A question looming before the debate last night was: Which of two mutually exclusive positions Clinton has taken recently on Dodd-Frank’s too-big-to-fail provision would she repeat in the debate? The answer: Both. [Updated 4/16]
As for Clinton herself, her bandwagon-jumping nature is a big reason why so many people dislike her. But in this instance there was the additional element of dishonesty: she knew that Sanders rather than the editorial board members had it right about what Dodd-Frank provides. She had said so publicly, recently, in a statement in which she also said she had said that before.
— ForExTraderProfits.com, linking to my Apr. 13 post here
Which in turn was excerpted from a post of mine from Apr. 10.
The instance I was referring to was Clinton’s decision a day after the New York Daily News published online its editorial board’s interview of Bernie Sanders—a truly weird interview in which the board members asked questions based upon their inaccurate factual beliefs across a panoply of issues, including that Dodd-Frank does not include a provision that allows the Fed together with the Treasury Dept. to designate a financial institution systemically important and dangerously large and order the institution to pare down.
And including that most experts, including those from the finance industry, believe that the best mechanism by which a financial institution would be pared down would be for the government to give them parameters such as a cap-size and permit the institutions to determine for themselves how to accomplish it.
This, while also demanding that Sanders comment on a lengthy opinion, issued four days earlier and reported about and analyzed in the media three days earlier, in which a single federal trial-level judge ruled unconstitutional the Dodd-Frank provision that allows the Fed together with the Treasury Dept. to designate a financial institution systemically important and dangerously large and order the institution to pare down—the Dodd-Frank provision that the Daily News editorial board said doesn’t exist. The opinion also was based partly on the judge’s erroneous belief that that provision requires something that it actually does not: a cost-benefit analysis, which, Paul Krugman notes, would be absurd.
And also while repeatedly conflating legislation that Sanders has proposed to augment and clarify that provision of Dodd-Frank with Dodd-Frank itself, making it impossible for Sanders to follow what even was being asked.
Nonetheless, the political—but curiously, not the finance-law pundits and experts nor economists (including the ones who double as pundits, with the exception of Paul Krugman)—put out word that Sanders’s answers indicated that he has no understanding of this seminal issue of his campaign: current law on breaking up the banks as too big too fail, and the mechanism by which this would be decided either under current law (Dodd-Frank) or Sanders’s proposed legislation. (Krugman subtlely walked back his take three days after he included that take in a column published three days after the interview transcript was released.)
Clinton, in an interview the morning after the transcript was released, characteristically parroted the take of the in mainstream political pundits and journalists that it was Sanders rather than the editorial board members who lacked knowledge and understanding of that relevant part of Dodd-Frank and of what the consensus mechanism to pare down the financial institutions would be—that the institutions themselves, like MetLife in the case in which the new court ruling was issued, would be allowed to determine themselves how to comply with the cap order. Sanders, Clinton said, hadn’t done his homework.
But if so, then neither had she, since, as a couple of dismayed non-household-name journalists quickly noted, she had said at the February debate, repeating what, as she herself pointed out, she had said earlier in the campaign: that Dodd-Frank indeed authorizes a forced breakup of too-big-to-fail financial institutions and that she as president would have her administration invoke the provision.
So a question looming before the debate last night was, which of these mutually exclusive positions would she take? The answer: Both. This is, after all, Hillary Clinton we’re talking about.
A few minutes after she reiterated her position of February, December, November, and October that her administration would invoke the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t-now-you-see-it-again Dodd-Frank provision that authorizes the compelled paring of huge financial institutions, she turned to Sanders and repeated her parrot line that Sanders’s answers to the New York Daily News editorial board indicated that he didn’t even know much about his own signature policy: break up the big banks. But this time (if I recall correctly), Clinton being Clinton, she phrased as something like, “The New York Daily News editorial board said Sanders ….” Because a cool way to mislead is to note that you’re repeating (and thus adopting) a claim made by someone else.
I have no idea why neither Sanders nor the debate questioners didn’t ask her why she claims Sanders was wrong and that editorial board right while repeatedly saying, before that Sanders interview and now after it, exactly what Sanders said in that interview. And why they didn’t ask her why, if Dodd-Frank doesn’t authorize the too-big-to-fail designations and a mandate to pare down, she nonetheless keeps saying, when asked, that her administration would invoke the provision.
