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
A merica 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
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.
T oward 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 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.
KAMALA HARRIS, LIKE SENILE JOE, HAVE A DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF SERVING CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND THE RICH. 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.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity, promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
The nomination of Kamala Harris and the right-wing logic of identity politics 20 August 2020 The Democratic Party concluded the third night of its convention on Wednesday, culminating in the official nomination of California Senator Kamala Harris as the vice-presidential candidate of Joe Biden.
Wednesday’s proceedings were in line with the inane and insipid character of the event as a whole. Various reactionaries and multi-millionaires, from Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi, declared the urgent need to elect Biden, the corrupt corporate shill from Delaware recast as a living saint, to right all wrongs and restore America to the path of prosperity and righteousness.
No actual program was advanced to deal with the massive social and economic catastrophe produced by the coronavirus pandemic and the bipartisan response of the ruling class to it. Everything was reduced to the fictionalized narrative of the life of Biden and his comrade in arms, Kamala Harris.
The selection of Harris was presented as a “historic” moment in American politics. This appraisal was based entirely on the fact that Harris is the first African American and Indian American woman selected by the world’s oldest political party to run for vice president. There were the inevitable proclamations that young girls throughout the country will conclude from this fact that they too can someday be vice president of the United States of America.
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.
Just before she ended her bid for the presidency in December 2019, Harris’ campaign boasted the most billionaire backers, including oil fortune heir Gordon Getty and vulture capitalist Dean Metropoulos.
As San Francisco District Attorney from 2004 to 2011, Harris pursued an agenda that included the implementation of a law to fine and jail the parents of truant students for up to a year. As California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, she warned parents across the state that they would face “the full force and consequences of the law” if their children missed out on too many days of school.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMAL HARRIS IS AN ADVOCATE FOR BIDEN’S AMNESTY FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR. SHE APPEARS TO LIKE TO EXPLOIT SLAVE LABOR!
During her tenure, Harris also oversaw California’s resistance to a Supreme Court order that it release prisoners from the state’s overcrowded prisons. Her attorneys (“for the people,” as Harris put it last night) argued in court that releasing too many prisoners would deplete the cheap labor pool of inmates who fight the state’s notorious wildfires for less than $2 a day.
Serving as the junior senator from California since 2017, Harris sits on the committees overseeing the federal budget, the judiciary, homeland security and the intelligence agencies.
Through her position on the Intelligence Committee, Harris has been privy to the most sensitive information about American imperialism’s criminal operations all over the world. In this role, she has backed the Democrats’ anti-Russia campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration into taking a more hostile posture towards Moscow.
BLOG EDITOR: JULIAN ASSANGE IS UNPOPULAR WITH CORRUPT DEM POLS. ASSANGE EXPOSED THE OBAMA-BIDEN AGENDA OF SURRENDERING U.S. BORDERS TO NARCOMEX AND CHARACTERIZED HILLARY CLINTON AS A ‘SADISTIC SOCIOPATH’, NOT SOMETHING HILLARY HAS MUCH DEFENSE ON.
She also supports the persecution of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who faces 175 years in a US prison for exposing American military war crimes, declaring that the organization had done “considerable harm” to the US.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMALA HARRIS SENATE COLLEAGUE DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS THE BIGGEST WAR PROFITEER IN U.S. HISTORY. HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM, HAS HANDED OUT GENEROUS ‘CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS’ TO VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE DEM POLS CLASS SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT FEINSTEIN-BLUM’S STAGGERING SELF-SERVING CORRUPTION.
While feinting to the left as a proponent of cutting the Pentagon’s $750 billion-plus annual budget, in July Harris voted against a proposal by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that would have cut funding by a meager 10 percent, saying she supported the idea but that any cuts to the military should be done “strategically.”
