Sunday, July 18, 2021

AMERICA'S BLACKS - THE MOST VIOLENT, RACIST, ANTI-SEMITIC, ANTI-ASIAN, ABORTED AND HOMOPHOBIC SUBCULTURE IN THE WORLD!

 ANY ONE HAVE THIS WEEKEND'S BLACK ON BLACK MURDER COUNT IN CHICAGO?


56 Shot, 11 Killed, During Weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago

Police: Suspect Arrested in Attempted Kidnapping of NYC Child

2:12

Police on Friday arrested a suspect accused in the attempted kidnapping of a five-year-old who was walking alongside his family in Queens.

Twenty-four-year-old James McGonagle of Pomonok was charged with attempted kidnapping, reckless endangerment, and acting in a manner injurious to a child regarding the incident in Richmond Hill on Thursday, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) told the New York Post.

“McGonagle’s alleged accomplice, an older bald man photographed wearing jeans, an orange polo shirt and sunglasses, remains at large,” the outlet said.

Video footage released Friday showed the child walking with his mom at approximately 8:00 p.m. on Hillside Avenue when McGonagle appeared to exit a red car, pick the boy up, and carry him back to the car while the other suspect waited inside the vehicle, according to ABC 7.

The child’s mom, Dolores Diaz Lopez, then reached through the car’s open window, grabbing her son and pulling him out.

Sources told ABC 7 officers were at Brookdale Hospital regarding another matter when they recognized the suspect from the video footage.

“They say the suspect was at the hospital seeking some sort of treatment and was taken into custody. Police say the suspect is undergoing an evaluation at the hospital,” the outlet continued.

Diaz Lopez explained the family was on their way to visit her husband at work when the suspect grabbed her son, whose name is Jacob.

She said the boy initially sat down in the back seat but once she and her other kids pleaded for them to give him back, he stood and she took hold of him.

Police told CBS New York the car fled southbound on Hillside Avenue then westbound on Jamaica Avenue.

“The people coming, and because I’m screaming, the people coming, and they help me,” the mother recalled. “One lady come and called the police.”

The video footage has disturbed neighbors in the area.

“It’s a pretty safe neighborhood. I see kids on my block all the time. I’ve never seen anything like that happen before. It’s kind of scary,” resident Orlando Reyes commented.

Exclusive: Wealthy Suburb Wanting ‘Divorce’ from Crime-Ridden Atlanta Will Get Senate Hearing

A police car is vandalized during rioting and protests in Atlanta on May 29, 2020. - The death of George Floyd on May 25 while under police custody has sparked violent demonstrations across the US. (Photo by John Amis / AFP) (Photo by JOHN AMIS/AFP via Getty Images)
JOHN AMIS/AFP via Getty Images
5:13

The Georgia Senate plans to grant the Buckhead City proposal a hearing during its upcoming special session, a sign that the push for the wealthy district to deannex from Atlanta is continuing its momentum.

Bill sponsor Sen. Brandon Beach (R-Alpharetta), who has served in the state legislature’s upper chamber for ten years, told Breitbart News he has “never seen” Buckhead cityhood gain so much traction before.

The deannexation idea is not new, having been floated by local officials and residents on and off again for at least a decade. However, the passage of a pair of introductory cityhood bills in the Georgia General Assembly this past spring has given the effort newfound validation. Beach said surging crime numbers are driving the support for it.

“I’ve got Senate leadership behind it, and I’ve got a lot of really high-powered folks that are interested in making sure we get this thing moving forward,” Beach said.

Sen. Lee Anderson (R-Grovetown), chairman of the State and Local Government Operations Committee, confirmed to Breitbart News he plans to schedule a committee hearing for the legislation next time the Senate convenes, which is expected to be in late fall for a special session for redistricting.

The goal of the organization leading the cityhood effort, the Buckhead City Committee, is to earn a spot on next year’s ballot so that Buckhead’s roughly 90,000 residents can formally vote on it.

Buckhead City Committee spawned from residents’ frustrations over crime rates in the area and has evolved in recent months into a serious effort that has backing from many Republican state lawmakers, including Beach and Anderson, and, according to committee CEO Bill White, substantial fundraising abilities.

“The money is a leading indicator in my book,” White told Breitbart News.

He detailed the price tags of several upcoming events designed to fundraise for Buckhead City. One gentleman hosting a local event is anticipating ten attendees at $25,000 per head, while another is hosting a dinner at his home for four couples at a similar cost. The committee in September will have a 75-person event at Bones, a fancy local steakhouse, and White said that event has already raised $75,000. A committee board member hosting an event in October expects that one to generate half a million dollars.

“I think by October we’ll have another million dollars on the books. That’s what our plan is,” White said.

The committee head moved to the affluent district with his husband a few years ago from New York, where he had been CEO of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum for about 20 years. He said he has been disturbed by the “brazenness” of the criminal behavior as of late, pointing to a high murder rate, home invasions while residents are home, and a recent police warning of “bump and robs.”

“Our [agenda], which is irrespective of politics, is just taking control back of our city,” White said in June.

Buckhead has often been ranked one of the wealthiest communities in the south and is home to an abundance of expensive retail, shiny new office buildings, and upscale neighborhoods. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis assessed that a hypothetical Buckhead City would be 74 percent white and have an average median income of around $140,000, and that the city would take with it about 40 percent of Atlanta’s entire value.

Beach warned, “The city of Atlanta’s going to fight this. They’re going to fight it tooth and nail because this is a big portion of their tax collection, and the people have always been okay with that as long as they felt like they were getting a return on their investment, but when you’re not getting public safety, and you’ve got potholes and your trash isn’t being picked up and you’re not getting any services, people say, ‘Hey we want to take control and control our own destiny,’ if you will.”