And I have no idea why neither Sanders nor the questioners asked her why she thought it was a bad idea to allow the banks themselves to decide how to pare down in compliance with the Dodd-Frank order. Other than, y’know, that the editorial board thought it indicated incompetence and unpreparedness on Sanders’s part and that lots of pundits agreed. In fact, some still do; this is a meme that is proving particularly resistent to actual fact, especially among big-name baby-boomer and Gen-X major-media writers who themselves are clueless about, say, Dodd-Frank.
What the questioners did do, though, is ask Sanders questions that gave him the opportunity to in essence respond to the punditry’s sheep stampede, such as why he would prefer to allow the banks to decide for themselves what path to take to comply with a pare-down order. Which he did, beautifully, although Nicholas Kristof (probably among others) didn’t notice.
I don’t want to continue to beat this horse, which I’d hoped and expected would have been explicitly killed last night but instead was merely wounded: Not just about Clinton’s shamelessly snakelike handling of this particular matter but that it is part and parcel of who she is, at least as a candidate.
My concern–obsession, really–with this isn’t so much because I support Sanders, who mostly is defending himself just fine, but because I expect that Clinton will win the nomination, and then I will switch my allegiance (without enthusiasm) to her. Clinton clearly does not get how much this type of thing hurts her as a candidate; presumably, she thinks it helps her, which itself indicates a problem with her perception. So it is part of her regular repertoire.
As I’ve said before, it probably won’t matter in the outcome of the election. She will be opposing (almost certainly) a pathological liar who (absolutely certainly) will be pushing most of the same fiscal-policy snake oil, dictated by the donors and their puppets and fellow travelers who comprise the Republican establishment, as the folks who unabashedly are part of that establishment have been pushing for decades now.
But Clinton has a dangerously weird thought process in some key respects, and her failure to recognize that her incessant sleight-of-hand misrepresentations, or outright misrepresentations, confirm what so many people already think about her: that she’s dishonest, that she’s untrustworthy, that you can’t simply accept at face value what she says.
Another example of this, albeit of a slightly different nature, is the ridiculous claim, repeated again last night, that she‘s not part of the establishment. The very last thing the Democrats need in this particular election is a nominee at the very top of their ticket who is the very definition of “establishment” but doesn’t know it because she doesn’t know what voters mean by “establishment” and therefore why the word matters. I have no idea whether Clinton is feigning that she doesn’t know what is meant by “establishment” or whether instead she actually misunderstands the term. I suspect the former**, but will take her at her word. And I don’t know which is worse. It’s a fielder’s choice, I think.
Sanders is by no means a perfect candidate, and I have to say that Krugman finally made a criticism of Sanders that I agree with, in his column today.* But Democrats fail at their own peril to reckon with Clinton’s inability to understand that some of her tactics and gimmicks are counterproductive.
—-
*Krugman does think that only Sanders among the Democratic primary candidates misrepresents things. Guess he doesn’t follow the Clinton campaign as closely as he follows the Sanders campaign. Or at all. He just shills for it.
Added 4/15 at 5:42 p.m.
**Originally and erroneously said “latter”. Corrected 4/17 at 10:08 a.m.
____
UPDATE: In response to criticisms of this post in the Comments thread, which insist that Sanders really, really doesn’t understand the relevant Dodd-Frank provisions and that Clinton was right to say last week that he didn’t do his homework and that he doesn’t understand this key issue of his and hint that this means he’s unqualified to be president—and that it’s fine for Clinton to talk out of both sides of her mouth, one the side that says Sanders is clueless about a key issue, the other the side that agrees completely with Sanders on the issue and expands upon it, going further than Sanders does—I wrote:
NYT The Upshot blogger Peter Eavis, who actually specializes in coverage of Dodd-Frank and related finance-industry matters, begs to differ with you.
His post, which is lengthy and detailed, is titled, “At Debate, Hillary Clinton Leaves Questions About Approach to Banks.” It’s theme, which it establishes damn clearly: That Sanders knows more that Clinton does about the relevant provisions of Dodd-Frank, and wayyyy more than the Daily News editorial board members or any of the mainstream political pundits who bought the editorial board’s line, know.
The subtext is that Clinton is either truly confused or being deliberately misleading. And that either way she well knows that it was the Daily News editorial board members and the political pundits who jumped on their bandwagon, rather than Sanders, who actually is clueless about what is a really complex and not precisely clear statutory provision, but a provision that the editorial board members had no understanding of at all.
