BLOG LAUGH OF THE DAY - 'CREDIT CARD' JOE BIDEN OF THE BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA, HOLDER AND BIDEN SERVICES MORE BANKSTERS - Biden Picks Former Mastercard CEO to Lead World Bank While Pitching Himself as Enemy of Credit Card Companies

On the campaign trail, President Trump warned that Biden was “the one that takes all the money from Wall Street” while his donors tended to be police officers, business owners, homemakers, truckers, construction workers, and drivers.

The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has attempted to push back against Biden’s potential for stacking an administration with Wall Street executives and those with deep ties to multinational corporations.

Biden, long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.

Likewise, Wall Street is behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.

Biden has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.

Biden Picks Former Mastercard CEO to Lead World Bank While Pitching Himself as Enemy of Credit Card Companies

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Mateusz Wlodarczyk/NurPhoto/Ting Shen/Bloomberg

JOHN BINDER

23 Feb 20230

4:31

President Joe Biden has nominated former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga to lead the World Bank — the first time a credit card executive has been chosen for the spot. The nomination comes as Biden pitches himself as a defender of American consumers and an enemy of the banking industry.

“Ajay is uniquely equipped to lead the World Bank at this critical moment in history,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday. “… he also has critical experience mobilizing public-private resources to tackle the most urgent challenges of our time, including climate change.”

Banga’s nomination comes less than a month after Biden pitched himself to the American public as an economic populist defending consumers against the often-predatory banking industry in his State of the Union address.

“We’ve reduced exorbitant bank overdraft fees, saving consumers more than $1 billion a year. We’re cutting credit card late fees by 75 percent, from $30 to $8,” Biden said:

Junk fees may not matter to the very wealthy, but they matter to most folks in homes like the one I grew up in. They add up to hundreds of dollars a month. They make it harder for you to pay the bills or afford that family trip. [Emphasis added]

I know how unfair it feels when a company overcharges you and gets away with it. Not anymore. We’ve written a bill to stop all that. It’s called the Junk Fee Prevention Act. [Emphasis added]

Firms like the Consumer Bankers Association, which lobbies lawmakers on behalf of Mastercard, have tried to pour cold water on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s rule that would cap late fees at $8.

“This announcement is just the latest example of the Bureau seeking to advance a political agenda that will harm, rather than help, the very people they are responsible for serving,” an executive with the Consumer Bankers Association said following the proposed rule.

Credit card companies like Mastercard and Visa are estimated to charge Americans more than $30 million every day in late fees. Annually, these companies rake in $12 billion from late fees alone.

While Banga was head of Mastercard, the federal government concluded that the company had made a number of “preventable failures” where customers were unable to use their prepaid debit cards to make payments on bills or get their paychecks. Mastercard, along with UniRush, was ordered to pay $10 million in restitution and fined $3 million.

Biden’s rebrand as an enemy of the banking industry comes as he has been accused for decades of doing the bidding of the nation’s biggest credit card companies who often served as major donors to his political campaigns.

In August 2019, Breitbart News reported how Biden sided with MBNA, a top donor and later acquired by Bank of America, to pass legislation that tightened financial regulations making bankruptcy more difficult. The legislation, eventually signed into law, is widely seen to have benefited credit card companies at the expense of consumers.

MBNA, at the time, was the nation’s largest issuer of credit cards and became Biden’s biggest donor throughout his nearly 40-year political career. From 1996 to 2006, MBNA employees donated more than $212,000.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), long considered one of the Senate’s leading consumer advocates, blasted Biden in early 2019 for his relationship with credit card companies.

“At a time when the biggest financial institutions in this country were trying to put the squeeze on millions of hardworking families,” Warren said of the 2005 bankruptcy legislation. “Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies.”

Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was being paid at least half a million dollars by MBNA as a consultant at the time  the then-Delaware Senator was promoting the bankruptcy legislation that had MBNA’s backing.

Hunter Biden worked at MBNA as an executive but left the company in 2001, which is when his sweetheart consultant gig with the firm began. After the bankruptcy legislation was signed into law in 2005, Hunter Biden’s contract with MBNA ended.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Joe Biden Rakes in More than $50M from Wall Street, Including from Soros

David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

16 Oct 20208

3:01

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is raking in tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street, weeks away from the November 3 election against President Trump.

In the last few months, Biden’s campaign and his fundraising committees have “benefited from big money contributions from finance leaders on Wall Street and across the country,” according to a new report by CNBC.

Wall Street donors to date have spent more than $50 million to help get Biden elected, as they view his candidacy as a return to the economic status quo, which has often spelled economic decline for Main Street.

CNBC reports:

The joint committees, which raise money for the Biden campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties, are being fueled, at least in part, by Wall Street executives. Those committees accept six-figure contributions. [Emphasis added]

…

People in the financial industry have largely favored Biden, spending more than $50 million to back his candidacy, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, compared with more than $10 million for Trump. [Emphasis added]

Some of those Wall Street donors to Biden include President Obama’s former Treasury Department secretary Tim Geithner, who contributed $150,000 to the Biden Action Fund in August. Geithner, while in the Obama administration, coordinated to slash pensions for roughly 20,000 Delphi workers in the midst of the auto bailout for General Motors (GM).

Wall Street executives Antonio Gracias and Jonathan Shulkin each delivered $300,000 to Biden’s campaign in August, while venture capitalist John Doerr donated more than $355,000 to the Biden Action Fund in the last three months.

