Oh What Tangled Webs They Weave
by John Lawrence, September 24, 2019
It turns out that Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of a gas company in Ukraine, Burisma, where he received $50,000 a month for his services. This was at a time when Joe Biden was Obama's point man in dealing with Ukraine. The whole thing starts smelling fishy. Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian prosecutor be fired before the US would give Ukraine $1 billion. Now Trump is under fire for holding up Ukrainian aid until they investigate the Bidens. Ukraine is a political football and a swamp which both parties are mired in. However there is a happy outcome to the situation - Elizabeth Warren is ahead of Joe Biden in the polls! Thank God! I want Warren, not Biden, to be the Democratic nominee for President. Joe Biden's time has come and gone. Both Trump and Biden can say there was no wrongdoing all they want, but they both have their hands dirty. No relative of a vice President should be getting $50 K a month for sitting on some board in a country that his father is dealing with.
It seems that the Bidens are mucking around in the same territories that Hillary Clinton was - taking money from rich donors who want special favors in return. In Hillary's case it was whispering into Lloyd Blankfein's ear in return for a check for $250,000. He is the chairman of Goldman Sachs. There were three paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, for which she earned a total of $675,000. These money grubbing Democrats as well as the whole Republican party which are nothing but a bunch of money grubbers need to be thrown out. Who does that leave us with? Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and a few other progressive and moderate Democrats. I would like to see Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker run as a team for President and vice President of the US. That would be a great combination, gender wise and ethnicity wise. Cory's politics are also more on the moderate side which gives some balance to the ticket.
Joe Biden thinks he can cover up his past voting record where he voted for everything the banking industry wanted. He's from Delaware headquarters of the credit card industry. The Washington Examiner reported:
Former Vice President Joe Biden bills himself as one of the regular guys and gals, but as a Democratic Senator from Delaware, he cozied up to credit card executives while championing their cause in Congress, making it tougher for average Americans to file for bankruptcy.
“Joe Biden pretends that he’s middle-class Joe, and in reality he’s corporate Joe,” Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in bankruptcy, commercial law, and financial regulation, told the Washington Examiner.
Biden was a key architect of and whip for the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which made it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy. At the time, bankruptcy filings were at a peak of more than 2 million and legislators worried that the system was being abused. After the bill became law, bankruptcy filings fell by 70 percent.
“Someone once analogized what happened in 2005 as someone looking at a hospital and saying, ‘oh my God, emergency admissions are way up. So the solution is to reduce the hours of the emergency room,’” Bruce A. Markell, a professor of bankruptcy law and practice at Northwestern University, told the Washington Examiner.
Lenders like Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Chase and Wells Fargo aggressively lobbied for changes to the bankruptcy code. Delaware-based credit card company MBNA, which Bank of America acquired in 2006, was one of the most ardent supporters of the bill.
Biden’s senate campaign committees received $208,175 from MBNA employees from 1989 through 2010, the second-largest source of contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets.org. In the 2006 election cycle, employees from Citigroup employees donated $18,825, those from Bear Stearns donated $15,000 and from Goldman Sachs donated $10,500.
In total, Biden received $1,126,375 from those in the securities and investment industry, $304,475 from finance and credit company workers, and $295,900 from commercial bank employees.
Biden’s ties to MBNA and banks span beyond political contributions from its employees. Home sales, family jobs, and free trips caused critics to dub him “the senator from MBNA.”
So good ol' middle class Joe, the defender of Joe Six Pack and Joe Lunch Box is really a guy who defended the banking industry and supported stricter standards that made it impossible for people in distress to declare bankruptcy. For years, Biden made it his mission to block student debt forgiveness, leaving many young people facing a lifetime of debt. Student debt broke $1.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2018 according to the Federal Reserve, outstripping auto loan ($1.1 trillion) and credit card debt ($977 billion) significantly, with 1.1 million people owing over $100,000 for their educational expenses. Twenty percent of student borrowers default on their loan payments.
And this guy wants to appeal to millennials? Elizabeth Warren has an impeccable record on these issues. She started the Consumer Financial Protection Agency whose mission was to do just the opposite of what Joe Biden was doing - protect middle class Americans. And by the way, the "senator from MBNA's" son, Hunter, was also an employee of MBNA.
