https://www.mintpressnews.com/filthy-rich-war-hawks-make-joe-biden-foreign-policy-team/273039/

American Oligarchs

Meet the Filthy Rich War Hawks That Make up Biden’s New Foreign Policy Team

“I expect the prevailing direction of U.S. foreign policy over these last decades to continue: more lawless bombing and killing multiple countries under the cover of “limited engagement,” – Biden Biographer Branko Marcetic

by Alan Macleod

The 77-year-old Delawarean likes to paint himself as a man of modest means.

Since leaving the White House, he and his wife Jill have amassed a fortune of more than $16.7 million. For comparison, the median net worth of U.S. households is $97,300. His tax returns show that he received over $900,000 from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and 2019. “When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor,” at the Ivy League institution, he told the country in March. Yet records show he has not taught even a single class during his time there.

In this sense, he is following in the footsteps of the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, who command enormous sums for public appearances — a practice often condemned as little more than payoffs for “good behavior” while in office.

The former vice-president’s team is also looking to be made up of extremely wealthy individuals as well. His transition task squad has been, in his website’s words, crafted to ensure they “reflect the values and priorities of the incoming administration,” and includes executives from Lyft, Amazon, Capital One, Uber, Visa, and JP Morgan.

One name being strongly floated for a cabinet position is former mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel, a move being met with vocal opposition from the left. Emanuel’s first tour of duty in the White House came under President Bill Clinton, where he was one of the key architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Emanuel also pushed through welfare “reform” bills that sharply reduced benefits for the poor and worked with Biden on the now-infamous 1994 Crime Bill, a key accelerator of mass incarceration.

Dave DeCamp, assistant news editor of AntiWar.com told MintPress. “His administration will likely be more successful than Trump at expanding the empire, with a more diplomatic and coherent approach at building alliances to face Russia and China.”

Many of the president-elect’s potential picks for foreign policy positions — including Susan Rice and Michele Flourney — have onlookers worried

Rice, who was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and National Security Advisor under Obama, has amassed a fortune of around $40 million. After leaving office, she was given a spot on the board of Netflix, being paid $366,666 as a base salary. On top of that, she was given $2.3 million worth of the company’s stock. However, it is her husband, former ABC News executive producer Ian O. Cameron (whose father was a super-wealthy industrialist), who is the prime source of her wealth. She was a key driver in U.S. action in Libya, and also successfully lobbied Obama to place harsher sanctions on North Korea and Iran.

Flournoy, meanwhile, was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012 in the Obama administration under Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. After “serving the country,” she received lucrative consulting contracts, joined corporate boards, and began her own security think tank, WestExec Advisors. By 2017, she was making a reported $452,000 annually.

“Certainly the possible selection of Michele Flournoy and other WestExec advisors people is concerning,” Biden biographer Branko Marcetic told MintPress.

This isn’t just because of their corporate/financial ties, though of course that’s alarming — can we be sure that people whose private sector career involved leveraging their government experience and contacts to help multinationals secure favorable business conditions will have their intentions calibrated toward good policy and not to their private sector career?”

“Biden claims he wants an end to the Yemen conflict, but again, words are only so much. It’s highly likely that he will have Michele Flornoy as his Secretary of Defense who was one of the voices that stated that weapons should continue to be sold to Saudia Arabia (during the Yemen conflict), under certain conditions, as they have a right to protect themselves.

With pro-Israel zealots like Rice advising him, the Biden administration would “expand” on what Trump had done in Palestine as well. Meanwhile, for Latin America, his foreign policy team intends to revive the so-called “anti-corruption drives” of the Obama era, which ultimately overthrew an elected government in Brazil and paved the way for the ascendency of far-right figure Jair Bolsonaro.