Clinton’s invoking of that editorial board’s belief that Sanders is confused and clueless—he didn’t do his homework!—is necessarily also a statement that Clinton too is confused and clueless. Either those editorial board members and all the pundits who adopted their line are wrong or both Sanders and Clinton are wrong; she knows this. And Eavis makes clear that what Clinton said about her intentions under Dodd-Frank are seriously weird, implying that she didn’t do her homework or that her homework reading assignment included a suggestion that she repeat the editorial board’s bogus claim that Sanders doesn’t understand this key premise of his campaign.
All the way back on April 5 the day that that interview transcript was released, Eavis in blog post at The Upshot deconstructed the claim that it was Sanders rather than his interviewers that was clueless about Dodd-Frank. Most pundits, including those at the Times, who commented on the interview presumably didn’t read (and at least one, Nicholas Kristof, still hasn’t read) Eavis’s April 5 post.
Ditto for some straight-news reporters covering the campaigns. Politico’s Annie Karni, who covers the Clinton campaign but who I mistakenly said in a recent post, covers the Sanders campaign, is a case in point.
Which is understandable, I suppose, since The Upshot is just a blog, and The Times hides Eavis’s work there.
But the real purpose of my post was to highlight a major problem with Clinton’s candidacy that Democrats need to recognize: That the fairly widely held view of her as less-than-honest, less-than-trustworthy, and not particularly admirable in character, is not solely the result of relentless, decades-long Republican efforts to portray her that way, nor mainly because of her asinine email mess. It also is because she consistently goes for the misleading cheap shot in an effort to con voters about, in this campaign, Sanders’ policy proposals or Sanders himself. And that she has no idea that this tactic is counterproductive rather than productive.
I was delighted that one of the questioners at the debate Thursday night—Dana Bash, if I remember right—pointed out her attempt to mislead last week that Vermont is the state from which the most guns come from that are used in crimes in New York state. That claim is emblematic of the dual problem here that Clinton does this kind of thing regularly and that she thinks it helps her.
The Times today has an editorial online that will be published in tomorrow’s paper that I think pretty clearly is a quickly revised, post-debate draft of what originally was written as an endorsement of Clinton and instead endorses neither Clinton nor Sanders. Here are the last two paragraphs of it:
Too often, Mrs. Clinton appears defensive in answering legitimate inquiries, for which she should have sound answers. This tendency has led to some errors and has prevented her from correcting others. Her decision to use a private server for her government emails was a lapse in judgment that she has yet to explain convincingly. Criticism of her lucrative speeches to Wall Street is also legitimate. She could easily deprive Mr. Sanders of one of his strongest points if she simply released the transcripts, instead of concocting absurd reasons not to. [Link in original.]
The breadth of experience that Mrs. Clinton — former first lady, senator from New York and secretary of state — would bring to the presidency is impressive and rare. But as tough as this long fight with Mr. Sanders has been, a tougher challenge could lie ahead: appealing to younger Democrats and resolving doubts about her forthrightness and her policies. She will need to do both if she is to stake a clear claim to the White House.
Watching that debate Thursday night, a majority of the Times editorial board members finally got the essence of the problem with Clinton’s campaign: It’s Clinton herself. My hope, since she almost certainly will be the nominee, is that someone high up in her campaign also gets it and gets that maybe if it is explained to her and illustrated to her that her misrepresentations and incessant sleight-of-hand gimmicks in addressing Sanders and things related to him are reinforcing the belief among so many voters that she’s slimy and that she will say almost anything to win an election, she will finally get this herself.
Democrats are fooling themselves if they think this is trivial.
Added 4/16 at 1:35 p.m. Addition re Karni inserted 4/16 at 2:15 p.m.
Did she iterate (repeat) it before she reiterated it??
Yes. Respectively, at least twice before the February debate, and once last week after her initial statement, I believe.
The only thing Hillary has said about the Daily News interview was that it seemed like he hadn’t “done his homework” and, in the debate, that he had “problems answering questions.” Those are thoroughly vague statements that do not specify exactly what the failure was, and if not asked neither she nor any other candidate has an obligation without specifically being asked to pinpoint her meaning.