Likewise, Wall Street investor Jonathan Soros, the son of billionaire left-wing mega-donor George Soros, gave a little less than $145,000 to Biden in the third quarter, while Wall Street venture capitalists and investors John Doerr, Stephen Mandel, and Pete Muller gave Biden nearly $1.5 million.

In the third quarter, alone, the Biden Action Fund got more than $4 million from Wall Street donors, with huge donations from executives at the Blackstone Group, JPMorgan Chase, The Carlyle Group, and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts.

Wall Street and nearly all of the nation’s biggest banks have lined up to support Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), against Trump’s economic nationalist agenda. Goldman Sachs and Moody’s Analytics each released reports to investors indicating their backing of a “blue wave” on election day as the biggest net gain for the financial industry.

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

 

Likewise, Wall Street is behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.

Biden has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.

 

CNN: ‘All the Big Banks’ on Wall Street Backing Joe Biden Against Trump

JOHN BINDER

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is raking in Wall Street cash from all the big banks at five times the rate of President Trump, a CNN report admits.

An analysis by CNN found that “all the big banks are backing Biden” against Trump, with the former vice president taking a larger margin of Wall Street donations than even failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

CNN reports:

The securities and investment industry donated just $10.5 million to Trump’s presidential campaign and outside groups aligned with it, according to a new tally by OpenSecrets. It has sent nearly five times as much cash, $51.1 million, to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. [Emphasis added]

That means Trump is losing the fundraising race among Wall Streeters by a slightly greater magnitude than in 2016. During that cycle, former New York Senator Hillary Clinton and groups aligned with her raised $88 million from the securities and investment industry, while Trump took in just $20.8 million. [Emphasis added]

…

But a CNN Business analysis of OpenSecrets research shows that Biden is beating Trump in fundraising from all of America’s big banks — in some cases by wide margins. [Emphasis added]

At the big banks — which saw little-to-no consequences for their role in the 2008 financial crisis — Biden is sweeping up donations from employees by huge margins. At Goldman Sachs, for example, Biden has raised more than $156,000, while Trump has taken less than $12,000.

JPMorgan Chase employees have given three times as much campaign cash to Biden as Trump. Biden has taken nearly $380,000. At Morgan Stanley, Biden has taken more than twice as much as Trump, taking nearly $258,000 from the bank’s employees compared to Trump’s $96,010.

Despite pitching himself as a defender of blue-collar Americans, Biden has not only been widely backed by Wall Street but also by wealthy residents on Park Avenue.

Biden’s campaign has raised over $1 million from donors living on Park Avenue, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings, as Breitbart News reported. This is more than eight times the $127,000 raised by the Trump campaign from the same area.

This month, Biden touted Wall Street’s support for his plan to abolish America’s suburbs by seizing control of local zoning laws to construct housing developments and multi-family buildings in neighborhoods. Likewise, Wall Street is behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.

Biden has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.

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

 

 

Hostile Takeover: Wall Street Assumes Command of Joe Biden Transition Team

JOHN BINDER

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.

Detailed by the New York Times, Biden’s list of transition team members includes former Wall Street employees and those with close ties to Wall Street. Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.

The Times reports:

Commerce Department: The review team is led by Geovette Washington of the University of Pittsburgh, who previously served as general counsel and senior policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget. Other members include Anna Gomez, a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein; Arun Venkataraman, who works in government relations at Visa (and was director of policy at the Commerce Department under Mr. Obama); and Ellen Hughes-Cromwick of the think tank Third Way, who served as chief economist at Mr. Obama’s Commerce Department and held a similar role at Ford. [Emphasis added]

Treasury Department: The team is led by Don Graves, who heads corporate responsibility at KeyBank and previously worked as director of domestic and economic policy for Mr. Biden. Others include Nicole Isaac of LinkedIn and Marisa Lago, who works at the New York City Department of City Planning and previously oversaw global compliance at Citigroup. [Emphasis added]

Federal Reserve, Banking and Securities Regulators: The team is led by Gary Gensler, a top Wall Street regulator in the Obama administration who is now a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The team also includes Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, long a proponent of tougher rules for banks. [Emphasis added]

Gensler previously worked at Goldman Sachs and for failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. As Breitbart News reported, giant tech conglomerates are also getting representation on Biden’s transition team.

Likewise, the Wall Street Journal noted a number of Wall Street-types who are seriously being considered for cabinet positions in a potential Biden administration:

Roger Ferguson, chief executive of retirement manager TIAA-CREF, is in the mix for a cabinet post, according to people familiar with the matter. And financial executives like Morgan Stanley executive Tom Nides and former hedge-fund manager and presidential candidate Tom Steyer publicly backed Mr. Biden and could emerge with influence, or jobs, in his administration. [Emphasis added]

Some who are active in the party or who held positions in past Democratic administrations— such as finance veteran Jeffrey Zients, co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s transition team, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jake Siewert, who served as press secretary in the Clinton White House and in the Treasury Department under President Obama — could join the new administration, Democratic fundraisers say. [Emphasis added]

Another Goldman executive who could head to Washington is Margaret Anadu, the 39-year-old head of Goldman Sachs’s urban-investment initiatives, whose name is said to have been floated for an economic policy position.
[Emphasis added]

On the campaign trail, President Trump warned that Biden was “the one that takes all the money from Wall Street” while his donors tended to be police officers, business owners, homemakers, truckers, construction workers, and drivers.

The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has attempted to push back against Biden’s potential for stacking an administration with Wall Street executives and those with deep ties to multinational corporations.

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