Joe Biden's pick to run the DHS immigration agency – Alejandro Mayorkas – is a political gift for the GOP, says Jessica Vaughan at CIS: "Cronyism, corruption, swampiness, and the immigration issue." https://t.co/859b16NhN4
Biden’s Cabinet: Obama Administration 3.0
While
the patriots across the country are running out of nails to bite watching the
Trump legal team taking on the swing states voter fraud, most Democrats are
praising Biden’s cabinet nominees and appointments. Sure enough, there is a
great chance that the truth will prevail, and all those cabinet picks will
remain in the dustbin of history, where they belong. At the same time, these
people represent the potential trends of the U.S. policy both at home and
abroad as the current Democrat establishment sees it.
Joe
Biden announced his first round of picks in November, he called his choices “experienced,
crisis-tested leaders who are ready to hit the ground running on day one […]
These officials will start working immediately to rebuild our institutions,
renew and reimagine American leadership to keep Americans safe at home and
abroad, and address the defining challenges of our time.” Top Democrats are rushing the Senate
hearings for Biden’s cabinet that they want to start before
inauguration. Despite the calls for unity and “time to heal,” Biden (whether
himself or, most likely, some shadow team of the real decision-makers) is
evidently taking a course on radically reversing the Trump administration’s
“America First” policies. In the end of November, Biden tapped Obama-era officials
for top national security and economic roles -- the same people who were one of
the main reasons why it was Trump and not Hillary winning over the White House
just four years ago. Let’s meet – or rather, reintroduce -- the key figures.
Foreign policy: the lobbyists-hawks
Antony Blinken, Secretary of State
During
his campaign, Biden claimed that he intended to end “forever wars,” -- many of which he helped
start. A
nomination of a hawkish Antony Blinken certainly looks like a betrayal of the
campaign promises and has attracted considerable criticism from both left
and right for Blinken’s record of supporting wars and so-called humanitarian
interventions. Blinken was a top aide to Biden when the then-senator voted
to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and helped Biden develop
a proposal to partition Iraq into three separate regions.
As
deputy national security advisor, Blinken supported the
military intervention in Libya in 2011. In 2018 he helped launch WestExec
Advisors, a “strategic advisory firm” that is secretive about its clients,
and still refuses to disclose them. Jonathan Guyer writes in
the American Prospect, “I
learned that Blinken [and the cofounders who also served in the Obama
administration] used their networks to build a large client base at the
intersection of tech and defense. An Israeli surveillance startup turned to
them… Google billionaire Eric Schmidt and Fortune 100 companies went to
them, too.” Will we find a patriotic Secretary of State in Tony Blinken?
Ironically, as Blinken himself once said, “Registered
lobbyist is a bullshit distinction. For me it’s: Are you making a living based
on monetizing a set of relationships or a policy domain with personal interest?”
Lobbying
interests of the foreign entities is something that Biden and his close friends from
the foreign-policy team seem to be great at. For example, both Linda
Thomas-Greenfield, nominated to be a U.N. ambassador and Jake Sullivan
(national security advisor) repeat the pattern of joining international
consulting firms whose clients are unknown, but both with substantial
capitalization.
Avril Haines, director of national intelligence
Haines
served as a deputy director of the CIA and Obama’s principal deputy national
security adviser. Haines played a key role in the controversial drone program
that cost the lives of up to 807 civilians in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
Some critics have accused Haines of complicity in the use of torture or
“improved interrogation techniques” by the CIA after 9/11. Haines is also
remembered for editing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of
torture and approving a panel that ultimately decided not to reprimand CIA
agents who spied on the committee’s investigators. She also worked for WestExec.
John Kerry, climate envoy
Obama’s
ex-Secretary of State whose family is a close business partner to the Biden
family, implicated in the shady
business in Ukraine and China, Kerry is a champion of the Paris
Climate Agreement, from which Trump withdrew the United States.
Domestic policy: socialism and control
Ron Klain, chief of staff
Known
as the “Ebola czar,” Klain is a close confidante of Biden and previously
advised President Obama. He has been vocal in his criticism of President
Trump -- particularly his handling of the coronavirus
pandemic. Klain is not a doctor or public health expert; he’s a lawyer with deep
experience in politics. Now, Klain is expected to make the virus a top priority.