But there was plenty there in his halting responses to justify that kind of general comment from an opponent in a political campaign. The anti-Hillary obsessives, whose ability to hold double standards in suspension is truly breathtaking, want to say that it was all about the part where he talked about participation of the institutions themselves in determining how it will be broken up. Bernie’s description of that was largely correct (although he hardly sounded secure in knowing that’s what the law provides; it sounded more like he was thinking it must work that way).
But Hillary said nothing on either occasion that specified that part of the interview as the part she was referring to. And there was more than just that. Sanders was, without question, extremely shaky about the basic mechanics of the Dodd-Frank process — not that we should expect a senator to cite chapter and verse, but he didn’t even mention the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is the key player in the whole process. His statements in that section — his uncertainty about the role of the President, Treasury, the Fed — were a convoluted mess. He clearly had not done his homework about that, and it is, exactly as she said, his signature issue.
Now I happen to think the pundit reaction to the Sanders comments was overwrought — getting into the weeds like this probably should not be necessary — but once the charge was out there, and with plenty of evidence in the earlier part of the interview to support the very general criticism she leveled — not doing homework, trouble answering questions — it was perfectly legitimate to use it for a campaign advantage.
Some of the stuff Sanders has been saying is a lot worse than this. He lied through his teeth about not running a negative campaign, and ever since has been borrowing every Fox News meme possible to attack her character and call her a liar.
As one spot-on commentator said, his campaign has turned from one “about something” to one “against someone.” He knows perfectly well that every Democratic Presidential candidate in the modern era has received contributions from all over the place, including people who work on Wall Street as well as unions, environmental groups, advocates for disadvantaged groups everything in between. He knows perfectly well that there is no necessary connection between policy-making and getting contributions (or payments for speeches going to the a Foundation one is associated with that requires contributions to do its work). That is perfectly obvious if one bothers to read her proposals for financial reform, none of which would be ones Goldman Sachs or any other Wall Street bank would happily ask for. It’s also supported by the fact that he has been unable to name any policies that show she’s in the hip pocket of the banks, but can only revert to the weak “it stands to reason” formulation.
To Urban Legend: One doesn’t need to see the skunk to know a skunk has sprayed. The only way political grifters or drug dealers are actually caught is when the FBI or the narcs are in the room. To say “that there is no necessary connection between policy-making and getting contributions” is to demand to be shown the skunk. It’s like the old joke: a woman walks in to find her husband in bed with another woman. “Honey, it’s not what you think,” he says, “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
“In 2009, the Clinton-led State Department approved a permit for the 400-mile Alberta Clipper pipeline, which is designed to pump up to 450,000 barrels of oil per day from the Canadian oil sands to Wisconsin (where recent polls show Democratic primary voters are concerned about its impact). According to federal lobbying records reviewed by the IBT, Chevron and ConocoPhillips both lobbied the State Department specifically on the issue of “oil sands” in the immediate months prior to the department’s approval, as did a trade association funded by ExxonMobil.
Those three oil companies have delivered between between $2.5 million and $3 million to the Clinton Foundation. That is on top of money their executives and lobbyists delivered to Clinton’s campaign and super PAC in her 2008 presidential bid — the year before she approved the pipeline.” http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/oil-companies-donated-clinton-foundation-while-lobbying-state-department-2348832
No one saw the skunk, but the stench is undeniable.
In Billary’s political universe, “bandwagon-jumping,” dishonesty and profound self-serving are not vices; they are essentials to running and winning political campaigns – and governing. “Clinton does not get how much this type of thing hurts her” because it really never has – not in the long run. They are moral blind spots of the kind we all have. It is very sad to say that all successful people seem to accommodate morality to personal ambition, to the demands of the area of human endeavor in which they hope to succeed: Generals to killing, investment bankers to greed, politicians to hypocrisy and dishonesty. But not all of us become Presidents or Senators or Secretaries of State, and when such leaders take office, we citizens become subject to those blind spots: there goes Richard Nixon; there goes Iraq; there goes 2008; and there goes, presumably, looming on that happy horizon, Hillary Clinton. These moral blind spots and political vices are so deeply ingrained they become habits, and they foretell exactly how such people will govern. It is only because she is running this time against Bernie, who, say what you will, is neither a bandwagon-jumper nor dishonest nor self-serving, that her vices stand out in such glaring relief. To contemplate her election is personally depressing. Far worse, though, will be the dashed hopes of millions of people who understand in their bones the pressing need to change the way they are governed. Any political or economic system that does not serve the interests of the governed needs to be – ought to be — abolished.