Harris represents the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street billionaires, the intelligence agencies and the military. Her nomination Wednesday came just one day after the Democrats paraded a number of Republicans who endorsed Biden, including Colin Powell—the first African American chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and a chief architect of the 2003 war in Iraq—and the widow of the notorious warmonger, Senator John McCain.
Harris’ closing remarks at the convention last night were preceded by those of Obama, of which we will have more to say later. Suffice it to say that Obama, the first African American to be nominated by the Democrats and win the presidency, proceeded to bail out the banks, continue the wars of George W. Bush, implement a policy of drone murder, and deport more immigrants than any of his predecessors.
It was the right-wing policies of the Obama administration that paved the way for the ascension of Trump to the presidency.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity, promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
However, the elevation of an increasing number of women, African Americans and other ethnic minorities into positions of power, from city councils, to mayoral offices, police departments and the presidency itself, has done nothing to advance the interests of the working class. In fact, over the last four decades wealth inequality has grown most rapidly within racial groups, as a small layer of the population has been elevated into positions of power and privilege while conditions for those of all races and genders in the bottom 90 percent have deteriorated.
In addition to Obama, the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, national security advisors Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and, one might add, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor Angela Merkel—have shown that women and racial minorities can pursue the interests of the financial oligarchy as ruthlessly as any other representative of the ruling class.
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. This effort now culminates in the selection of the former “top cop” of California as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate.
This is aimed at blocking the emergence of a powerful, united movement of the working class. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the criminal indifference of the entire ruling elite to the lives of the working class. As was shown with the near unanimous passage of the trillion-dollar CARES Act bailout, their concern is for their stock portfolios and corporate profits at the expense of more than 175,000 people who have now died and the more than 5.5 million who have been infected by coronavirus.
The fight to advance the interests of the working class will have to be waged through the methods of class struggle, in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans and the capitalist system which they defend.
Kamala’s Lies Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything.
By David Keltz
Last week when Joe Biden officially announced Kamala Harris as his running mate on August 12th, 2020, Harris made what amounted to one of the most dishonest speeches by a vice-presidential candidate in recent memory. “This is a moment of real consequence for America. Everything we care about, our economy, our health, our children, the kind of country we live in, it’s all on the line,” she said. Harris, who appears to have been honing her acting skills during the pandemic, unleashed a bevy of emotions during her remarks, as she went from “cheerful,” to “empathetic,” to “nostalgic,” to “indignant,” and finally back to “cheerful,” all in a matter of seconds. In a desperate attempt to portray herself as humanizing, relatable, and down to earth, she instead reminded us all why the robotic Hillary Clinton was seen as untrustworthy and was immensely unpopular. Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything.
Harris heavily criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, blaming him for the death toll, the economic contraction, the high unemployment rate, the closure of schools, homelessness, hunger, and poverty. “The case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut. Just look where they’ve gotten us, more than 16 million out of work, millions of kids who cannot go back to school, a crisis of poverty, of homelessness afflicting black, brown, and indigenous people the most, a crisis of hunger afflicting one in five mothers who have children that are hungry and tragically, more than 165,000 lives that have been cut short, many with loved ones who never got the chance to say goodbye.”
Aside from the fact that Trump has been a huge advocate for the reopening of schools , Harris did not mention that seven of the top ten states with the most COVID deaths are run by Democrats, including New York, which has more deaths than Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona combined. Not only was NY the hardest hit state in the U.S., but it has far more deaths per million, when compared to any other country, at 1,692. By comparison, the country with the next highest death toll per million residents is Peru, at only 796. Harris also did not bother to explain how Trump was responsible for the 32,920 deaths in New York state, considering that it was Governor Andrew Cuomo who chose to allow seniors who tested positive for the virus to return to nursing homes, resulting in thousands of avoidable deaths. The state’s death toll for nursing home residents is listed as 6,600 , but the official number is likely significantly higher. The AP reported that the real number may be as high as 11,000 , with some estimates indicating that it could be closer to 14,000, considering that 21,000 nursing beds are currently vacant , compared to just 13,000 from one year ago.