Because, he believes, it was Trump's “slow response” and “downplaying the
threat” that devastated the country with businesses’ and schools’ shutdowns and
lockdowns -- not the thugs like Cuomo, Newsome, or Whitmer. The threat has proven to be overblown,
but I have doubts that Klain will truly listen to the scientists.
Neera Tanden, Office of Management and Budget director
Tanden
is a chief executive of the left Center for American Progress. She is not an
economist, but a political activist and organizer who worked in the Clinton and
Obama administrations (ObamaCare reform), and for Hillary Clinton’s
campaigns. If Tanden takes control of the OMB (which is questionable),
then the office will be run by someone who believes that
the deficits and the debt should be no obstacle whatsoever to further
government spending and suggests the “oil rich
countries” in the Middle East should cover it. In addition to
that, she was accused of becoming physically aggressive toward
a CAP staffer who had dared to question Hillary Clinton about the Iraq War, and
she once outed an employee who
had filed a sexual harassment complaint.
Council of Economic Advisers: chair Cecilia Rouse (served in both Clinton and Obama
administrations), Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey (both served Biden during
his VP tenure).
Janet Yellen, Treasury secretary
Yellen
is a former Federal Reserve chair. During her tenure, the central bank launched
experimental programs that ballooned its balance sheet to $4.5 trillion. Stocks soared, but
economic growth was below par and wealth disparity hit historic levels. As reported by CNBC, the
dichotomy between the market and the economy will be one of the most lasting
parts of the Yellen legacy: while the S&P 500 was up about 325 percent
since the 2009 lows, wage gains had barely kept up with inflation and income
inequality has soared. Talk about taking care of Main Street America!
As we
can see, Biden’s presumptive nominees mark a return of the “swamp”-- people
with strong relationships in Washington D.C. elite and global capitals. We’ve
seen those faces before; we have first-hand experience with their policies that
failed America. But it seems that for the Democrat establishment America is not
an objective, but a source and object of their power.
Follow Veronika Kyrylenko on Twitter or LinkedIn
"Along with Obama (LAWYER) Biden (LAWYER), Pelosi and Schumer (LAWYER) are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY Add the Banksters’ rent boy Eric Holder (LAWYER) and the up and coming Swamp Empress Kamala Harris (LAWYER…but keep counting….(LAWYER) Brian Deese, Obama-Biden’s loot-for-Wall Street guy.
"Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the twin nutters of Congress, were certain they could beat Trump at his own game, but have made fools of themselves, as usual. The stand-off is not over but with each passing day, the Democrats reveal more of their anti-American, pro-illegal immigration agenda. Conservatives have been sounding the alarm for years: Democrats do not care about American citizens!"
PATRICIA McCARTHY
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos congratulates Biden as the president-elect packs his transition teams with servants of the corporate oligarchy
Amazon
oligarch and COVID-19 profiteer Jeff Bezos, the world’s
richest man, congratulated president-elect Joe Biden following the declaration
four days after the November 3 vote that Biden had won the US presidential
election.
“Unity,
empathy and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era,” Bezos wrote on
Instagram, congratulating Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “By
voting in record numbers, the American people proved again that our democracy
is strong.”
This
sentiment was echoed on November 7 by the Business Roundtable, including Bezos
as well as the chief executives of Apple, Cisco, Microsoft and Salesforce. The
big business organization issued a statement that said: “Business Roundtable
congratulates President-elect Biden on his election as 46th President of the
United States. We also congratulate Vice President-elect Harris on her historic
accomplishment as the first woman, Black woman and person of South Asian
descent to be elected Vice President of the United States… We look forward to
working with the incoming Biden Administration and all federal and state
policymakers.”
Last
week, Biden’s transition team posted the names and most recent employers of
members of its agency review teams on the website buildbackbetter.org. Given the composition of
these teams, it is easy to see why Bezos and his fellow oligarchs are in a
congratulatory mood.
