Between 2014 and 2019, CAP received at least $33 million in donations from firms in the financial sector, private foundations primarily funded by wealth earned on Wall Street and in other investment firms, and current or former executives at financial firms such as Bain Capital, Blackstone and Evercore, according to a Washington Post analysis of CAP’s donor disclosures and some of the foundations’ public tax filings. In the same time period, CAP received between $4.9 million and $13 million from Silicon Valley companies and foundations, including Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic organization. Tanden’s choice suggests the Biden White House will follow in the footsteps of the Clinton and Obama administrations – favoring large corporations that mouth progressive ideals while standing mute or providing quiet support for wild regulatory schemes that they can easily afford but that their smaller competitors cannot. This is “regulatory capture” at its finest, which is to say its worst... It retards innovation and competition but appears to be activist when it comes to the kinds of intrusions into the private sector that Democrats favor. The problem of size will also be manifest at the Treasury Department, whose chief will be Janet Yellen, the one-time chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The Fed is supposed to be shielded from the give-and-take of electoral politics to serve as a stabilizing force in the making of monetary policy. The very idea of a Treasury Secretary who would use her
USUAL SUSPECTS Take the installation of the Democratic operative Neera Tanden as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden may actually have been selected in the first place as a sacrificial lamb – a liberal firebrand in a key job who would likely have been slapped down by the Republican- controlled Senate – whose opposition Biden could have used to help unify his party’s disparate elements and their refusal to confirm a woman of color. Indeed, when Biden announced her choice, it was generally thought the GOP would retain control – and given that Tanden had repeatedly called Sen. Mitch McConnell, who would have been the majority leader, “Moscow Mitch,” her nomination might never have come up for a vote at all. Now all she needs to worry about is Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, whom she also accused effectively of being a Moscow stooge in the Russian regime’s effort to harm her 2016 candidate, Hillary Clinton. It’s doubtful that Sanders would want to begin the Biden presidency as the sole vote against a Biden nominee. (He and Biden are said to like each other.) As head of the Center for American Progress, Tanden has been a perfect example of the Clinton style of glad-handing fundraising. The Center’s budget is said to run about $50 million a year, most of it raised from friendly corporate interests eager to establish intimate relationships with what they perceive to be mainstream Democratic power brokers. According to the Washington Post ...
American Consequences
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