THERE IS NO BANKSTER TUCKING MORE STOLEN MONEY INTO THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY JOB BIDEN’S POCKETS THAN BLACKROCK’S LARRY FINK.
IF YOU’VE WONDERED IF JOE BIDEN, THE CLOWN WHO STAGES HIMSELF AS A BLUE COLLAR POPULIST, IS ANYTHING BUT BOUGHT AND OWNED BY WALL STREET’S BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANKSTERS, LOOK AGAIN! JOE WILL BE BAILING THEM OUT FIRST!!!
The closeness of the relationship between Blackrock and the financial and economic arms of the state, the US Treasury and the Fed, were highlighted in a comment by William Birdthistle, of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds, cited in the article.
He said Blackrock was “about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve.”
SHOCKING! OR IS IT? BIDEN HAS BEEN THE SAME BRIBES SUCKING LAWYER FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS!
Chris Hedges | Voting BIDEN was WRONG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RjnohdjH5E
Chris Hedges: The Ruthless Corporate destruction of our Nation, Culture and Ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eQV0IuYQ2U&list=WL&index=12
LOW DOWN ON BIDEN'S REAL PAYMASTERS - JOE RECIEVED MORE THAN $76 MILLION DOLLARS FROM WALL STREET'S BIGGEST CRIMINALS. THE BIGGEST PART OF THAT CAME FROM BLACKROCK . HERE'S MORE:
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=83&t=33s
BlackRock & Wall Street: US Housing Market TAKEOVER (Fact or Fiction?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCHS4IW0LBo
David Sirota: Blackrock, Koch ROBBING Future Homeowners https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFjxvrJvWwQ
BlackRock - The company that owns the world? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4foal20UTA
How BlackRock exploited the COVID-19 pandemic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96sAffLWy_8
"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.
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.
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.”
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
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
JOHN BINDER
30 Nov 2020 316
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
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.”
KAMALA HARRIS - I CAN CON THEM! I'M A LAWYER, IT'S WHAT I HAVE DONE MY ENTIRE BRIBES SUCKING LEGAL CAREER! All of this is, if we can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry professionals and their most trusted law firms.
*
There is something fitting in the selection of Harris to co-lead the Democrats’ ticket. The response of the Democrats to the mass multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests against police violence that erupted earlier this year was to divert them into the politics of racial division, using the reactionary and false claim that what was involved was a conflict between “white America” and “black America,” rather than a conflict between the working class and capitalism.
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA
KAMALA HARRIS AND HER GOLDMAN SACHS BANKSTER STEVEN MNUCHIN
A tidy corrupt partnership
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-looting-of-america-kamala-harris.html
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.)
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
World’s largest asset management firm was “front and center” of Fed’s Wall Street bailout
Nick Beams
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, was “in frequent touch” with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome Powell “in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency programs were announced in late March.”
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
The extent of the collaboration is revealed in new emails obtain by the newspaper together with information that has been previously made public.
In one newly obtained email, Fink refers to planning for the rescue measures as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”
As the article notes, “America’s top economic officials were in constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue,” showing “how intertwined Blackrock has become with the federal government.”
Blackrock’s close collaboration with the Fed and Treasury came at a crucial point in the development of a crisis in financial markets which began with the onset of the pandemic in March and fears in corporate circles over the response in the working class amid walkouts by workers insisting that safety measures be out in place.
The Fed responded to the initial turbulence in the markets by cutting interest rates. But these measures proved to be insufficient and the potential for a major meltdown in the markets emerged in the week ending March 20 when the $21 trillion US Treasury bond market—the bedrock of the US and global financial system—froze.
Instead of providing a “safe haven” for investors it moved to the centre of the crisis as Treasuries were sold off and no buyers could be found as the sell-off extended to all areas of the financial system.
Faced with a disaster when the markets re-opened, Mnuchin, Powell and Fink were engaged in a series of discussions over the weekend of March 21–22 to devise a rescue package. According to the Times report, Mnuchin spoke to Fink five times over the two days, more than anyone else, other than Powell with whom he spoke nine times.
One of the most significant features of the rescue measures announced on Monday March 23 was the decision by the Fed, for the first time ever, to buy corporate bonds which, as the Times noted, “were becoming nearly impossible to sell as investors sprinted to convert their holdings to cash.”
Blackrock had already closely collaborated with the Fed developing its response to the 2008 financial crisis was thereby set to play a key role in the March intervention.
The article pointed out that, while Blackrock signed a non-disclosure agreement on March 22 restricting officials from sharing information about the upcoming measures, the way in which the rescue package was devised “mattered to Blackrock.”
The decision of the Fed to buy corporate bonds and provide an underpinning for the market was significant and involved two key areas of Blackrock’s operations. One of the ways it makes profit is by managing money for clients charging a preset fee. But assets under management were contracting as investors went for cash and its business model was under threat.
Blackrock is also a major player in the short-term debt markets which were coming “under intense stress” as investors moved their holdings to cash.
Electronic Traded Funds (ETFs), which track market indexes but which trade like a stock, were also severely impacted.
In the words of the Times article: “Corporate bonds were difficult to trade and near impossible to issue in mid-March 2020. Prices on some high-grade corporate ETFs, including one of Blackrock’s, were out of whack relative to the value of the underlying assets.”