The
individuals who have been appointed are listed alongside the company for which
they most recently worked, and organized into “teams” based on the government
operations they are tasked with reviewing, such as the departments of Commerce,
Defense, Education, Labor, State and Homeland Security.
The
composition of these agency review teams demonstrates the intersection, if not
outright integration, of the technology monopolies, academic aristocracy,
beltway think tanks, trade union bureaucracies, giant law firms and the
military-intelligence apparatus of war and repression at home and abroad.
Amazon
will have not one, but two seats on the transition teams. Tom Sullivan,
Amazon’s director of international tax planning, will sit on Biden’s Department
of State team. In addition to Sullivan, Mark Schwartz, an “enterprise
strategist” for Amazon Web Services, will serve on the extremely powerful
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) team. The OMB oversees the $5 trillion
federal budget and exerts influence across a broad range of federal regulatory
frameworks.
In
addition to figures from Amazon, Nicole Isaac, senior director of North
American policy at LinkedIn, will sit on the Department of Treasury team.
Brandon Belford from Lyft will serve on the Office of Management and Budget
team, along with Divya Kumaraiah from Airbnb.
Shara
Mohtadi of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is funded by the donations of
billionaire oligarch Michael R. Bloomberg, will sit on the Council on Environmental
Quality. And no less than four individuals, serving in various capacities, are
drawn from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-owned by Facebook
oligarch Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
Arun
Venkataraman from Visa will sit on the team tasked with reviewing the Office of
the United States Trade Representative, which will also review the US
International Trade Commission and the US Trade and Development Agency. This
team will also include Ted Dean from Dropbox.
The
labor bureaucracies will also have seats at the table, demonstrating their
complete integration into the apparatus of capitalist rule. Beth Antunez,
Shital Shah and Marla Ucelli-Kashyap of the American Federation of Teachers,
together with Donna Harris-Aikens of the National Education Association, will
sit on the Department of Education team.
The
labor bureaucracies are also represented by LaQuita Honeysucker from the United
Food and Commercial Workers International Union, who will be on the Department
of Agriculture review team, while Josh Nassar of the United Auto Workers will
sit on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau team.
Brad
Markell of the AFL-CIO will sit on the Department of Energy Team. His name
appears right before that of Trisha Miller from the venture capital firm Gates
Ventures.
On
the Department of Labor team will be Jennifer Abruzzo of the Communications
Workers of America, Dora Chen of the Service Employees International Union,
Jessica Chu of the Amalgamated Transit Union International, Nadia Marin-Molina
of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), and Shaun O’Brien of
the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, among others.
The
major academic institutions represented on the list include Harvard Law School,
the University of Michigan Law School, New York University School of Law, Duke
University, Stanford University, Georgetown University and others. Major law
firms and consulting firms include Deloitte Consulting; DLA Piper; Orrick,
Herrington & Sutcliffe; Sidley Austin; Covington & Burling; and Latham
& Watkins.
The
racial and identity politics promoted by the Democratic Party did not fail to
be reflected on the list, with Bonnie Jenkins appointed to the Department of
State team from an organization titled Women of Color Advancing Peace and
Security. Jenkins, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
previously served as the coordinator for threat reduction programs in the Obama
administration’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.
The
Department of Defense team will be led by Kathy Hicks from the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who will be joined by Melissa
Dalton and Andrew Hunter, also from the CSIS; Stacie Pettyjohn, Christine
Wormuth and Terri Tanielian from the RAND Corporation; Ely Ratner from the
Center for a New American Security; and Lisa Sawyer of JPMorgan Chase, among
others.
The
composition of Biden’s agency review teams exposes and refutes all of the
pseudo-left and opportunist groups in the orbit of the Democratic Party and the
trade union bureaucracies, which have throughout the year attempted to persuade
American workers that Biden, the Democratic Party and the unions represented
some sort of channel through which they could advance their own independent
interests.
The
parade of lobbyists, servants and agents of the capitalist class into the
incoming Biden administration prompted a defensive article in the New
York Times on Thursday, titled “Progressives Press Biden to Limit
Corporate Influence in Administration.”