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D), who is opposed to Buckhead’s deannexation, restated Friday at a press conference about anti-violence initiatives that the “current wave of violent crime” in her city is a “COVID crime wave.” She reasserted that Georgia reopening earlier than other states last year caused more people to flock to Georgia, which she claimed correlated to the uptick in crime.

Bottoms made similar comments in April at the Buckhead Rotary Club as she addressed deannexation, saying, “In creating a new city, you’re not building a wall around the city.” She contended, “It doesn’t address crime,” and added that the way to correct the “COVID crime wave” is to “continue to work together as we have done for decades, as a city, as one city.”

White, however, argued a lack of proper police resources was the source of the crime spike. He said there is “no leadership here in Atlanta” and called Bottoms the “worst mayor in history.”

He compared Buckhead’s deannexation to a divorce, saying, “At a certain point you realize you have — literally they call it ‘irreconcilable differences’ — and the only way to civilly handle that is to file for divorce in a marriage.”

Write to Ashley Oliver at aoliver@breitbart.com.


Suspect Wanted in Shooting Arrested After Commenting on Police Facebook Post

Lorraine Graves
Tulsa Police Dept./Facebook
2:13

An Oklahoma woman is in jail after commenting on a police department’s Facebook page about warrants regarding her arrest.

The Tulsa Police Department (TPD) makes a weekly Facebook post about its “Most Wanted” fugitives, KFOR reported Friday.

Authorities wrote Wednesday that Lorraine Graves was wanted in connection with the murder of Eric Graves, who was shot and killed at the St. Thomas Square Apartments this year.

“Detectives arrested Jayden Hopson and Gabriel Hopson for the murder, but they were still searching for Lorraine Graves, who was charged with accessory to murder,” the outlet said.

Once the Facebook post was shared, Graves commented, “What’s ,where’s the reward money at.”

“On 7/15/21 around 4:30 p.m., detectives with our Fugitive Warrants unit arrested Graves in north Tulsa near 36th St. N. and Garrison Ave. Graves is charged with Accessory to Murder. Her bond is set at $500,000,” the department said in a post on Friday.

The post featured photos of Graves and a screenshot of her comment:

The department also emphasized, “This is an arrest, not a conviction.”

Police noted in the initial post about Graves that detectives said she was “involved in the city’s 10th homicide of 2021 where Eric Graves was shot and killed at the St. Thomas Square Apartments” and asked citizens with information about her to contact the Tulsa Crime Stoppers:

According to KBTX, Graves remains in the Tulsa County Jail and if she is convicted, may face a sentence of up to 45 years in prison.

Meanwhile, Fox 23 reported in June Tulsa Police were investigating a spike in shooting calls that occurred within a short time span.

However, “When it comes to gun crimes, not just homicides, we have a 97 percent solve rate on things like this,” TPD Officer Danny Bean said at the time.

“If you’re going to go out there and commit a crime with a gun in Tulsa where you shoot someone, there is only a small three percent chance we will not catch you,” he added.


29 Shot Wednesday Alone in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago

Lori Lightfoot speaks at her election night party Tuesday, April 2, 2019, in Chicago. Lori Lightfoot elected Chicago mayor, making her the first African-American woman to lead the city. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh
2:08

Twenty-nine people were shot, two fatally, Wednesday alone in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports the first of the two fatalities occurred at 6:40 p.m., when a 24-year-old was shot in the head. He was sitting in a vehicle “in the 1600 block of South Christiana Avenue” when he was shot. He died at the scene.

Less than an hour later, at 7:20 p.m., a 38-year-old woman was shot and killed while standing “in front of a home in the 200 block of South Kilpatrick Avenue.” A vehicle pulled up near the woman and a gunman exited the vehicle and opened fire, killing her.

There were two shootings that left behind multiple wounded victims on Wednesday as well.

The first occurred early Wednesday morning when a gunman opened fire on five people who were standing “in the 4600 block of West Monroe Street just after midnight.” A man and four women were injured in the incident.

NBC 5 notes that the second such shooting occurred at 12:09 p.m. when three assailants opened fire on people standing on “a sidewalk near the intersection of 79th Street and Justine Street.”

Five  people were wounded in the attack, two of them critically.

The violent Wednesday in Chicago comes just days after a weekend over which 40 people were shot, 11 of them fatally.

The Chicago Tribune points out some 364 people were killed in Chicago January 1, 2021, through July 7, 2021.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkinsa weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

 


Atlanta police arrest 3 suspected of homophobic abuse of child in viral video

·2 min read

Authorities in Atlanta credit the public for reporting the incident, leading to arrests

On Saturday, three people were arrested in connection with a viral video that captured a child being hit and verbally taunted over his sexuality, according to WSB-TV. The video was posted online a month ago.

The Atlanta Police Department has now arrested three suspects in relation to the video: Brittney Monique Mills, 35, Lorkeyla Jamia Spencer, 19, and Jordan Jarrode Richards-Nwankwo, 18. All three have been charged with cruelty to a child and are being detained in Fulton County Jail.

Richards-Nwankwo has received an additional charge of family violence battery. The connection between the child and the suspect has not been disclosed.

Brittney Monique Mills (left), Jordan Jarrode Richards-Nwankwo (middle) and Lorkeyla Jamia Spencer (right) (Atlanta Police Department)
Brittney Monique Mills (left), Jordan Jarrode Richards-Nwankwo (middle) and Lorkeyla Jamia Spencer (right) (Atlanta Police Department)

According to Crime Online, last month an Instagram Live post was circulated of a 12-year-old boy being ridiculed by older people for being gay. Video shows that the word “gay” was shaved into the side of his head. It is reported that he was also smacked on his head during the video.

An older man was heard in the video saying, “You still doing gay s—. You think I cut this in your head for no reason?”

WAGA-TV reports that police were notified of the video on June 17 by people who saw the viral post. The child and parties involved were located by investigators within 24 hours and the child, who has yet to be identified, was placed into protective custody with the Georgia Division of Family & Children Services.