In addition to ramping up testing, and sending thousands of ventilators to the state of NY, Trump allocated 350 million dollars to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for construction of alternate care facilities in NY, including sending the USNS Comfort ship, and turning the Javits Center into a military field hospital. For what it’s worth, Cuomo praised Trump back in April at the time when his state was in desperate need of the president’s help saying, “He has delivered for New York. He has." Harris did not bother to ask Cuomo or Mayor Bill De Blasio why they chose not to efficiently use the resources that the federal government provided them with. None of those facts fit into Harris’s narrative, so instead she moved ahead and blamed Trump for an economy that is recovering quicker than many economists predicted.
“The president’s mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” she said. The ability to create an alternate reality is nothing new for Harris. This is the same person who said that the Trump economy was failing a year ago, at a Democratic debate on June 28th, 2019. “You know, this president walks around talking about and flouting his great economy, right? My great economy… You ask him, well, how are you measuring this greatness of this economy of yours and they point to the jobless numbers and the unemployment numbers... Working families need support and need to be lifted up, and frankly this economy is not working for working people.” At the time that Harris made those factually incoherent remarks, the unemployment rate sat at a robust 3.7 percent (the 16th consecutive month that it was at or below the 4 percent threshold), African-American unemployment stood at a solid 6 percent, Asian-American unemployment was at 2.1 percent, 192,000 new jobs were created each month over a twelve-month period, and average hourly earnings rose by 3 percent from the previous year. In other words, when the U.S. economy was thriving and perhaps stronger than at any point in our history, Harris wanted Americans to believe that we were still living in the Great Depression.
Harris also bizarrely compared COVID-19 to Ebola. “It didn’t have to be this way. Six years ago, in fact, we had a different health crisis, it was called Ebola. We all remember that pandemic, but you know what happened then? Barack Obama and Joe Biden did their job.” As of this writing the coronavirus has killed 775,000 people worldwide , and 21,927,114 people have tested positive for the virus. Ebola, by comparison, killed 11,310 people worldwide, while only 28,616 people tested positive for it. To put in perspective, nearly as many people have tested positive for the coronavirus as the total number of people residing in Sri Lanka, a country that has the world's 58th largest population at just over 21 million . Meanwhile, roughly the same number of people that can attend a football game at Princeton Stadium (27,800) , tested positive for Ebola.
The Democratic vice-presidential candidate also professed her supposed patriotism and love for the country by calling the U.S. a country that is rooted in institutional racism. She praised the “Black Lives Matter Movement,” while failing to condemn violent protests, the rioting, the looting, the burning of businesses, churches, and courthouses, and the destruction of property that has swept across major cities including: Portland, Seattle, Minnesota, Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C. and many other places. “We’re experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that has brought a new coalition of conscience to the streets of our country, demanding change,” she said. The beneficiaries from this “moral reckoning,” or non-social distancing exercise that has made our streets much less safe was not something Harris was willing to explore.
Harris also claimed that she, along with Joe Biden, would bring the jobs back, “We’ll create millions of jobs and fight climate change through a clean energy revolution, bring back critical supply chains so the future is made in America, build on the affordable care act.” Harris and Biden somehow plan on increasing employment while raising taxes by more than three trillion dollars, including increasing the marginal, federal, and payroll tax rates , and eliminating thousands of jobs in the energy sector if the “Green New Deal,” is implemented. Harris spoke of implementing many of the things that Trump not only talked about, but already succeeded in accomplishing before the Chinese virus struck the world. All of these outright lies might explain why Harris was forced to drop out of the presidential race last December, after running her campaign into insolvency coupled with her anemic poll numbers. Not to worry, the mainstream media continues to tell us Harris is not only a moderate, but much more exciting, and invigorating the second time around. She is none of those things, but one constant remains: she is as dishonest as ever.