As Gregg Gelenzis, associate director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress told the Times : “This was the first time that ETFs came under stress in a really systemic way.”
In the rescue package the Fed committed itself to buying already existing debt as well as new bonds and also decided it would purchase ETFs with the result that the “bond market and fund recovery was nearly instant.”
As the Times article notes, while practically all of Wall Street benefited from the Fed’s intervention, and other financial firms were “consulted” apart from Blackrock “no other company was as front and center.”
The closeness of the relationship between Blackrock and the financial and economic arms of the state, the US Treasury and the Fed, were highlighted in a comment by William Birdthistle, of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds, cited in the article.
He said Blackrock was “about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve.”
The Fed makes every effort to cover up that relationship in order to try to preserve the fiction that it is not beholden to Wall Street and operates as an independent public authority concerned above all with the state of the economy and the welfare of the population.
The Times article recalled a news conference in July 2020 in which Powell was asked about the discussions with Fink.
“I can’t recall exactly what those conversations were,” he said, “but they would have been about what he is seeing in the market and things like that.
He said there were not “very many” conversations and that the Blackrock chief was “typically trying to make sure that we are getting good service from the company he founded the leads.”
Powell’s claim that, in the midst of the most significant crisis since the meltdown of 2008—with a potential to go even further, as the freeze in the Treasury market showed—he could not recall those conversations simply does not pass muster.
The value of every crisis, it has been rightly said, is that it reveals the real relations that are obscured and covered over in “normal” times.
And that is the case here. The economic arms of the capitalist state are not some independent authority but function every day in the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy, servicing its needs and interests above all else.
Coal Miners Protest Wall Street’s BlackRock: ‘Invest in the American People!’ Rainmaker Photos/MediaPunch
JOHN BINDER
28 Jul 2021 244
4:08
Coal miners from across Alabama, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania protested outside the Wall Street firms like BlackRock, the biggest shareholder in Warrior Met Coal, on Wednesday in a fight for better union contracts.
For nearly five months, about 1,100 coal miners with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) have been on strike against Warrior Met Coal demanding a better contract.
In 2016, Warrior Met Coal filed for bankruptcy and in order to keep the company afloat, the UMWA agreed to pay cuts, fewer healthcare benefits, and less time off for coal miners with the promise that they would be rewarded once the company climbed its way out of the bankruptcy.
UMWA representatives, though, said upper-level management was paid bonuses even as the coal miners accepted pay cuts. Now, after the agreement saved Warrior Coal Met $1.1 billion over the last five years along with $4.3 billion in profits, the coal miners are asking for a contract that rewards them for helping the company’s finances get back in order.
“You have sacrificed enough, you have made this company profitable,” a union representative said outside of BlackRock, Warrior Met Coal’s biggest shareholder. “And when they sit at the table and they tell you ‘The price is too high,’ I tell them that the cost is too much to bear for your families and your communities and for you not to get the contract that you deserve.”
“If they don’t like us in these streets, then they need to get us a contract, you hear that BlackRock,” another union representative said:
Get us a fair contract and we’ll go back to work in those coal mines where we should be. We road up here on buses to tell you your investment needs to be put to use in these guys’ salaries, in these guys’ benefits, these guys that have earned you profits that you’re making from these coal mines.
The union representative continued:
Every time America gets in a war, they come down to a coalfield to get people to fight those wars . In Vietnam, more West Virginians lost their lives per capita than any other state in the union. America owes a great deal to coal miners. We fought in World War I, World War II, Korea, the Middle East, Vietnam. Whenever America called on us, we answered. It is now time for our government to stand up for coal miners . [Emphasis added]
Actress Susan Sarandon spoke at the protest, slamming BlackRock as a “horrible smear on the vision of the United States.”
“I know what it’s like to be a union person who is struggling for what’s right, for what is owed to you,” Sarandon said:
Striking Alabama Coal Miners Protest at BlackRock Offices in New York City on July 28, 2021. Credit: Rainmaker Photos/MediaPunch /IPX
Striking Alabama Coal Miners Protest at BlackRock Offices in New York City on July 28, 2021. Credit: Rainmaker Photos/MediaPunch /IPX
Striking Alabama Coal Miners Protest at BlackRock Offices in New York City on July 28, 2021. Credit: Rainmaker Photos/MediaPunch /IPX
Will Attig with the Union Veterans Council said Warrior Coal Met “has stolen a billion dollars from each” coal miner, their community, and the “mom and pop shops that we’re supposed to be supporting” over the last five years.
“Right now, we see those politicians and CEOs taking those opportunities from our workers to pull themselves up and they’re cutting the bootstraps off before they can even tie them,” Attig said:
It is time for use to send these CEOs, conglomerates, and millionaires back to where they need to go — they need to come to the table. They need to say ‘We’re willing to fight for our country, we’re willing to fight for the workers in our communities, we’re willing to give this company a fair shake and a fair contract. That’s what they need to do … we’re calling on them to invest in the American people that they talk about.
One UMWA member called on the coal miners to pray, saying “We can’t do this without Jesus … cause it’s all about him. Whether you know it or not, it’s all about him.”
While on strike, the UMWA has been paying coal miners benefits and covering healthcare expenses through the union’s Strike Aid Fund. In the first three months of the strike, the union distributed $4.3 million to coal miners, including $3.1 million in benefits and $700,000 in healthcare expenses.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
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