WSB-TV reports that the local Special Victims Unit also got involved in the effort to locate and detain the suspects.

Once the three arrests where made, Atlanta Police Sgt. John Chafee gave credit to the people who brought the video to the department’s attention. “We’re very pleased with these arrests but we are pleased with feedback that we got from members of the community assisting in this and how quickly they were able to jump on it,” Chafee said to WAGA-TV.

Chafee went on to say how disturbing it was to review the video as the investigation was launched.

“This was a difficult video to watch. When you see someone, you know, I have a child, and when you see a young person being abused like this, I mean this is just so unnecessary,” he said. “It was difficult to watch. And I think with a lot of the investigators it was the same way.”

Have you subscribed to theGrio’s podcast “D

TAX EVADER APPLE COMPUTER AND CRIMINAL BANKSTER GOLDMAN SACHS CONSPIRE TO SUCK (more) BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA

 The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.


Report: Apple and Goldman Sachs Are Developing a Fancy Form of Consumer Debt

Tim Cook CEO of Apple laughing
Stephanie Keith/Getty
2:07

Apple is reportedly working with Goldman Sachs to develop a new consumer debt scheme for customers that is internally being called “Apple Pay Later.’

Apple Insider reports that Apple is rumored to be working with Goldman Sachs to launch “Apple Pay Later,” a “buy now, pay later” payment system for Apple Pay users. Currently, there are only a few companies involved in the buy now, pay later (BNPL) market, but it’s fast becoming a profitable industry as worldwide spending habits change.

The Financial Times states that BNPL is best used for expensive purchases. The FT cites the Affirm BNPL company’s partnership with Peloton to spread the cost of a $1,900 exercise bike over a number of months as an example of how the system is most often used.

The FT also notes that many users are taking advantage of the low initial cost to buy not one expensive item, but many cheap ones. Around one-fifth of the UK population has used BNPL in the last year, with 90 percent of transactions being for fashion and footwear.

BNPL becomes particularly profitable after the initial interest-free period ends. The FT reports that the Klarna BNPL service currently offers credit up to 18.9 percent APR when a user defers payments between 6 and 36 months. Similarly, Affirm can charge between 10 percent and 30 percent APR.

Apple launched its own credit card, the Apple Card, with the promise of making repayments easy and clear. It would appear that “Apple Pay Later” would aim to do the same thing while also putting products in the hands of consumers that they might not be able to afford.

Read more at Apple Insider here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

EconomyTechAppleGoldman SachsMasters of the Universe


A Homeless Village Is Growing on Apple’s Silicon Valley Property

The Associated Press
The Associated Press
2:18

According to recent reports, a growing homeless encampment has been set up on dozens of acres of undeveloped land in the heart of Silicon Valley owned by tech giant Apple.

VICE News reports that despite Apple committing billions of dollars to fix California’s housing crisis, an encampment of homeless people living in RVs, shacks, and tents has taken over dozens of acres of undeveloped land owned by Apple in the center of Silicon Valley.

Between 30 to 100 homeless people have reportedly set up camp on the property owned by Apple in North San Jose. The area covers about 55 acres according to the local CBS affiliate KPIX. Some current residents of the site say that they feel they can be left alone there, despite the area’s proximity to PayPal’s corporate headquarters and other office buildings.

Before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, around 6,000 homeless people lived in San Jose with fewer than 1,000 beds available to them. It’s common for homeless people living outdoors and in vehicles across the Bay Area to be moved from place to place by security and police, those staying on the Apple property have largely been left alone according to Renee Corona who has lived in an RV on the property for nearly two years.

Corona, who receives disability payments but cannot afford to live in San Francisco where she was raised, stated: “This is an area where you’re secluded from the city. I don’t think a lot of people knew about this.” She added: “I’m grateful that they don’t kick us out. I just want to say thank you. They don’t bother us.”

San Jose City Council member David Cohen, whose district includes the property, told VICE News that his office is trying to schedule a meeting with Apple to discuss the site. “We’re setting up a meeting so that I can begin to talk to them about what we might be able to do to help the people who are living there, and to figure out some plan for offering services,” Cohen said.

Read more at VICE News here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

Wall Street, Big Banks Spend $74 Million Trying to Get Joe Biden Elected

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

29 Oct 2020330

3:03

Wall Street donors from the nation’s biggest banks will end up spending about $74 million trying to get Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden elected.

BLOG EDITOR: THE BANKSTERS KNOW HOW WELL THE

BANKSTER REGIME OF SOCIOPATH LAWYER BARACK

OBAMA, 'CREDIT CARD BIDEN, AND BANKSTERS'

RENT BOY LAWYER ERIC HOLDER DID FOR THEM.

DESPITE ALL BUT BRINGING DOWN THE U.S. ECONOMY

AND DESTROYING THE LIFE SAVINGS AS INFEESTED IN 

OUR HOMES, NOT EVEN ONE OF THESE FUCKERS WENT

TO PRISON.


The latest financial report from the Center for Responsive Politics reveals that Biden is set to rake in more than $74 million from Wall Street, which is more than the financial industry gave President Obama in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns combined.

CNBC reports:

The sum includes contributions that began in 2019 and continued through the first two weeks of October to Biden’s joint fundraising committees and outside super PACs backing his run. Former Goldman Sachs President Harvey Schwartz gave $100,000 this month to the Biden Action Fund, a joint fundraising committee for the campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties. [Emphasis added]

Biden also received a ton of financial support from leaders on Wall Street in the third quarter. Going into the final two weeks of the election, Biden, the DNC and their joint fundraising committees had over $330 million on hand. That’s $110 million more than for Trump, the Republican National Committee and their joint committees. Biden’s campaign is on track to raise $1 billion in the six days until Election Day. [Emphasis added]

Biden’s campaign chairman, Steve Ricchetti, met with finance executives in January to encourage them to back his candidate, CNBC reported at the time. Attendees included Evercore founder Roger Altman, longtime investor Blair Effron, Blackstone Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Gray, former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire, Centerbridge Partners co-founder Mark Gallogly, and former U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley. [Emphasis added]

Biden, by November 3, will have raised just about $13 million less from Wall Street than Hillary Clinton in her failed 2016 presidential run.