Image: PD, Cali National Guard
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT NO CAPS ON IMPORTING CHEAPER FOREIGN WORKER. Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
Millionaire Democrat Donor Says Joe Biden Will Be Good for Wall Street
Scott Olson/Getty Images
15 Sep 2020 395
2:53
A millionaire Democrat donor, who was once listed as a billionaire by Forbes , says Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden will be good for Wall Street in the long run.
Michael Novogratz, the former Goldman Sachs executive and hedge fund manager, told CNBC in an interview that while a Biden win against President Donald Trump may initially drag the market down, Wall Street will stand to benefit.
“I think Biden’s going to win. I hope Biden wins,” said Novogratz, who now runs an investment firm. “But if he wins, I think the market will go down, at least initially because he’s going to raise capital gains tax … he’s going to raise corporate taxes some and he’s going to raise personal income tax.”
“I think it’s probably better for the markets [if Biden wins] because the chaos Trump brings every week, every day just gets tiring,” Novogratz said.
Novogratz donated $200,000 to the Biden Action Fund in June.
Despite endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Novogratz said Biden and running mate Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) platform “sounds a lot more conservative than the Republican team when you’re talking about their plans.”
“There’s going to be so much pressure to start redistributing wealth whether it’s paying for college, paying for loans, if it’s Medicare for All,” Novogratz said. “Those are things the Democrat Party cares about and there’s going to be pressure and maybe we’re not going to get all of those but we’ll be heading in that direction. So I don’t see our deficits miraculously collapsing.”
Biden and Harris have sought to distance themselves from their large Wall Street backing in recent weeks. Although Biden blasted Wall Street executives in a town hall with the AFL-CIO union, a new report revealed that the former vice president’s campaign has assured Wall Street donors that his administration will maintain an economic status quo to their benefit.
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 fully 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.
The Biden-Harris ticket has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to the 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 .
Biden’s Billionaires By Steve McCann
Many years ago, while participating in a voter registration drive, I came upon a grizzled and disheveled old man sitting in the overgrown and weed-infested yard of his paint-starved house calming smoking his pipe. Despite his gruff demeanor, Ully (Ulysses) was very pleasant and loquacious as we talked for over an hour on topics ranging from the weather to the innate foibles of mankind. It turned out that he had to leave school after the fourth grade in order to work in the fields to help support his family and had toiled in a variety of menial and labor-intensive jobs ever since. Yet, he had a deep and thorough insight into human nature. Among his comments about the rich and ostensibly well-educated was: “All the money in the world cain’t buy a fool a lick of common sense.”
I was reminded of that observation after reading an article describing the 131 billionaires who are pouring millions into the coffers of the Democrat party and Joe Biden’s campaign in their mindless obsession to defeat President Trump in November. Among the prominent names are Jeff Skoll, a founder of eBay who has contributed $4.5 million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner of The Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million, and Josh Bekenstein , Chairman of Bain Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5 million.
Far more Wall Street financers have also jumped on the Biden/Democrat party bandwagon than are supporting Donald Trump, whose policies have overwhelmingly revived the economy after the stagnation of the Obama-Biden years. The tech billionaires , not content to simply cough up untold millions in direct political contributions, are also funding massive voter drives, promoting mail-in balloting, creating divisive partisan news sites, aiding and designing the Democrat party’s digital campaigns and unabashedly censoring the social media accounts of the Trump campaign and innumerable conservatives.
The political party they are gleefully underwriting in order to oust Trump is no longer the party of the middle and working class (which is now one and the same) but a two-tier assemblage in which the prey is sleeping with the predator. The witless wealthy and socially aware are in bed with the avowed socialists and militant Marxists. What is holding this marriage of convenience together is a mutual hatred of Donald Trump and the undoable promises made by Joe Biden and the Democrat party hierarchy.