The
title of the article essentially acknowledges that “corporate influence” (i.e.,
corruption) is playing a pervasive role in the formation of the incoming
administration, and suggests “limits” on that influence.
The
article concedes that “Mr. Biden’s team included executives from Amazon Web
Services, Lyft, Airbnb and a vice president of WestExec Advisors, a Washington
consulting firm whose secretive list of clients includes financial services,
technology and pharmaceutical companies.”
The Times then
points to the efforts of “progressive Democrats” who are advocating “for
tighter ethics rules.” This is nothing but a fig leaf for the otherwise naked
domination of the Democratic Party by the interests of the
military-intelligence-corporate-financial oligarchy.
The
facts presented in the Times article themselves paint a
devastating picture of how the so-called “left” wing of the party is being
shoved aside as the fat cats shoulder their way into the new administration. In
a joint letter sent Thursday, a number of organizations associated with the
so-called “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party pleaded with Biden not to
“nominate or hire corporate executives, lobbyists, and prominent corporate
consultants,” and to adopt “ethics” rules to limit corruption.
These
and other feeble efforts by the “progressive Democrats” are being
unceremoniously ignored. The Times itself was compelled to
acknowledge that “Mr. Biden has not always shared the left’s concerns about
lobbying.”
Tendencies
like the Democratic Socialists of America were used by the Democratic Party
during the election campaign to further the Democrats’ electoral prospects, but
within days of the vote they were tossed aside and roundly denounced for having
supposedly cost the Democrats votes and positions with their “radical” and
“socialist” rhetoric.
These
“socialist” elements had been promised “space” in a Biden administration, but
they showed up after the election only to find their “Green New Deal” and other
promised reforms piled up in trash bags by the curb.
There
is nothing unexpected about the emerging right-wing, pro-war, pro-Wall Street
composition of the incoming Biden administration. Biden himself spent decades in Washington as a corrupt
bag-man for wealthy interests in the state of Delaware, the legal headquarters
of hundreds of thousands of corporations that take advantage of its
business-friendly laws.
As vice
president, Biden was reportedly opposed even to the barebones rules against
corruption that were imposed during the Obama presidency. In the words of
the Times:
“When he was vice president under Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden bristled at the strict
lobbying rules, which he contended would deprive their nascent administration
of experienced talent.”
From the moment Biden secured a lead in the
voting results, the Democratic Party swung viciously
to the right, attacking “socialism” and the “left” in general. On a conference
call with House Democrats after the election, former CIA agent Abigail
Spanberger, now a representative from Virginia, shouted: “We need to not ever
use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
While
the “socialists” have been escorted out of the back door, the front door has
been thrown open to corporate executives, lobbyists and consultants to staff
the new administration.
Despite
his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has
attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton,
Pennsylvania.
Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Alexander Nazaryan administration
takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford
worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White
House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became
president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to
Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with
Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of
staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of the
“transition teams” named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal
government that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new
officials and advising the incoming administration on what its first governing
steps should be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by the
composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some
progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to
normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace
policy ideas well to the left of center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says former
Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called
“Bad Faith.”
Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic
operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms
and think tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives
from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and
enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the
Brookings Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very
concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this administration,”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also
effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White
House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not
“pull the wool over our eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s
transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely
disconnected from the struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning
activist Ryan Knight, whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan
in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders
hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election,
Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent
contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP)
(Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two dozen
agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold &
Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent
lobbyists.
The agency review teams are not exactly
settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet
conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by
Republican operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is
an enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The
transition teams are supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large
part by making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their
respective agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one
member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were
primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She
says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only
as a secondary function.
With a single exception, the agency review team
members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
One with a typically impressive biography is
that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for
Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now
he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will
presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis
DeJoy.
Of course, most progressives are glad that
there’s a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But
they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did everything
they could to get Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive
activist who worked for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice
Democrats, the group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in
2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will be a
“junior partner” to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been
ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to
be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency review
teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s
reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the
Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a
doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business
Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico
who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials throughout
many of the groups is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the
American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are
several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury
teams “all-stars,” a sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for
this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive
economist who has written on the
racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate
governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related
teams are not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not
stuffed with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the
lessons of his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking
executives to help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways
that steered the new president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those
very same banks.