President Trump has received just a fraction of what Biden has taken from Wall Street. By November 3, Trump will finish the race with more than $18 million from Wall Street executives and employees — a whopping $56 million less than Biden’s total.

CNN analysis from September noted that “all the big banks” are backing Biden against Trump this election, as they backed Clinton against Trump in 2016.

Moody’s Analytics and Goldman Sachs reports to investors have sought to boost Biden’s chances against Trump by cheering a potential “blue wave” on election day. Biden has reportedly promised Wall Street donors, behind closed doors, a return to a globalized, economic status quo that has forced working and middle-class American communities into a managed decline for decades.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. 

 

THE LOOTING OF AMERICA:

BARACK OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS set themselves on America’s pensions next!

 http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/obamanomics-assault-on-american-middle.html

The new aristocrats, like the lords of old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the lower orders. Voluminous reports have been issued by Congress and government panels documenting systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest banks both before and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. 

 

Goldman Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden Campaign

JOHN BINDER

The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.

Former Goldman Sachs Chief Pours $100K into Joe Biden’s Campaign

JOHN BINDER

26 Oct 2020374

1:41

A former Goldman Sachs president made a huge, last-minute donation to Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign against President Trump.

Harvey Schwartz, former president of Goldman Sachs, donated about $100,000 to the Biden Action Fund in October, according to Federal Election Commission data.

CNBC reports:

The filing lists Schwartz and a New York address and describes his work profession as “self employed.” The contribution was processed on Oct. 5, records show.

Schwartz retired from the bank in 2018 after being its president for just over a year. Prior to that role he was Goldman’s chief financial officer.

Wall Street executives and employees has been a major donor to the Biden campaign. One of the donors is a former Goldman Sachs executive who profited from the housing crisis.

While Biden has taken about 184 separate contributions from Goldman Sachs executives and employees, President Donald Trump has taken just 41 contributions from the big bank. Trump’s contributions from Goldman Sachs total less than $7,500.

As Breitbart News has noted, recent CNBC analysis revealed that Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s campaign this election cycle. CNN analysis found that “all the big banks” are backing Biden against Trump.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. 

 

Joe Biden-Donor-Rich Goldman Sachs Admits to Record $1.6B Bribery Scheme

JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

25 Oct 2020711

2:30

Goldman Sachs, home to many big donors to Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign, has admitted to a record-setting $1.6 billion foreign bribery scheme this week.

The Justice Department announced charges against Goldman Sachs for their executives’ involvement in a foreign bribery scheme, the largest in United States history. As a result, Goldman Sachs will pay more than $2.9 billion as part of a settlement.

“Goldman Sachs today accepted responsibility for its role in a conspiracy to bribe high-ranking foreign officials to obtain lucrative underwriting and other business relating to [1Malaysia Development Bhd.],” said acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement.

“Today’s resolution, which requires Goldman Sachs to admit wrongdoing and pay nearly three billion dollars in penalties, fines, and disgorgement, holds the bank accountable for this criminal scheme and demonstrates the department’s continuing commitment to combatting corruption and protecting the U.S. financial system,” Rabbitt said.

The revelations of Goldman Sachs’ involvement in the foreign bribery scheme comes as Biden has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from executives and employees at the big bank.

Kathy Matsui and Richard Friedman, in executive and banker roles at Goldman Sachs, have donated nearly $105,000 to the Biden Victory Fund and the Biden Action Fund in June. Just this week, news broke that the former Goldman Sachs executive who profited off the U.S. housing crash has donated $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund.

While Biden has taken about 184 separate contributions from Goldman Sachs executives and employees, President Donald Trump has taken just 41 contributions from the big bank. Trump’s contributions from Goldman Sachs total less than $7,500.

As Breitbart News has noted, recent CNBC analysis revealed that Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s campaign this election cycle. CNN analysis found that “all the big banks” are backing Biden against Trump.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

Wall Street Praises Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s VP: ‘What’s Not to Like?’

AP Photo/Richard Drew

JOHN BINDER

13 Aug 2020996

4:20

Wall Street executives are praising Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s choosing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate against President Trump, feeling they dodged a bullet from a progressive insurgency.

In interviews with the Wall Street JournalCNBC, and Bloomberg, executives on Wall Street expressed relief that Biden picked Harris for vice president on the Democrat ticket, calling her a “normal Democrat” who is a “safe” choice for the financial industry.

Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman Tom Nides told Bloomberg that across Wall Street, Harris joining Biden “was exceptionally well-received.”

“How damn cool is it that a Black woman is considered the safe and conventional candidate,” Nides said.

Peter Soloman, the founder of a multinational investment banking firm, told Bloomberg he believes Harris is “a great pick” because she is “safe, balanced, a woman, diverse, what’s not to like?”

As the Journal notes, many on Wall Street see Harris is another conscious decision by the Democrat establishment to stave off populist priorities to reform Wall Street:

To some Wall Street executives, Ms. Harris’s selection signals a more moderate shift for the Democratic Party, which its progressive flank has pushed to the left in recent years. [Emphasis added]

“While Kamala is a forceful, passionate and eloquent standard-bearer for the aspirations of all Americans, regardless of their race, gender or age, she is not doctrinaire or rigid,” said Brad Karp, chairman of law firm Paul Weiss, who co-led a committee of lawyers across the country who supported Ms. Harris during the primary. [Emphasis added]

Marc Lasry, CEO of Avenue Capital Group, called Harris a “great” pick for Biden. “She’s going to help Joe immensely. He picked the perfect partner,” Lasry told CNBC.