In a 2019 meeting with 100 super-wealthy potential donors, Biden assured the gathering that he would not demonize the rich and would only increase their taxes slightly while ensuring that their standard of living would not be affected by any of his policies. He also stated: “I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 Billionaires are the reason why we are in trouble”. Further, he unabashedly emphasized that the wealthy are not the reason for income inequality and “If I win this nomination. I won’t let you down. I promise you .”
Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
When the time came to deal with the Marxist/socialist wing of the Democrat party’s anti-Trump coalition, policy commitments, many diametrically opposite of what was promised the wealthy donors, were also guaranteed with a non-verbal pledge of we won’t let you down.
The first step was a de facto party platform. The 110-page Biden-Sanders Manifesto which includes, among other commitments, a massive job killing $2+ trillion climate agenda to phase out fossil fuel usage within 15 years, the elimination of cash bail, redirecting (i.e. cutting) funding for the police, dismantling all border protections, legalizing virtually all illegal immigrants and massively raising corporate and individual tax rates on the wealthy. This manifesto is a socialist screed that would destroy the middle class and permanently neuter the economy and nation.
An effusive Bernie Sanders proclaimed to the world that Biden and the Democrats have embraced his socialist agenda and that Biden would be the most progressive president since FDR. Sanders exposed not only the behind the scenes reality of today’s Democrat party but Biden’s figurehead role.
Further confirmation of the radicalization of the Party came about unexpectedly as the militant Marxist faction of the Sanders coalition forced the issue. Impatient and unwilling to wait until after the 3rd of November, Antifa and Black Lives Matter used the death of George Floyd as a pretext to take to the streets and begin their long-hoped for revolution. They claimed that rioting, looting, committing arson and attacking law enforcement was a necessity as this was a systemically racist country. Yet, they openly demanded immediate changes rooted in their radical Marxist ideology of class warfare not so-called systemic racism. As two of their preferred chants and graffiti slogans “eat the rich” and “abolish capitalism now” confirms.
Biden, the Democrat party hierarchy as well as virtually all Democrat elected officials refused to address the violence and those responsible. Thus, they tacitly approved of the lawlessness and by doing so flashed a green light to continue the riots. When forced to acknowledge the reality on the streets of the nation’s cities, they instead blamed Trump, the police, white supremacists and even the Russians. Due to their spinelessness, the armies of anarchy and revolution Biden and the Democrats unleashed will never be defeated or mollified by them.
Considering the vast dichotomy in the litany of promises made and actions taken, it is inevitable that either the moneyed elite or the mob of passionate true believers will be betrayed. There is no middle ground. Who will prevail?
Will it be the elites whose only weapon is money and fleeting political influence or the passionate mob whose weapons are unconstrained violence and intimidation? Will it be those who believe a revolution could never happen here or those who are currently inciting revolution with the implicit blessing of a major political party? Will it be those who believe that Biden and the Democrats, if elected, will be able to forcefully deal with the insurgents or the insurgents who now know that riots and extortion causes Democrat politicians to cower in the corner?
Beginning with the French Revolution and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, history has recorded that passionate mobs always prevail when dealing with a feckless ruling class or party. And the first casualties have inevitably been the wealthy elites.
I can envision sitting with my old friend, Ully, and asking him if he thought the wealthy elites, indiscriminately tossing money at the Democrats for the sole purpose of defeating President Trump, understood the pitfalls involved. He would lean back, slowly exhale a puff of smoke from his well-worn pipe and with uncontrollable anger in his eyes would say: “Nope. Those damn fools ain’t got a lick of common sense.”
Report: Joe Biden Promises Wall Street Donors the Status Quo in Private Calls OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
8 Sep 2020 343
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Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is promising Wall Street donors the economic status quo that they became used to before President Donald Trump’s administration, according to a report.
An investment banker on Wall Street told the Washington Post that in private calls with financial executives two months ago, Biden’s campaign assured them that talk of populist reforms on the campaign trail was nothing more than talking points.