Several nice summations here from Urban Legend and Ms 57
The way I feel is that HRC and Cruse do not understand that we are in the mist of the great political revolution of 2016 that has both parties as part of “the establishment”. The two true outsiders are gaining unexpected momentum every day as more corruption becomes revealed about the establishment. We must learn and remember that the DNC and RNC are private enterprises that rig to set the rules of the election that lends itself the best ability for them to nominate the candid of there favor. So in essence the system is rigged by the purposeful rules confusion. We really should only have primaries that count the vote and voice of the people to choose. In my view the caucus is the rigging tool and should be outlawed . We should have the same rules for both parties in all 50 states and eliminate all the dishonesty with true transparency in our election processes…Also will the new supreme court agree to over turn Citizen United ? Depends on who wins the election.
Just when you think it cannot get any worse, we get another rambling dialogue on the same subject that manages to throw more bs into the process. This is so negative to the progressive cause it is frightening, and it is beneath the author who seems to be possessed by some “Campaign Zombie”.
You know what, Urban Legend and EMichael? NYT The Upshot blogger Peter Eavis, who actually specializes in coverage of Dodd-Frank and related finance-industry matters, begs to differ with you, Urban Legend, and you EMichael, at http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders-go-on-the-attack-in-democratic-debate/?_r=1.
His post, which is lengthy and detailed, is titled, “At Debate, Hillary Clinton Leaves Questions About Approach to Banks.” It’s theme, which it establishes damn clearly: That Sanders knows more that Clinton does about the relevant provisions of Dodd-Frank, and wayyyy more than the Daily News editorial board members or any of the mainstream political pundits who bought the editorial board’s line, know.
The subtext is that Clinton is either truly confused or being deliberately misleading. And that either way she well knows that it was the Daily News editorial board members and the political pundits who jumped on their bandwagon, rather than Sanders, who actually is clueless about what is a really complex and not precisely clear statutory provision, but a provision that the editorial board members had no understanding of at all.
Clinton’s invoking of that editorial board’s belief that Sanders is confused and clueless—he didn’t do his homework!—is necessarily also a statement that Clinton too is confused and clueless. Either those editorial board members and all the pundits who adopted their line are wrong or both Sanders and Clinton are wrong; she knows this. And Eavis makes clear that what Clinton said about her intentions under Dodd-Frank are seriously weird, implying that she didn’t do her homework or that her homework reading assignment included a suggestion that she repeat the editorial board’s bogus claim that Sanders doesn’t understand this key premise of his campaign.
I hope everyone who’s contributed to this thread reads the update I just added. The entire update, all the way to the end.
Of course, Bernie never takes a cheap shot. And while he took money from fossil fuel people, it was perfectly justifiable to insinuate that only Clinton has been swayed by it. Bernie’s never swayed — well, unless it’s about guns, and that’s justifiable because it’s Bernie.
I don’t give a hoot what Perter Eavis says. Bernie’s responses to how the powers in Dodd-Frank are invoked seemed very confused. That is not even arguable.
My main point is that every politician says things that are wrong. You can lurk and find things for any politician talking 12 hours a day that can’t be supported. They all take talking points and language from their staffs — as Bernie obviously did on the fossil fuel absurdity — and usually they drop them when they find out they are wrong — like the Vermont guns thing.
Your specialty, Beverley, is examining everything Hillary says, extrapolating it to its furthest logical conclusion, claiming that’s what she said or meant, and then applying a standard for truthfulness that no politician has or ever will meet. “Not doing your homework” does not say he was wrong about the role of the banks in deciding how to be split up. There is nothing wrong with it because, if anyone bothers to actually read how Dodd-Frank works, he did not appear to have done his homework.
Okay, I get that you don’t understand that Sanders, damn right, was confused because he didn’t realize near the outset that his questioners didn’t know of the existence of the relevant provision of Dodd-Frank, and their responses and follow-up questions to Sanders’ answers—some of them expressing incredulity—were based on their misconception of the statute: specifically, their cluelessness that the relevant provision in the statute exists.
Your complaint is that Sanders sounded like he didn’t know that the law doesn’t provide for what it does provide for. He didn’t do his homework, which I guess would have been either a mindreading course or a previous conversation with these people about the provisions in Dodd-Frank so that he would have known coming into the interview that he could not answer their questions based on a presumption that they knew what the statute they would be asking about actually provides.