There is not a single current executive from
Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has
also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review
process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo
News that the bank was “following the appropriate election laws” and that
Sawyer was “not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is going to
be surprising to progressives in some ways and disappointing in others, and the
agency review teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the summer, the
American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy
advisers’ lucrative foray
into corporate America. Many are set to return to the highest
echelons of official Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says
Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like Shahid are
less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are
less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a
lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the
mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of
Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College
and is an ardently anti-Trump
Republican.
“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies
loose in the government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people
on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not
Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas
cautioned against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to
government, but it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their stars like
Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department,
they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third
Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the
populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has
only made that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment,
they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself,
again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to
transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox,
as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor
Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these
officials are veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the
Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate
influence there,” says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on
Race and the Economy. “And that is troubling.” But he is encouraged by the
presence of “hard-core progressives” like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury
deputy who is both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American
Economic Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on
the Treasury transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between former
Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who
moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials had
done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate
law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as
impressive as it may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four
years,” Weeks says.
For many progressives, Trump was a singular
threat to important institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding
those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities
shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities.
It doesn’t help matters that, today, tech
giants are distrusted by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that were
run out of Palo Alto garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad
companies of a century ago.
And like those companies, they know how to use
their influence. In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential
technology firms — Amazon and Facebook — each spent $17 million on “government
affairs,” better known as
lobbying.
Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to Uber may have been
a subtle warning to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law of Vice
President-elect Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the Department of
Justice under President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel at Uber. Jake
Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for Uber.
The company recently won a major victory in
California with Proposition 22, a successful response
to legal efforts to make Uber drivers and other “gig workers” employees, not
contractors. That’s exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the
Biden administration must avoid.
Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon Valley
in 2017. They could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation for free
market capitalism at a time when “socialism” is no longer a dirty word.
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked
with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication
that covers technology.
That’s exactly what worries Jeff Hauser,
executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has
called, without much affection, “the swamp.” He notes that the transition team
for the Office of Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly
from Silicon Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and
Amazon.
The budget office wields an “enormous amount of
power,” says Hauser, including in both how congressionally appropriated money
is doled out and how certain rules are implemented. Though it had a supporting role
in Trump’s impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise
obscure, making it a perfect site for covert exercises of federal power.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big
Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the
Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Watching the transition, Gray, the former
Sanders adviser, recalled an old saying: “The fish rots from the head.” The
head, in this case, is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has long
been a skeptic.
“He’s a fundamentally conservative man,” Gray
says. She reasons that if Biden was “unmoved by the largest protest movement in
American history” to endorse Medicare for All, he can’t be trusted to do much
for conservative causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New Deal.
Still, she believes that Biden can be made to
hear the voices of progressives — if, Gray says, they are loud enough. She
points out that there is widespread support for progressive legislation
like the $15 minimum wage in
Florida, even though Trump won the state.
Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to
legalize small amounts of drugs, known as Measure 110, was even more popular
than he was.
She sees that as evidence that progressive
ideas are more popular than Biden himself. “Progressives should never stop
screaming that reality from the rooftops,” Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed
to keep fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval
Office once again.
“I don’t accept resignation,” she said.
Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
THE
LONG HISTORY OF OBAMA-BIDENomics:
The “managed
bankruptcy” of GM and Chrysler ordered by the Obama administration set into
motion the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs, including 35,000 GM
production jobs in the US alone, the shuttering of dozens of assembly and parts
plants and the closing of more than 1,000 car dealerships. Obama worked with
the United Auto Workers to slash the wages of new hires in half, abolish the
eight-hour day, ban strikes for six years and relieve the corporations of
retiree health care obligations by handing the provision and cutting of retiree
medical benefits to the UAW.
The executive from the giant investment firm BlackRock
played a leading role in the destruction of autoworkers’ jobs and living standards
during the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler.
Who is Biden’s top economic adviser Brian Deese?