Executives at Citigroup and Centerview Partners made similar comments about Harris to CNBC and the Journal, calling her a “great choice” and “direct but constructive.”

Founder of financial consulting firm Kynikos Associates Jim Chanos was elated in an interview with Bloomberg over Harris joining Biden on the Democrat ticket:

“She’s terrific,” said Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates. “She’s got force of personality in a good way. She takes over a room. She certainly has a charisma and a presence which will be an asset on the campaign.” [Emphasis added]

Harris is no stranger to praise from Wall Street executives. In the 2019 Democrat presidential primary, Harris won over a number of financial industry donors, even holding a fundraiser in Iowa that was backed by Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

While criticizing “the people who have the most” in Democrat primary debates, Harris raked in thousands in campaign cash from financial executives from firms such as the Blackstone Group, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.

This month, the New York Times admitted the “wallets of Wall Street are with Joe Biden” in a gushing headline about the financial industry’s opposition to Trump:

Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.

Harris’s views on trade and immigration, two of the most consequential issues to Wall Street, are in lockstep with financial executives’ objective to grow profit margins and add consumers to the market.

On trade, Harris has balked at Trump’s imposition of tariffs on foreign imports from China, Mexico, Canada, and Europe — using the neoliberal argument that tariffs should not be used to pressure foreign countries to buy more American-made goods and serve as only a tax on taxpayers.

Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national immigration policy — which seeks to drive up legal and illegal immigration levels to their highest levels in decades — offers a flooded labor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by Wall Street.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.



 

Goldman Sachs fined $2.9 billion over role in 1MDB corruption case

Goldman Sachs has been fined $2.9 billion by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in a deal announced yesterday that closes one of the biggest corruption cases in the history of Wall Street.

Together with a settlement reached with Malaysian authorities in July, Goldman Sachs will pay more than $5 billion for its involvement in the 1MDB scandal.

While the amounts are large, the settlement follows the pattern of earlier deals on corruption. In return for an agreement to pay fines out of corporate revenue, the company and its executives escape prosecution for criminal activity. The financial penalties are simply written off as a cost of making profit.

Besides avoiding prosecution, Goldman will also escape the appointment of a government monitor to oversee its compliance department which had earlier been put forward by officials involved in pursuing the case.

While the financial penalties amount to around two-thirds of its annual profits, Goldman had already taken them into account, as they had been mooted for some time. Company shares actually rose by more than 1 percent after a report earlier this week by Wall Street Journal about the expected action by the DoJ.

Following the DoJ announcement, the bank’s share price barely moved. “This is already priced in. The stock price is already reflecting this kind of action,” Sumit Agarwal, finance professor at Singapore’s National University told the Financial Times.

Goldman’s involvement with 1MDB was in response to the situation it confronted in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, as its earnings prospects in the US declined and it went in search of profitable opportunities. The Malaysian government had launched the 1MDB fund, supposedly to finance infrastructure development. Goldman stepped forward to organise the sale of $6.5 billion in bonds, with the aim of collecting large fees, in 2012 and 2013.

The whole operation saw the development of a vast corruption ring. According to the prosecution, around $2.7 billion was stolen from 1MDB and more than $1.6 billion was paid out in bribes.

Much of the money was stolen by an adviser to the fund, businessman Jho Low, who was aided by two Goldman bankers working for its Malaysian subsidiary as well as associates in the Malaysian government. It is claimed that the former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, now serving a 12-year jail term, received $700 million.

The DoJ said Goldman had played a “central role” in the looting of 1MDB and should have detected warning signs. The acting head of the DoJ’s criminal division, Brian Rabbitt, said: “Personnel at the bank allowed this scheme to proceed by overlooking or ignoring a number of clear red flags.”

The attempts to claim that one of the largest corruption operations in history was a matter of oversight simply does not pass muster. In court yesterday, Karen Seymour, Goldman’s senior counsel, admitted its Malaysian subsidiary had paid bribes “in order to obtain and retain business for Goldman Sachs.”

According to court papers, when an employee told an unnamed senior executive he was concerned that a 1MDB deal was being delayed because one of the participants was seeking a bribe, he was told: “What’s disturbing about that? It’s nothing new, is it?”

The deals were organised by two Goldman bankers, Timothy Leissner and Roger Ng. Leissner, the former head of Goldman’s Southeast Asian business, pleaded guilty to his role in the 1MDB case in 2018. He received more than $200 million from 1MDB and paid bribes to government officials.

Goldman chief executive David Solomon, who took over from Lloyd Blankfein—author of the infamous comment in 2009 that big profits for banks meant they were doing “God’s work”—said: “We recognise that we did not adequately address red flags and scrutinise the representations of certain members of the deal team.”

As details of the corruption began to emerge, Goldman sought to blame its involvement on “rogue operators.” In fact, their activities were encouraged. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the 1MDB bond deals organised in 2012, “won one of Goldman’s most prestigious internal awards, praised for its ‘spirit of creativity and entrepreneurial thinking’.”

In an effort to clean up its image, Goldman announced that four senior executives, including CEO Solomon, would forfeit $31 million in pay this year, and that it would attempt to claw back bonuses paid to Blankfein in the past. But the penalty imposed on current executives amounts only to about one-third of what they were paid in 2019.

The notion that Goldman was somehow the victim of “rogue” activity and that its involvement in massive corruption is simply the result of oversight is belied by its history, in particular, the role it played in the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2008.

The Senate investigation into the crisis, which found that the financial system was a “snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing,” singled out Goldman for special mention.

In 2006, Goldman determined that subprime mortgage assets it was selling to clients were destined to flounder. Goldman went short in the market in the expectation that it would crash and it would make a profit on the other side of the very trades it had been promoting. The sums were not small. At one point the firm held short positions amounting to $13 billion.

