FOLKS, I'M JUST ONE MORE LAWYER SHIT FROM SCRANTON!
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.
DO YOU TRULY BELIEVE JOE BIDEN IS, OR EVER HAS, SERVED ANYONE WHO DOES NOT LIVE ON WALL STREET?
Chris Hedges: The Ruthless Corporate destruction of our Nation, Culture and Ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eQV0IuYQ2U&list=WL&index=36&t=119s
Chris Hedges | The HORRIFIC State of the American Empire
Shockingly Bad Home Sales Data Derail The Fed's Tapering Plans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnc9mBOtr-Q
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30
Executives Tied to Wall Street
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.
BLOG EDITOR: OF BIDEN'S $74 MILLION IN BANKSTER MONEY, 30% CAME FROM IS BLACKROCK BANKSTER BUDDIES.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign
is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on
Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and
Wall Street executives and employees have
donated more than $74 million to elect the
former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
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.
In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
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.
Chris Hedges | How Bankers ROBBED and ENSLAVED America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZnwIyQjCOg
Chris Hedges | America's RIGGED Justice System
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP5fQ4wDk2Y
8 Signs That The US Is Heading To 21st Century Great Depression: Prepare Your Self For The Worst!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx3p0qS3O5Y&t=13s
Bank Meltdown Is Coming As Latest Data Reveals Something Is Terminally Broken In The US Bank System
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Chris Hedges | The HORRIFIC State of the American Empire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXYsGuBdzM4
HOW THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY JOE BIDEN HELPED STRIP BANKRUPTCY PROTECTION FROM MILLIONS JUST BEFORE THE RECESSION THE BIG BANKSTERS CAUSED
Biden and Elizabeth Warren have been fighting each other since the 2005 bankruptcy bill.
BY LUKE DARBY
October 23, 2019
NurPhoto
During the most recent Democratic presidential primary debate, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren had an awkward and tense exchange over the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The friction between the two of them goes back quite a ways, long before Biden was vice president and Warren became a senator in Massachusetts. The two first butted heads over Biden's support of bankruptcy reform in the late 1990s and early 2000s, back when he represented Delaware in the Senate.
The key detail is the difference between the two kinds of bankruptcy a person can declare: Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Chapter 7 is known as liquidation bankruptcy and is meant for people with limited income. It allows them sell off what assets they can to pay creditors and then discharge most of the rest of their debts relatively quickly. In contrast, Chapter 13, reorganizing bankruptcy, puts the debtor on a payment plan, so a portion their future income is guaranteed to go to paying back their creditors. If you're a creditor, this is the option you would rather someone take when they owe you money, since you're going to get more out of them over the long run.
The 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) was meant, on paper, to prevent people from abusing Chapter 7 bankruptcy. It accomplished that through means testing, making it harder for people to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy versus Chapter 13. If a person's income exceeds a certain threshold, they're ineligible for declaring Chapter 7. The bill also required people to complete a credit counseling course no more than 180 days before they declare bankruptcy. It also limits the kinds of debt a person can discharge through bankruptcy: If they use a credit card to spend too much money on "luxury goods" or withdraw too much in cash advances, that credit line can't be erased. And, gallingly, the bill made it completely impossible to discharge student loan debt. It may very well be the single piece of legislation most responsible for putting the U.S. in the current student debt crisis.
Biden was one of the bill's major Democratic champions, and he fought for its passage from his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He had pushed for two earlier bankruptcy reform bills in 2000 and 2001, both of which failed. But in 2005, BAPCPA made it through, successfully erecting all kinds of roadblocks for Americans struggling with debt, and doing so just before the financial crisis of 2008. Since BAPCPA passed, Chapter 13 filings went from representing just 24 percent of all bankruptcy filings per year to 39 percent in 2017. Melissa Jacoby, a University of North Carolina law professor specializing in bankruptcy, told Politico, "I doubt that the bill reined in the abuses that the bill was premised on, in part because they didn’t necessarily exist in the first place."
Unions, consumer protection groups, and the National Organization for Women all opposed the BAPCPA, but it had heavy support from the credit card industry. Delaware is essentially a domestic tax haven for corporations, and as a result financial institutions like credit card companies hold tremendous power in the state. As political writer Alexander Cockburn once wrote, "The first duty of any senator from Delaware is to do the bidding of the banks and large corporations which use the tiny state as a drop box and legal sanctuary. Biden has never failed his masters in this primary task. Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you’ll likely detect Biden’s hand at work."
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Biden at the time stressed that he wasn't acting on behalf of the credit card companies, and as Matt Ygelsias writes at Vox, Biden's camp claims now that BAPCPA was an effort to get some concessions out of a Republican bill that would have been a bigger disaster without his intervention. But to his critics, there were red flags. For example, 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. Biden's interests were so aligned with MBNA's that in 1999 he was forced to defend himself by declaring, "I am not the senator from MBNA." But even without the shadows of impropriety, critics of Biden's support for bankruptcy reform had plenty of fodder.
One of Biden's biggest antagonists was none other than Elizabeth Warren. Back when she was a mere Harvard law professor specializing in bankruptcy law, Warren questioned the entire rationale of bankruptcy reform, telling The Washington Post in 1998, "Those who want to say the way to solve rising consumer bankruptcy is by changing the law are the same people who would have said during a malaria epidemic that the way to cut down on hospital admissions is to lock the door." In the 2003 book she co-wrote with her daughter, The Two-Income Trap, she took special aim at Biden's efforts to make it harder for Americans to declare bankruptcy and framed it as an issue that disproportionally effects women:
This year, more women will file bankruptcy papers than will receive college diplomas. More women with children will search for a bankruptcy lawyer than will seek subsidized day care. And in a statistic with special significance for Senator Biden, more women will be victimized by predatory lenders than will seek protection from an abusive husband or boyfriend... The point is simply that family economics should not be left to giant corporations and paid lobbyists, and senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening. Middle-class women need help, and right now no one is putting their economic interests first.
Two years after Warren wrote that, BAPCPA overwhelmingly passed with Biden's support—while bankruptcy reform had been dead on arrival just a few years earlier, 18 Senate Democrats chose to side with all 55 Republicans and the lone independent to vote in favor of the bill. Then president George W. Bush promptly signed it into law, and 14 years later BAPCPA is still making it more costly and cumbersome to declare bankruptcy. With the U.S. likely heading for another recession and credit card debt at a record $870 billion, millions more Americans could end up struggling with mountains of debt than they would otherwise had Biden not fought so hard to strip them of bankruptcy protection.
BIDEN WAS SELECTED BY BANKSTER-OWNED OBAMA BECAUSE OF HIS LONG HISTORY OF SERVING THE BANKSTERS!
Biden backed brutal bankruptcy bill in 2005
By Chris Talgo
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.
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