Which I guess is why you don’t care to read an article that explains actual law, says that it is complicated and subject to more than one interpretation; that Sanders knows quite a bit about it; that his answers were appropriate in light of the actual statute; and that Clinton in her debate answers about it seemed confused.
I’m not the rigid one here, Urban Legend. And I’ve done my homework. You should, too.
And btw, Sanders gets donations from fossil fuel industry lobbyists and executives? I’m betting that they all maxed out with $2,700 a piece.
At least Bev admits that what she is doing with all this amounts to an “obsession.”
The more the debate regarding the qualifications of Clinton vs. Sanders is allowed to meander into relatively arcane provisions of complex legislation the more a monster sized issue in a Presidential campaign is allowed to get swept under the rug. How much cash have H.C. and W.J.C. managed to suck up in the past four Presidential terms since Bill left office? How much additional cash has gone into the Clinton Foundation? How much personal wealth has the nearly unemployed Chelsea been able to Hoover up along with mom and dad? I brought this up not long past and the reply it received was that they paid their taxes on all the income and wealth accumulation.
H.C. the tax payer is not the issue. H.C. the flack, the cash machine, the recent addition to America’s wealthiest families. Those are the issues. Where did it all come from and why were they worth so much?
For me the income after office in those amounts, for all three of the happy family is the best reason not to vote for H.C. We can never know where her heart is. Though we know it’s close to the bank.
I have no doubt whatsoever that a President Sanders or a President Clinton would know how to implement an orderly process to break up financial institutions that by many measures constitute a threat to the economy should they fail. The so-called doubt about Sanders’ competence on the issue he cares most about arose from a combination of some ham-handed questioning by the NYDN, by a fairly lazy and uninformed media fanning the flames, and by the Clinton campaign waiting to pounce – as all campaigns are. But more importantly, that doubt serves an institutional purpose: the financial industry feels that Sanders is a serious threat, which he is, and if they and their surrogates – such as Clinton, such as the corporate media — can introduce the idea of Sanders’ incompetence into the national debate, he is weakened. They did; he is.
The essential question, though, is does it need to be done?
Sanders asserts, often and boldly, that, yes, it is a pressing need that large financial interests need to be broken up. Clinton, in all fairness, does not see it as a pressing need. She puts much more emphasis on individual behavior and criminality on Wall Street: “Prosecuting individuals when they break the law… Holding executives accountable when they are responsible for their subordinates’ misconduct… Holding corporations accountable when they break the law.” (From her web page.) In her mind the financial institutions themselves are not an institutional or structural threat to the economy; it’s the bad apples within a sound system that ought to be prosecuted. It is clearly directed at the outrage about how no banker ever went to jail. She typically does not challenge the financial industry, but accommodates it.
Sanders sees the threat of “too big to fail” as a structural problem, as do: the Fed, current and former Governors of the Fed, the FDIC, Dodd-Frank, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Robert Reich and a slew of others. “The FDIC and Federal Reserve are committed to carrying out the statutory mandate that systemically important financial institutions demonstrate a clear path to an orderly failure under bankruptcy at no cost to taxpayers,” said FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg.
From the text of the “Too big to fail, too big to exist” Act introduced by Sanders in 2013:
The “Secretary of the Treasury shall submit to Congress a list of all commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies that the Secretary believes are too big to fail, which shall include, but is not limited to, any United States bank holding companies that have been identified as systemically important banks by the Financial Stability Board… Notwithstanding any other provision of law, beginning 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Treasury shall break up entities included on the Too Big To Fail List, so that their failure would no longer cause a catastrophic effect on the United States or global economy without a taxpayer bailout… For purposes of this Act, the term “Too Big to Fail” means any entity that has grown so large that its failure would have a catastrophic effect on the stability of either the financial system or the United States economy without substantial Government assistance.”
Is the size and strength of the financial industry a systemic threat to the economy, or is the threat limited to the bad apples working within an essentially sound system? Answer the question, cast your vote.
Is Hillary a surrogate for the unions? Is she a surrogate for the environmental and civil rights organizations? They all make contributions to her. You throw around these accusations as if they were fact. If you think someone is a surrogate for some specific interest group, then its your obligation to show that in operation. If you can’t do that, then you need to not make an unsupported accusation.
