|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Elphaba
Pan, Biden is my favorite for a VP position. Any pres would be lucky to have him.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by pan6467
I agree, the man is a truly great leader in this day and age of very few even decent leaders.
|
I could not disagree, more...about Biden. IMO, the people of Delaware would be hard pressed to find a republican to replace Biden as their senator, who could do a more thorough job of selling out the common interests of the large majority of them:
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/bu...C8%20YZEkIvgKQ
Expired: How a Credit King Was Cut Off
By LOWELL BERGMAN and PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: March 7, 2004
ON a chilly Monday in early November, Laura Bush appeared at a lunchtime reception at a baronial mansion in Wilmington, Del., to express her husband's gratitude for $350,000 in contributions to his re-election campaign. Her host was Charles M. Cawley, and most of the money had come from employees of the MBNA Corporation, the highflying credit card company that he had run for two decades.
The Bush family was well acquainted with Mr. Cawley and his generosity. Only Enron, before its fall, was a bigger source of political donations to George W. Bush than MBNA. Mr. Cawley was also a benefactor to the president's father. Besides donating $1 million to the foundation that built George H. W. Bush's presidential library, Mr. Cawley and MBNA have paid more than $300,000 to the former president and his wife for appearing at company events.
Friends in the highest places were not all that Mr. Cawley collected. As he built the company into the world's largest independent credit card issuer, he gained a reputation as a free spender. Over the years, MBNA accumulated a fleet of airplanes, helicopters, yachts and expensive cars, as well as a $65 million art collection.
Although hardly a household name, even on Wall Street, Mr. Cawley, 63, became a powerful figure in business by catering to the national addiction to credit. Operating in a heavily regulated industry, he curried favor in Washington through political contributions and by hiring former senior government officials. MBNA's management team is studded with retired F.B.I. officials, including Louis J. Freeh, its former director....
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/bu...rtner=USERLAND
....MBNA has been the No. 1 donor to Senator Biden's campaigns since 1993 and has made substantial contributions to Senator Snowe and Representative Michael N. Castle, Republican of Delaware. Combined, those three politicians have received more than $700,000 from MBNA and its employees since 1993, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a research group in Washington that tracks money in politics.
Mr. Freeh took issue with those figures, saying that putting all the individual contributions together was unfair and that only $57,000 of that total came from the company's official political action committee. He also said in an interview that, excluding the personal contributions of Mr. Lerner and Mr. Cawley, about 65 percent of MBNA's money goes to Republicans and about 35 percent to Democrats.
What did MBNA get for all that money? While Mr. Biden's main work has been on the Foreign Relations Committee, he has been a consistent advocate for MBNA. He has actively supported the company's favorite federal legislation, the Bankruptcy Reform Act, which would make it more difficult for consumers to escape their credit card debt.
Senator Biden shepherded the bankruptcy legislation along by taking the unusual tack of inserting it into a foreign relations bill in 2000, said his spokesman, Norm Kurz. But Mr. Kurz added that Mr. Biden said he would have backed the bill whether or not he was from Delaware or had received MBNA donations.
The bill passed Congress that year but President Bill Clinton vetoed it. President Bush has pledged to sign it if it passes again, despite opposition from consumer advocates.
"This bill is clearly a giveaway to the credit card industry, and free-spending MBNA has been at the head of the pack," said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America.
The company also has ties to Senator Biden's son, R. Hunter Biden, a lawyer in Washington. Hunter Biden joined MBNA as a management trainee after graduating from Yale Law School and rose to be an executive vice president. Now a partner in Oldaker, Biden & Belair, a lobbying and law firm, he receives a $100,000 annual retainer from MBNA to advise it on "the Internet and privacy law," Mr. Freeh said. He added that Hunter Biden was not a registered lobbyist and did not lobby on legislation for the company....
|
Quote:
http://web.archive.org/web/200610270...st_statei.html
Delaware: America's First State...in Democratic sellouts
I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
...And why is his Delaware Senate colleague, Sen. Tom Carper, willing to drink MBNA's Kool-aid at the same time?
Biden and Carper were two of the <a href="http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2005/03/democrats-in-name-onlythese-are.html">14 Democrats</a> who thwarted efforts to prevent passage of the federal bankruptcy bill . That measure is long a favorite of Wilmington-based credit-card giant MBNA, because it will make it harder for debt-plagued Americans (many of whom were lured down the path to insolvency by aggressive credit-card marketing tactics) to clear the debt in bankruptcy court. In a 2005 America where the big corporation seems to always beat the little guy, this is a pretty big win for the money boys.
Biden's been carrying MBNA's water on this issue for years. In 2000, when the plan was effectively stalled because a real Democrat named Bill Clinton was in the White House, he even tried to attach the bankruptcy changes to a foreign aid bill.
Why is Biden such a big fan. Those less cynical than us might argue that, well, MBNA does employ a lot of people in Delaware. True -- but could it also be because <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp?CID=N00001669&cycle=2004">MBNA is Biden's biggest contributor</a> -- by a good margin. According to Opensecrets.org, Biden raised some $147,700 in contributions from MBNA employees from 1999-2004, his biggest source of campaign cash.
Who is that in second? A law firm named Pachulski Stang Ziehl Young Jones & Weintraub, which gave $127,625 over the same period. And <a href="http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php?type=loc&addr=1+CENTRE+CT&zip=19807">who are they</a>, might one ask?
Pachulski Stang is the nation's largest bankruptcy law firm with one of the most highly regarded bankrupty practices in the country. The firm's client list includes some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry as well as many of the most well-known businesses in the world.
While we're at it, guess who Tom Carper's <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp?CID=N00012508&cycle=2004">biggest donor is</a>. By now, you should be shocked to learn that his No. 1 contributor is also MBNA Corp. at $127,447, dwarfing the next closest donor.
But let's return to Biden, shall we? If you're not troubled by campaign contributions, there's more. Eyebrows were raised in 1996 when Biden sold his house for $1.2 million -- his asking price and more than a couple of a similar neighboring homes went for around the same time -- to an MBNA executive named John Cochran.....
...And you wonder why even loyal Democrats get disgusted with the Democrats nowadays. Many Americans crave a political system in which there's a choice between the party of the fat cats and the party of the regular guys. Instead, what we get is the party of all fat cats versus the party of selected, money-giving fat cats.
And the loser is you. Remember that the next time MBNA offers you a credit card in the mail, or the next time that Joe Biden dares to run for president.
|
Last edited by host; 08-23-2008 at 08:55 AM..
|