President-elect
Joe Biden has reportedly selected Brian Deese, an executive at the Wall Street
investment firm BlackRock, as director of the National Economic Council,
according to several major news outlets. “In
his new post, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, Mr. Deese will play a
lead role in implementing Mr. Biden’s economic agenda,” the Wall Street
Journal wrote Monday.
While Deese was
not among those Biden introduced Tuesday as his “economic team,” an
announcement is expected soon. Deese, the
Global Head of Sustainable Investment at BlackRock, would be the second
executive chosen by the incoming administration from the world’s largest asset
manager, which controls $7 trillion in assets and is a major shareholder in
Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, Apple, Microsoft and other global corporate giants.
On Tuesday,
Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, a former chief of staff to BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink,
was named top deputy to Janet Yellen, the former Federal Reserve Chairwoman who
Biden picked for Secretary of the Treasury. Tom Donilon, chairman of BlackRock
Investment Institute and brother of Biden’s chief campaign political
strategist, had been considered for the director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, but the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Donilon
decided to stay in the “private sector.”
Brian Deese
(Source: BlackRock)
The
selection of Deese and Adeyemo—who both previously served in the Obama
administration—exemplifies the revolving door between Wall Street and
Washington, DC, which operates constantly, regardless of which party controls
the White House.
It
is a further signal to the financial oligarchy that a Biden administration will
dispense with its rhetoric about raising taxes on the wealthy and continue
funneling trillions into the stock markets. “By picking folks with deep ties to
large asset managers,” Tyler Gellasch, executive director of investor trade
group Healthy Markets Association, told the Journal, “the administration
can help assuage financial executives’ concerns. It sends a clear signal to the
industry to breathe easier: They can plan for stability without likely facing
massive new regulatory or tax risks.”
After working on Obama’s 2008 election
campaign, Deese was appointed Special Assistant to the President for economic
policy and served on the National Economic Council as Obama took over the
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) from the outgoing George Bush
administration, and pumped massive resources into the same banks and financial
institutions whose criminal activities had crashed the economy.
Deese, who had
no formal training as an economist, then made a name for himself for being the
most aggressive advocate of throwing General Motors and Chrysler Corp. into
bankruptcy in 2009.
In a May
2009 New York Times article, headlined “The 31-Year-Old in Charge of
Dismantling G.M.,” David Sanger wrote, “It is not every 31-year-old who, in a
first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting
the rules of American capitalism.
BLOG
EDITOR: WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THE PARASITE LAWYERS?!?
“But that, in
short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law
School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on
his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.”
Deese was part
of the White House Auto Task Force, which was made up
of Wall Street asset strippers, including billionaire investor and Democratic
Party fundraiser Steven Rattner and Ron Bloom, another Wall Street “turnaround
specialist” with a long history of collaborating with the unions during the
bankruptcy restructuring of the airline and steel industry.
While publicly
claiming that they wanted to avoid bankruptcy, court document would show that
Deese and others in Obama’s inner circle were determined to
force the auto companies into a forced restructuring from the earliest days of
the new administration.
After Rick
Wagoner, GM’s former chief executive, said publicly that bankruptcy was not a
viable option, the administration would fire him and threaten to withhold any
further money from GM unless it imposed far more “painful” cuts than outlined
in its initial plan, which called for the elimination of 47,000 jobs worldwide,
including 21,000 hourly workers in the US.
The
“managed bankruptcy” of GM and Chrysler ordered by the Obama administration set
into motion the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs, including 35,000 GM
production jobs in the US alone, the shuttering of dozens of assembly and parts
plants and the closing of more than 1,000 car dealerships. Obama worked with
the United Auto Workers to slash the wages of new hires in half, abolish the
eight-hour day, ban strikes for six years and relieve the corporations of
retiree health care obligations by handing the provision and cutting of retiree
medical benefits to the UAW.