In an email, referring to an unsuspecting investor, a Goldman executive wrote: “I think I found a white elephant, flying pig and unicorn all at once.”

But the exposure of criminal activity did not bring any prosecutions, let alone jail terms, merely fines, which Goldman and others simply wrote off. In 2013, President Obama’s attorney-general, Eric Holder, clearly recognising the extent of the malfeasance, said that prosecutions would impact on the stability of the US and global banking system.

Since 2008, notwithstanding claims by authorities that there would be a clamp down, the corrupt practices have extended, of which Goldman’s involvement in 1MDB is only one expression.

Last month, documents published by BuzzFeed News from the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, showed that between 1999 and 2017, major banks has been involved in financial transactions of $2 trillion flagged as potentially involving money laundering. The banks involved were some of the biggest in the world including JP Morgan, HSBC and Standard Charter Bank.

Earlier this month, JPMorgan Chase was fined $920 million over “spoofing” activity involving the quick placing and withdrawal of buy and sell orders to create the impression there was a surge of activity around a particular financial asset in order to create a profitable opportunity.

According to one of the lead investigators in the case, “a significant number of JP Morgan traders and sales personnel openly disregarded US laws that serve to prevent illegal activity in the marketplace.”

But despite the fact that the practice was not only well known but was actively promoted, no one in the upper echelons was prosecuted, and the fine has been written off as an operating expense.

The issue which clearly arises is: what is the underlying cause of this system of corruption and illegality?

Commenting on the latest Goldman case, Seth DuCharme, the acting US attorney in Brooklyn, might have gone further than he intended when he remarked: “This case is … about the way our American financial institutions conduct business.”

It certainly is. However, it would be wrong to simply ascribe it to the greed of the financial executives and others, and thereby able to be countered through tighter regulations.

Of course the greed of executives and others exists in abundance. But their activities are, in the final analysis, the expression of processes rooted at the very heart of the profit system—they are the personification of objective tendencies.

While the aim and driving force of the capitalist system is the accumulation of profit the mode of accumulation has undergone profound changes, above all in the US. No longer is the chief source of profit investment and production in the real economy.

It occurs through operations in the financial system based on speculation, clever trades, the securing of fees for the passage of money (without questioning its source) and where the “value” of assets is determined by arcane algorithms and other forms of “financial engineering.”

Consequently, in conditions where profits are increasingly divorced from the underlying real economy, lies, deception, misinformation, corruption and criminality come to dominate the entire financial system.

Goldman Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden Campaign

JOHN BINDER

The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.

Donald Mullen Jr., as first noted by the Washington Free Beacon, gave $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in August. Mullen was a key architect of the “Big Short” scheme that allowed Goldman Sachs to profit from the housing collapse.

New York Magazine detailed the scheme:

In the years leading up to the financial crisis, a team of mortgage executives and traders at Goldman Sachs predicted that the housing market was in trouble. So they designed a massive bet against it, using a bunch of esoteric financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations that would pay off in the event that housing prices fell and homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. [Emphasis added]

That bet, now known colloquially as “the big short,” allowed Goldman and its clients (including hedge-fund managers like John Paulson) to avoid losses and make billions of dollars when the housing market collapsed, at the same time that people around the country lost their homes to foreclosure. [Emphasis added]

Meanwhile, millions of America’s working and middle class lost their homes, as Business Insider reported in 2018:

After the real estate bubble burst in 2008, many families living in the US found that the cost of running their homes was no longer affordable, resulting in many of those people losing their homes. [Emphasis added]

The widespread consequences were that, between 2006 and 2014, nearly 10 million homeowners in America saw the foreclosure sale of their own homes, which entailed having to give up their property to lenders or selling it as quickly as possible via an emergency sale, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. [Emphasis added]

Livelihoods were threatened and the financial damage was colossal — not to mention the emotional damage suffered by victims of the crisis — a 2014 study shows a correlation between the crisis and an increased suicide rate. But where are the victims of the real estate and financial crisis now? [Emphasis added]

It’s not just Mullen Jr. who is showering Biden with campaign cash to defeat President Trump on November 3. Biden has taken nearly 200 contributions from employees at Goldman Sachs — including contributions of nearly $50,000 to $55,000 from the bank’s top executives.

Altogether, a recent CNBC analysis revealed, Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s campaign this election cycle and CNN has noted that “all the big banks” are backing Biden and Harris against Trump.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:

And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER

The Rise of Wall Street Thievery

How corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.

by Ryan Cooper

MAGAZINE

America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.

Clearly, something has happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.

Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.

Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and pensions. 

Lemann then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”

Jensen and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.

The best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.

Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands. 

And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.

Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.

In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”

This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

If concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.

Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings. 

Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.

Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.

Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.

Fact Check: Big Banks that Kamala Harris ‘Took on’ Now Support Her

2020 Democratic National Convention / YouTube

Volume 90%

JOHN BINDER

19 Aug 202017

2:53

CLAIM: Former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis suggested that because Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) “took on” the big banks as attorney general of California, she will stand up to them as vice president.

VERDICT: While Harris was among 49 state attorney generals who secured a $25 billion settlement from big banks, many executives from those banks now support her as Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s vice presidential choice.

“When millions of families lost their homes, my friend in California, Sen. Kamala Harris, took on the big banks and won,” Solis said in reference to the case which involved Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally Bank.

BLOG EDITOR: AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA, KAMALA HARRIS REFUSED TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTE ANY OF HER GENEROUS BANKSTERS DESPITE THAT FACT THAT CA WAS GROUND ZERO FOR BANKSTER-CAUSED MORTGAGE MELTDOWN AND FORECLOSURE!

A number of executives on Wall Street with links to Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America now support Harris in her effort with Biden to defeat Trump.

As Breitbart News reported recently, Wells Fargo Vice Chairman for Public Affairs Bill Daley, who served as Obama’s chief of staff from 2011 to 2012, called a Harris a “reasonable, rational person who has worked in the system.”