The Post reports :
When Joe Biden released economic recommendations two months ago, they included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers : allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account. [Emphasis added]
But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden’s agenda. [Emphasis added]
“They basically said, ‘Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into it,’” said one investment banker , referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls. [Emphasis added]
In a statement to the Post , Biden’s campaign downplayed the influence of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — left populists on trade and economic policy — on the former vice president’s agenda.
“The Biden-Sanders task forces made recommendations to Vice President Biden and to the [Democrat National Committee] platform drafting committee,” Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo said. “This anonymous source appears to be confused and uninformed about this very basic distinction.”
The report comes as Biden told AFL-CIO members on Labor Day that he will be the “strongest labor president” union workers “have ever had.”
“You can be sure you’ll be hearing that word, ‘union,’ plenty of times when I’m in the White House,” Biden pitched. “The words of a president matter. Union. We’re going to empower workers and empower unions.”
In the Democrat presidential primary, Biden told a group of rich Manhattan donors at a private fundraiser that “nothing would change” for them or their wealthy lifestyles if elected.
“I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money,” Biden said at the June 2019 fundraiser.
“The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished,” Biden said. “No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”
Like failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Biden has enjoyed a cozy relationship with Wall Street executives, along with his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA).
Most recently, 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 fully 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.
The Biden-Harris ticket has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to the 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 .
As Bloomberg pledges $100 million, Wall Street boosts Biden campaign Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has pledged to spend at least $100 million to support the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in Florida. This announcement Sunday is only the largest pledge of support from the financial oligarchy for the Democratic campaign.
Bloomberg aide Kevin Sheekey said the pledge of virtually unlimited financial backing to Biden in Florida, the most critical “battleground” state in the 2020 election, “will allow campaign resources and other Democratic resources to be used in other states, in particular the state of Pennsylvania.”
Florida has 29 electoral votes, the most of any closely contested state, following California with 55, overwhelmingly Democratic, and Texas with 38, leaning Republican. New York state, also with 29 electoral votes, is heavily Democratic.
Only once in the last 60 years—Bill Clinton in 1992—has a candidate won the presidency while losing Florida. The last Republican to lose Florida and still win the White House was Calvin Coolidge in 1924, when the state was lightly populated swampland.
Early voting begins in Florida September 24, and Bloomberg’s money will pay for massive campaign advertising on behalf of Biden, in both English and Spanish. Campaign officials said the funds would be devoted almost entirely to television and digital ads.
Even before the Bloomberg commitment, the Biden campaign and supporting Democratic groups had outspent Trump and the Republicans by $42 million to $32 million. The flood of cash from the billionaire media mogul will give the Democrats a three- or four-to-one advantage over the final seven weeks of the campaign.
The efficacy of Bloomberg’s huge financial commitment is open to question. The media billionaire spent $1 billion (a mere one-fiftieth of his gargantuan personal fortune) on his own pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination. He launched his campaign at a time when he believed Biden’s candidacy was near its demise, hoping that his money might forestall the nomination of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
The sudden revival of Biden’s campaign with his victory in South Carolina in February and then in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3 led Bloomberg to abandon his own efforts and endorse the former vice president, since their right-wing views on a range of topics, and particularly on foreign policy, were virtually identical.
Since then, Bloomberg has transferred $20 million from his abortive presidential campaign to the Democratic National Committee, as well as pumping in another $120 million to local, state and congressional campaigns, making him by far the largest single backer of the Democratic Party.
Florida is only the most glaring example of the general trend in the 2020 election, in which the financial oligarchy and Wall Street have indicated a distinct preference for Biden and backed it up with heavy financial commitments.
During August, the Biden campaign broke all records for fundraising in a single month, raking in $365 million, nearly double the previous record of $203 million set by the campaign of Barack Obama in September 2008, and more than Hillary Clinton and Trump combined to raise, in August 2016, $233 million. The Trump campaign also broke the Obama record, but its total of $210 million in August was far behind the pace set by the Democrats.