As
the wrote at the time, “Obama’s Auto Task Force has focused on one
thing from the beginning: how to exploit the crisis of the auto industry to
create conditions for Wall Street to reap huge profits. Its leading
figures—Secretary Treasurer Timothy Geithner and White House economic [adviser]
Lawrence Summers—played a key role in the Wall Street bailout, opposing the
slightest restrictions on compensation paid to banking executives receiving
public money. When it has come to the auto industry, however, they have
demanded the most brutal job cuts and wage and benefit concessions from
autoworkers.
“The outcome of
the dismantling of the auto industry,” the continued, “will mean that the
industrial base of the US will shrink even more and the economy will be further
dominated by the type of reckless and socially destructive speculation that is
responsible for the worst economic and social crisis since the 1930s.”
A year after
the forced bankruptcies, Citi Investment Research analyst Itay Michaeli boasted
that GM’s fixed cost per vehicle would drop from $10,400 in 2009 to $7,280 in
2010 and fall to $5,772 by 2012. In the five years following, labor costs at GM
and Chrysler—which declared bankruptcy on April 30, 2009—were predicted to be
lower than any Japanese automaker operating nonunion plants in the US, making
it profitable for the company to build small cars in the US, rather than in
Mexico.
The auto
restructuring became a template for the decimation of wages throughout the
working class during the eight years of the Obama administration, which oversaw
the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to top in US history up until
today.
Deese’s “success” during the auto restructuring
earned him a rapid set of promotions in the Obama White House. He was soon named deputy direct of
the National Economic Council and then the deputy director and acting director
of the Office of Management and Budget. In 2015, he helped negotiate the 2015
Bipartisan Budget Act.
After
finding limitless funds to bail out Wall Street, the Obama administration would
insist there was no money to bail out states and municipalities, which had laid
off hundreds of thousands of educators and other public employees during the
Great Recession.
When Biden
introduced his economic team Tuesday,
he claimed that “help was on the way” to the tens of millions of workers, small
business owners and unemployed who are facing an unprecedented economic and
social catastrophe. But his selection of Deese, Yellen, Adeyemo and others
directly from Wall Street make it clear that a Biden administration
will be committed to austerity and back-to-work campaign aimed at forcing
workers to pay for the corporate bailout no matter how many lives are
needlessly lost to the pandemic.
At the time, Delphi employed nearly 50,000 Americans, who earned about
$30 an hour on the assembly line. Now, workers in Mexico for the company
earn about $1 an hour.
Joe Biden’s Pick for Economic Adviser Tied to Delphi
Pension-Slashing Scheme
30 Nov 2020316
4:35
Democrat Joe Biden’s pick to be his top economic adviser in the
White House served on the Obama-appointed team that helped slash pensions for
roughly 20,000 Americans in the auto bailout.
This week, Biden announced that
Obama alum Brian Deese, now an executive at the investment management firm
BlackRock, will serve as his top economic adviser should he enter the White
House.
Deese previously served as a special assistant to Obama for
economic policy and played a role in the administration’s bailout of the auto
industry, which ultimately led to slashed pensions for 20,000 non-union workers
at the Delphi Corporation, an auto parts supplier to General Motors (GM).
In 2009, as part of the Obama-Biden
administration’s taxpayer-funded bailout of GM, the Pension Benefit Guaranty
Corporation (PBGC) terminated the
pension plans of non-unionized Delphi workers. In some cases, workers had
their pensions gutted by as much as 75 percent.
A federal report in 2013 detailed that
the Delphi workers would likely have their pensions cut by an estimated $440
million. Meanwhile, GM topped off unionized
Delphi workers’ pensions at a cost of about $1 billion.
Deese, along with agency heads like Timothy Geithner and top
advisers like Ron Bloom, was named in that federal report, having had been
involved in multiple conversations about the Delphi pensions:
In July 2009, internal Government emails between the Auto Team
and Advisor to the President Brian Deese discussed GM’s need to address issues
with Delphi’s “splinter unions.” Auto Team officials did not recall details
related to the emails. When Senator Charles Schumer took a position that GM
should assume the Delphi salaried retiree pensions, Mr. Deese emailed Mr.
Rattner this “may complicate the optics of doing anything for the splinters.”