Citigroup executive Ray McGuire called Harris a “great choice” for vice president. During the Democrat presidential primary, Harris raked in campaign donations from executives and employees with Bank of America.

In These Times reported the donations at the time:

Then there’s California Sen. Kamala Harris, who received a total of $44,947 from these 12 firms. Harris, who was once branded a ​“bankster’s worst nightmare,” and has touted her prosecutorial record against banks as evidence of her progressive credibility, received donations from five executives of these firms. They include Blackstone managing director Tia Breakley, Morgan Stanley’s new head of international wealth management Colbert Narcisse, Bank of America senior vice president for diversity and inclusion Alex Rhodes, and Goldman Sachs vice president of financial crime compliance Margaret Cullum. [Emphasis added]

Harris’s most enthusiastic source of support among these firms, however, is Wells Fargo, from whose employees she received a total of $16,713 — the most funding from the bank out of any other candidate examined. The donors span multiple tiers of the bank’s hierarchy, from bankers and consultants, to a regional director and a manager, to executives like National Head of Cards and Retail Services Beverly Anderson, both of whom gave the maximum individual donation of $2,800 to Harris. [Emphasis added]

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008

OBAMA CRONY DONORS Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin embodies the plutocratic principle that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz

 

Steve Mnuchin knows his way around a crisis. Twelve years ago, the Treasury secretary was still a middling multi-millionaire of little renown or historical import. But whenever God closes a door on an underwater home-owner, he opens a window to an unscrupulous speculator, and in 2008, the Big Man began closing a lot of doors. Mnuchin didn’t miss his opening. He may have been just a humble Goldman Sachs nepotism hire turned Hollywood financier back then, but he had a few million dollars to play with and a few friends with many millions more. Together, they bought up a failing mortgage lender, rapidly foreclosed on thousands of borrowers, and resold the homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his tenure as a bank CEO, Mnuchin had earned himself the title “Foreclosure King” — and a return of $200 million. That’s the kind of money that can buy you entrance into the good graces of a Republican nominee, especially if he’s already alienating a lot of the party’s biggest donors. And from there, it’s walking distance to the White House.

Thus far, the COVID-19 crash has been as kind to Mnuchin as the Great Recession once was. If the last global economic crisis made him rich enough to purchase a lofty perch in our government, this one is making the Treasury secretary powerful enough to claim a prominent place in U.S. history. Before the novel coronavirus made its presence felt, Mnuchin’s most memorable achievement as a public servant may have been commandeering a government plane for a solar-eclipse-themed day trip. Since the pandemic sickened global markets, he has brokered the largest stimulus legislation ever passed and won control of a multi-trillion-dollar bailout fund.

Which is to say: We’ve put one of the primary beneficiaries of America’s inequitable response to the last economic crisis in charge of crafting our nation’s response to this one.

Of course, it wasn’t really God who opened the window to Mnuchin’s foreclosure profiteering or the profiteering of all the well-heeled investors who bought low during the financial crisis, then sold high amid the bailout-buoyed recovery (the Almighty contracts out those jobs to protect his brand integrity). Rather, it was an economic system that keeps a wide swath of Americans one bad break from financial ruin — and another tiny class draped in gold-plated armor.

From the first capital-gains-tax cut of the modern era in Jimmy Carter’s day to the supply-side bonanza of Donald Trump’s, this system’s essential rationale has remained the same: If capitalists cannot reap big rewards from their winning bets, they will have no incentive to take the great personal risks that fuel collective prosperity.

Mnuchin’s career and the pandemic response he has overseen belie most of that sentence’s premises. In truth, the Treasury secretary owes his success to a series of low-risk, high-reward bets of little-to-negative social value. Which makes sense. After all, if America’s brand of capitalism actually required the superrich to assume great personal risk in order to reap outsize returns, they wouldn’t be so invested in it.

Steve Mnuchin wasn’t born on third base so much as a few inches to the left of home plate. His grandfather co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons. His father was a Yale-educated partner at Goldman Sachs. If his family’s name didn’t secure Steve’s own Yale admission, its wealth certainly covered his tuition, books, personal Porsche, and “dorm” at New Haven’s Taft Hotel. From this perch, it would have been harder for Mnuchin to tumble down America’s class ladder than to climb higher still. The former would have required prodigious acts of self-destruction; the latter mere fluency in ruling-class social mores and the art of strategic sycophancy — and the wallflower cipher Steve Mnuchin is a master of both.

At Goldman, Mnuchin’s colleagues did not consider him “especially book smart.” And some have suggested that his steady ascent at the firm was fueled less by merit than pedigree (Mnuchin’s elevation to partner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin Ingram, an African-American trader who’d risen from a working-class childhood up through MIT’s engineering school, then Goldman’s ranks, where he struck one colleague as both “much smarter than Steven” and more “accomplished”).

After Mnuchin paid his dues at Goldman, he founded a hedge fund called Dune Capital and a motion-picture-financing company called Dune Entertainment (both named after a stretch of beach near his house in the Hamptons). He helped bankroll Avatar and the X-Men franchise, hobnobbed in Beverly Hills, and hoarded his investment profits in a tax haven. He had everything America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” imagine a person could want. But Mnuchin longed for higher things. And when the housing market collapsed, he knew he was in luck.

Early in his career, Mnuchin had watched his superiors turn America’s savings-and-loan crisis into their own buying-and-selling bonanza. In the summer of 2008, Mnuchin was watching television in his New York office when an invitation to emulate his old mentors flashed across the screen: Out in California, frightened depositors were lined up outside IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, waiting to withdraw their cash. “This bank is going to end up failing, and we need to figure out how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague. “I’ve seen this game before.”

