
virtue-signaling purpose, a purpose that press releases can be released on, and
political campaign speeches can be made ... and then spending the same pile of
cash on something thing else, something far less salable to the
voters, something that will cover up spending mismanagement or fatten pensions.
In California, this game is gotten away with all the time. Gas tax is approved
by voters to improve roads ... and ends up bankrolling bureaucrat and
administrative hiring sprees. Federal stimulus money is shoveled into the state
for shovel-ready bridges and road improvements --- and goes to cover
municipal budget holes brought on by mismanagement. Voters approve bond
measures in the name of hiring teachers and getting more school supplies
for kids in education -- and it goes to educrat pensions and union siphon-offs.
Harris is comfortable operating that way in taking on the big banks, shaking
them down -- and just letting the money head elsewhere.
Two, she's still
the teacher's pet of Democrats, the sidling, sucking-up, get-along-to-go-along,
slept-her-way-to-the-top errand girl the more powerful Democrats like. Crabtree
reports that Harris first protested the diversion of the funds, and then went
silent. Why would she do that? Obviouly, she heard from more powerful
Democrats, the kind who could make or break her career. An Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez-style boat-rocker she was not. The money was won, the cash was
collected, the whole thing went to the government instead of the little
guys, and she went along.
Which pretty
well tells us what kind of leader she would be if heaven forbid she should win
the presidency. In
winning the money and then allowing it to be diverted, she failed the little
guys she now says she was serving. And with that, she shows she's never
been about serving the people, she's about obeying the greater
interests of the Democratic political machine. No wonder she's so popular in those
circles - she's been kowtowing to these rich and powerful since the dawn of her
career. For voters, the real message, as she vows to take over their health
care, hand out reparations to black people, and offer free stuff for votes is
clear: That the cash she promises isn't going to get anywhere near
the little guys. Not even the illegal immigrants she's promising free health
care for can believe her.
“One, Biden has cut ties with
President Obama and no longer expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement
from him. He's been
sucking up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting
toward Kamala Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse
Biden at this point, after all those years of faithful service, was
quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter
what he did.”
In reality, as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the
settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on top of the TARP bailout
and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a fake homeowner
assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost their homes as a
result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than
those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly half
of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be
legally recovered in the first place. She also declined
to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered
over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank.
(OneWest donated $6,500
to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated
$2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
The problem with Harris instead
is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive audiences while
defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to make tough
decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama
administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning
scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under
the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state
in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she
did. RYAN COOPER
Joe Biden admits it: Obama stiffed the deplorables
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/joe_biden_admits_it_obama_stiffed_the_deplorables.html
It's getting weird out there in these dog days of the Democratic
presidential nomination race ahead of the Big One in 2020.
Departing from his nonstop praise for President Obama, former vice
president Joe Biden came up with this doozy in his interview
with the New York Times. Here's the money quotes picked out by Breitbart:
Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted
"a lot of people were left behind" during his and President Barack
Obama's tenure in the White House.
Biden, who has pitched himself as the only
Democrat capable of winning back the white working class in 2020, made the
admission when being interviewed for a profile in The New York
Times that was published on Tuesday.
"A lot of people were left
behind," the frontrunner said when discussing the Obama administration's efforts to combat
the recession. "In areas where people were hard hit, I don't think we
paid enough attention to their plight."
So some kind of reality has dawned on him. He's noticed
the Obama-era meth addicts and hollowed out cities, made that way by the Obama
"you didn't build that" agenda, but not quite enough to
recognize that a large portion of Trump voters were actually well
educated.
None of this makes Biden look like someone you'd like to elect
president.
Three possibilities are there for what is going on.
One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer expects
to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him. He's been sucking
up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting toward
Kamala Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at
this point, after all those years of faithful service, was quite a slap in
the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter what he
did. These Biden remarks suggest that maybe he's realized this
and is distancing himself, even as the Breitbart report noted that he tried to
soften the blame. Nope, blame is blame, even with sugarcoating.
Two, Biden is trying to draw negative attention to Obama...to
deflect from all the stuff he didn't bother to do. According
to Breitbart:
Despite the confession, Biden stopped
short of laying the culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the president and
others were preoccupied by more pressing issues during their eight years in
office.
"Everything landed on the president's
desk but locusts," Biden said in describing the early days of the
administration. He added that Obama was so busy he "didn't have time
to breathe."
The former vice president attributed the
"lack of messaging" and Obama's reluctance to "promote his
successes."
Obama was busy? Where the heck was Joe,
then? Vice presidents are supposed to be there to do all the work
the president can't do, such as go to funerals. Biden declaring
Obama busy only raises the question about what Biden was doing. Was
he doing anything at all — other than meddling in the internal affairs of
Ukraine in the name of business deals? Biden, like Obama, had
his priorities — and helping deplorables wasn't one of them. So now
he's trying to pin the whole thing on Obama.
Third, it may just signal that Biden doesn't have a strategy at
all, just bits and pieces and parts and particles, and he likes the sound of
his voice to interviewers. He's popping off and doing
gaffes. He doesn't recognize that what he's saying is damaging to
him because of what it reveals. What could it reveal? That
he's bitter at Obama, that he was a lazy, shiftless, do-nothing vice president,
that he doesn't know what he's talking about. What a picture of
incompetence.
There aren't any other scenarios. Biden's remarks on
this, after years of effusive praise of the Obama years, is some kind of truth
coming out. Truth is not going to help old Joe.
Image credit: Obama Library,
public domain.
Hat tip: Roger Luchs.
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