Other emails from Mr. Deese stated, “We will continue to face intense scrutiny
on this issue. The politics of terminations is quite intense” and “we need to
work on a clear rationale for the outcomes we’re moving toward, as well as an
explanation of respective roles.” Mr. Rattner emailed members of the Auto Team
that he had spoken with Fritz Henderson about “our logic on the splinters,
which he [Henderson] was fine with. [Auto Team Analyst] Sadiq [Malik] should
speak to Janice [Uhlig] about the details, particularly how the reallocation of
the $417mm would work.” Auto Team member Feldman emailed members of the
Auto Team about health care/pension benefit changes for IUE and USW employees,
and Mr. Deese responded that the company’s organizing principle was parity
between GM salaried and non-UAW hourlies. Mr. Deese referenced a discussion
about health care costs and the “credible fairness arguments to augment the
hourlies’ recovery based on the pension disparity, but that for all the reasons
we discussed that would not be possible. However, I think the logic of that
conclusion strongly counsels in favor of bringing the top-up through.
Otherwise, we’re moving in the opposite direction from a position that we all
agreed was itself on the edge of fairness.”
In October, President Trump signed a memorandum to
devise a plan to restore the pensions of the Delphi workers. Biden has not said
if he supports the memorandum.
Former Delphi workers told Breitbart
News in interviews how
the pension-slashing scheme uprooted their livelihoods. One retiree said she
lost her home, and her retirement plans to move to the Florida coast have been
squashed.
Another retiree said his wife died in the process, as he was
forced to find work in order to pay for her medical bills. He had assumed that
after 30 years at Delphi, he and his wife would have a good healthcare plan in
their retirement. That ended when his pension was cut by about 30 percent.
Delphi, which has since split into
Aptiv and Delphi Technologies, announced in 2006 that it would shutter 21
of its 29 plants in the United States — offshoring some 20,000 U.S. jobs
to Mexico, China, and other foreign countries.
At the time, Delphi employed nearly
50,000 Americans, who earned about
$30 an hour on the assembly line. Now, workers in Mexico for the company
earn about $1 an hour.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
YOU WONDERED WHY BIDEN HAS VOTED
FOR EVERY WAR FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS???
JOE BIDEN'S GLOBAL WAR MACHINE TO
BE RUN BY WALL STREET CRONIES
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-names-national-security-team-of.html
Biden
names national security team of right-wing militarists
This is because despite all its
declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s
transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and
the military-industrial complex.
Amazon is entangled not only with
Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon
was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10
billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government
data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software
“Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
Hostile Takeover: Wall Street
Assumes Command of Joe Biden Transition Team
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-i-need-secretary-of-treasury.html
Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.
Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.
JOE
BIDEN SAYS MUCK PROGRESSIVES, I MADE MY DIRTY MONEY SERVING WALL STREET!
“Hauser also didn’t like the
prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled
to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate
malefactors.”
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html
“Joe Biden’s transition is
absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an
online publication that covers technology.”
“He was presumably referring to
the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold
& Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.”
“During the summer, the American
Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America. Many
are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.”
Alejandro Mayorkas: A Portrait of the
Intended Nominee for DHS Secretary
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-promises-employers-of-cheap.html
Will a Senate confirmation hearing recall troubling integrity scandals
and heavy-handed re-direction on immigration law and fraud enforcement?
Feds: Plants that Hired Illegal Aliens Paid Unlawful Wages, Hired
a Child…open borders…it’s all about keeping wages depressed and passing along
the true cost to middle America
Former Vice President Joe Biden will
nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),
despite his role in creating huge Latin American migration and his involvement
in several visas-for-sale scandals.
Joe Biden's pick to run the DHS immigration
agency – Alejandro Mayorkas – is a political gift for the GOP, says Jessica
Vaughan at CIS: "Cronyism, corruption, swampiness, and the immigration
issue." https://t.co/859b16NhN4
OPEN BORDERS
AND A NATION FLOODED WITH ‘CHEAP’ LABOR
Former Vice
President Joe Biden will nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to run the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS), despite his role in creating huge Latin American
migration and his involvement in several visas-for-sale scandals.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-keeps-promise-to-narcomex-picks.html
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