He played it like a natural. Mnuchin reached out to George Soros, John Paulson, and other billionaires whose trust he’d cultivated. They marshaled a $1.6 billion bid. Eager to unload the bank — whose balance sheet was chock-full of toxic assets — the FDIC agreed to cover any losses that might accrue to the investors above a certain threshold. Which is to say, the government agreed to partially socialize Mnuchin & Co.’s downside risk. This public aid came with one major condition: The new bank, which Mnuchin dubbed OneWest, would need to make a good-faith effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The FDIC would ultimately pay OneWest more than $1.2 billion.

This was not enough to buy Steve Mnuchin’s good faith.

Purchasing IndyMac secured OneWest a claim on a lot of undervalued housing. The catch, of course, was that much of it was full of broke people. And California’s foreclosure laws make the process of separating low-net-worth humans from high-value housing stock long and arduous. But this was nothing a little entrepreneurship couldn’t solve: Mnuchin’s bank (ostensibly) bet it could get away with “robo signing” and backdating documents to expedite foreclosures. One-West got caught red-handed on the first count but emerged with a slap on the wrist. Investigators at the California attorney general’s office concluded the bank was guilty on the second and requested authorization to pursue an enforcement action. It’s unclear exactly why then–Attorney General Kamala Harris denied this request. But as the investigators themselves noted, to pursue legal action against an entity with OneWest’s resources would mean investing years of time — and large sums of the public’s money — in a deeply uncertain enterprise. The government could afford to take only so many risks, which meant the idea that the state could hold all its superrich residents accountable to its laws was a bluff. Mnuchin called it.

In the spring of 2016, another promising investment opportunity caught the eye of the now-former One-West CEO. Mnuchin had crossed paths with Trump several times over the years; his hedge fund had invested in (at least) two of the mogul’s projects. So when Donald invited Steve to swing by his tower on the night he won the New York primary, Mnuchin obliged. A dozenish hours (and a glass or two of Trump-branded wine) later, Mnuchin agreed to become the finance chairman of the future GOP nominee’s campaign.

This decision baffled some of Mnuchin’s Hollywood pals. The bankroller of The LEGO Batman Movie didn’t strike them as a political animal, let alone a Trumpist. But his motives weren’t mysterious. For someone in Mnuchin’s socioeconomic position, Trump’s presidential campaign was just another low-risk, high-reward bet. Or, as Mnuchin himself put it in an interview in August 2016, “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?,’ if I end up in the administration.”

Mnuchin is the last of the “adults in the room” — that cabal of semi-credentialed advisers whose presence in the West Wing eased the troubled minds of Never Trump pundits circa 2017. None of the others — not Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, or John Kelly — could marshal the requisite combination of unscrupulous sycophancy and patient politicking to weather each turn in Trump’s tempestuous moods. Only the former Foreclosure King has what it takes to unequivocally defend the president’s kind words for alt-right marchers in Charlottesville or echo his attacks on NFL players who dared to protest police abuse. So when the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression hit, Mnuchin became — in The Wall Street Journal’s appellation — “Washington’s indispensable crisis manager.” Unburdened by ideological conviction or economic literacy, Mnuchin has proved to be the GOP’s most able dealmaker. Working out of a temporary office in the Capitol’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, Mnuchin spent the closing weeks of March running (and massaging) messages between the Senate’s Democratic and Republican camps as they sought consensus on a gargantuan coronavirus relief bill. “Mnuchin played the middleman, and he must have been in my office 20 times in three days,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Journal, going on to praise the reliability of the Treasury secretary’s word. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she and Mnuchin can communicate through a “shorthand” devoid of time-wasting “niceties or anything like that.”

The soft skills Mnuchin had once deployed to ink billion-dollar investment deals now eased the passage of a $2.2 trillion economic-relief package. And there was much to admire in the legislation’s headline provisions: an unprecedented expansion in federal unemployment benefits that would leave many laid-off workers with as much — if not more — income than they’d earned at their old jobs, forgivable loans for small businesses that agreed to forgo layoffs during the crisis, and onetime cash payments to all nonaffluent Americans.

But this is still a Republican stimulus, however much schmoozing Steve has done with Chuck and Nancy this spring. Congress’s persistent underfunding of the small-business aid has kept America’s most vulnerable mom-and-pops out in the cold. And our nation’s decrepit unemployment-insurance offices have struggled to administer benefits as the ranks of the jobless grow millions stronger every week. The Treasury Department has allowed debt collectors to garnish the relief checks of cash-strapped Americans, and Congress has essentially refused to bail out hospitals whose budgets have suddenly been destroyed by COVID-driven shortfalls, meaning that over the next few years, whole essential health systems and services could abruptly be suspended.

Most of all, the legislation’s largest appropriation — $454 billion to backstop a $4 trillion Federal Reserve lending program to large corporations — gives Mnuchin significant personal discretion over which firms will have access to low-cost credit and on what terms, thereby leaving a connoisseur in the art of subverting federal crisis management for personal profit in charge of preventing America’s corporate titans from subverting federal crisis management for personal profit.

The White House’s next big idea for promoting economic recovery is, reportedly, to formally suspend the enforcement of labor and environmental regulations on small businesses, a measure that would enable petit bourgeois tyrants to suspend all pretense of concern for their workers’ health and well-being in the midst of a pandemic.

Nevertheless, could we have reasonably expected anything better, all things considered? A GOP president and Senate majority were always going to comfort the comfortable and toss crumbs to the afflicted. And when Congress approved $2.2 trillion in coronavirus relief funds last month, nurses were intubating patients without proper PPE, grocery-store clerks were jeopardizing their health to keep others fed, and delivery drivers were forfeiting the security of social distancing so others could more comfortably enjoy it. The legislation included zero dollars in hazard-pay benefits for those workers. It did, however, provide $90 billion in tax cuts to the owners of pass-through businesses, such as, for instance, the Trump Organization. Such “relief” was necessary, the American Enterprise Institute later explained, to mitigate the “penalty” on economic risk-takers.