Axios has a story up today that reveals Joe Biden’s shortlist for potential Treasury secretaries includes two bankers, Jamie Dimon (!) of Chase, Anne Finucane of BofA, and Elizabeth Warren:
Boy, I wonder who he’ll pick.
Well it’s not like Biden has a history of doing what rich donors in the financial sector want. Oh wait:
With Sen. Joe Biden joining the Democratic ticket, there's renewed scrutiny of Biden's connections to the credit card industry. Biden has been particularly cozy with MBNA, a financial services company from Delaware, and now a subsidiary of Bank of America.
Over the past 20 years, MBNA has been Biden's single largest contributor. And as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal note, Biden's son Hunter was hired out of law school by MBNA and later worked as a lobbyist for the company.
The Times also details just how helpful Biden has been to MBNA and the credit card industry. The senator was a key supporter of an industry-favorite bill -- the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005" -- that actually made it harder for consumers to get protection under bankruptcy.
www.propublica.org/...
But it’s not like Biden and Warren have a history of antagonism over this very issue of the financial sector’s influence over politics.
For Warren, Biden’s successful push to make it harder for struggling people to file for bankruptcy is Exhibit A in her case that big money — in this instance, from credit card companies based in Delaware — corrupts the system, rigging it against regular people.
theintercept.com/...
Oh, and Biden is also considering billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the guy who Warren gave a public enema to a few weeks back, for the World Bank slot per the Axios piece.
But switching to a more serious tone, this is why I supported Elizabeth Warren and now support Bernie Sanders. Given the way the economy’s been turned into a big casino over the last 40 years where only the fat cats and other well-educated or well-connected people win, we desperately need new kinds of people with fresh, imaginative ideas and perspectives in charge.
We might be headed into another financial and economic crash. Given Biden’s long history of catering to his donors in the financial sector, does anyone really believe he’s going to suddenly break from his career-long pattern to select Wall Street’s worst nightmare to manage our economic policy? I don’t think so. So with Biden we’ll have yet another administration where Wall Street calls the tune.
I’ll support him obviously if he’s the nominee, which seems increasingly likely, but just know all we’re doing is returning back to the economic status quo that existed prior to Trump and which played a role in giving us Trump.
It’s really too goddamn bad because we could’ve had as our nominee someone who last year sorta called the likely economic crash to come, just like she called the 2008 economic meltdown. But she’s too strident and liberal for our centrist overlords. Oh fucking well.