Approximately $205 million of the $365 million came through online donations, including 1.5 million new donors. This is more an indication of the widespread hostility to Trump among millions of working-class and middle-class people than any groundswell of support for Biden, who personifies the corrupt US political establishment, having spent 36 years in the Senate before his eight years as Obama’s vice president.
That means that $160 million—a near-record amount by itself—was raised through large donations from wealthy supporters of the Democratic Party. While Trump continues to rake in the lion’s share of support from industries such as oil and gas, mining and real estate, Biden has collected the bulk of financial backing from the banks, hedge funds and insurance industry.
Under rules set by the Federal Election Commission, a wealthy donor can now give as much as $830,600 to support a presidential candidate, routing much of the money through federal and state party committees rather than the candidate’s own campaign.
The result of the disparity in fundraising throughout the summer is that the Democratic presidential campaign has now caught up with and even surpassed Trump’s war chest. The Trump reelection campaign, despite raising an unprecedented $1.1 billion, has less cash on hand for the fall than the Biden campaign. According to press accounts, more than one-third of the money raised by the Trump campaign was used to pay the expenses of fundraising itself.
There were several reports last week that the Trump campaign was experiencing a “cash crunch,” and was unable to sustain advertising in all 15 of the so-called battleground states. Both the Washington Post and Bloomberg News reported that Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien has halted television advertising in Michigan and Pennsylvania at least temporarily, and that Biden was outspending Trump in nearly every closely contested state.
Stepien replaced Brad Parscale as campaign manager in July, at least in part because of concerns that Parscale had squandered Trump’s substantial initial fundraising advantage.
According to the media tracking firm Advertising Analytics, the Biden campaign spent $17 million in television and digital advertising in nine battleground states during the week of September 3, compared to $4 million by the Trump campaign.
The Clinton campaign outspent Trump by similar margins in 2016, but Trump campaign aides had boasted they would not face such a deficit in 2020. Trump has hinted he would seek to make up the difference from his personal fortune, but there has been no sign yet of any direct outlay by the billionaire to back his own campaign.
Proof
positive Kamala Harris is a lying phony By Thomas Lifson
Even
in a profession known for phoniness, Kamala Harris stands out as remarkably
fake. We expect politicians to lie — "what a beautiful
baby!" — but we also expect them to be reasonably skilled at
it. Being unable to convincingly name a favorite thing takes a lot
of experience in counterfeiting feelings.
Yet,
yesterday, in the softest of softball interviews on CNN, where she was asked
about her various "favorites" — roast chicken is her
"go-to" dish to cook (as if she spends a lot of time in time kitchen wearing
an apron that says "kiss the cook") — she stumbled and revealed
that she only pretends to listen to rap music.
Of
course, liking rap music is believed to be essential to forge an identity as
somehow African-American when none of her ancestors ever lived in the United
States. The closest her lineage comes to the experience of slavery
is as slave-owners, according to her Jamaican father. Joe Biden's
handlers chose her as his running mate only because her darkish skin tone was
supposed to fool blacks into thinking she is one of them and feels the pain of
slavery that lies a century and a half in the past.
Watch
below as very friendly CNN interviewer Angela Rye asks her to name "the
best rapper alive."
She
answers, "Tupac" and gives that slightly hysterical laugh she uses
all the time.
Rye
screws up her face and seems genuinely taken aback, saying emphatically,
"He's not alive!"
After
a couple of seconds, anticipating a dodge, she adds, "You say he lives
on..."
And
then, perhaps realizing that she may have just revealed the awful truth about
the bogus blackness, hastens to add, "Listen, West Coast girls think Tupac
lives on."
Tupac
Shakur was killed almost a quarter-century ago. Even stuffy old
white guys like me know that he is dead, dead, dead.
VIDEO
I think the Trump campaign
needs to paint Harris as both the real presidential candidate and as a
transparent phony. Video ads showing her completely phony masquerade
here can help turn young black males in particular against her.
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