Go read Clinton’s proposals for regulating Wall Street, and tell us which if any of those represent her acting s the surrogate for the industry. You think they’re especially enamored with the proposal to eliminate the carried interest loophole for hedge fund managers? Are they begging for a new tax on high speed trading, or pulling the so-called shadow banks within the Dodd-Frank regulations? I’ll bet the highest paid managers — the ones who really have the clout with Hillary supposedly — have been lobbying hard for a “Warren Buffet rule” minimum tax on all income.
I’m betting you won’t bother to read what she is proposing because you don’t want facts to disabuse you of the shibboleths you’ve heard and are regurgitating without doing your homework. In the alternative, you’ll say that her proposals are not as strong as Bernie’s, which, of course, even if true, is completely beside the point. The best you can say there is that maybe — that is a real maybe, since he says nothing about shadow banks — Bernie is slightly less in the pocket of Wall Street than she is, but that’s hardly the stuff of the black-and-white lines you draw between the good guy and the corporate whores.
By the way, why doesn’t Bernie advocate a $25 minimum wage? He must be a whore for the big corporations by settling for a measly $15 phased in over several years. You think anyone can live in San Francisco or Manhattan on $15 an hour? Of course, if Hillary is a shill for the fossil fuel industry for its one-tenth of one per cent of her total contributions, Bernie is too for his five one hundredths of one per cent.
Hillary will:
• Veto Republican efforts to repeal or weaken Dodd-Frank.
• Tackle dangerous risks in the big banks and elsewhere in the financial system.
•Hold both individuals and corporations accountable when they break the law.
“Our banking system is still too complex and too risky … While institutions have paid large fines and in some cases admitted guilt, too often it has seemed that the human beings responsible get off with limited consequences – or none at all, even when they’ve already pocketed the gains. This is wrong, and on my watch, it will change.”
Hillary Clinton, JULY 13, 2015
The financial crisis showed how irresponsible behavior in the financial sector can devastate the lives of everyday Americans—costing 9 million workers their jobs, driving 5 million families out of their homes, and wiping out more than $13 trillion in household wealth. Hillary has a plan to reduce the risk of future crises and make our financial system fairer and more accountable.
Hillary’s plan will tackle dangerous risks in the financial system:
• Impose a risk fee on the largest financial institutions. Banks and financial companies would be required to pay a fee based on their size and their risk of contributing to another financial crisis.
• Close the Volcker Rule’s hedge fund loophole. The Volcker Rule prohibits banks from making risky trading bets with taxpayer-backed money—one of the core protections of the post-financial crisis Wall Street reforms. However, under current law these banks can still invest billions through hedge funds, which are exempt from this rule. Hillary would close that loophole and strengthen the law.
• Discourage excessive risk-taking by making senior bankers accountable. Senior managers should lose some or all of their bonus compensation when a large bank suffers losses that threaten its overall financial health.
• Make sure no firm is ever too big and too risky to be managed effectively. Hillary’s plan would give regulators more authority to force overly complex or risky firms to reorganize, downsize, or break apart.
• Tackle financial dangers of the “shadow banking” system. Hillary’s plan will enhance transparency and reduce volatility in the “shadow banking system,” which includes certain activities of hedge funds, investment banks, and other non-bank financial companies.
• Impose a tax on high-frequency trading. The growth of high-frequency trading has unnecessarily placed stress on our markets, created instability, and enabled unfair and abusive trading strategies. Hillary would impose a tax on harmful high-frequency trading and reform rules to make our stock markets fairer, more open, and transparent.
Hillary would also hold both corporations and individuals on Wall Street accountable by:
•Prosecuting individuals when they break the law. Hillary would extend the statute of limitations for prosecuting major financial frauds, enhance whistleblower rewards, and provide the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission more resources to prosecute wrongdoing.
•Holding executives accountable when they are responsible for their subordinates’ misconduct. Hillary believes that when corporations pay large fines to the government for violating the law, those fines should cut into the bonuses of the executives who were responsible for or should have caught the problem. And when egregious misconduct happens on an executive’s watch, that executive should lose his or her job.
• Holding corporations accountable when they break the law. As she enhances individual accountability, Hillary will make sure that corporations don’t treat penalties for breaking the law as merely a cost of doing business, so that we can put an end to the patterns of corporate wrongdoing that we see too often today. (from her webpage.)
I did not misrepresent Hillarys’ views. He approach is piecemeal, by definition: characterized by unsystematic partial measures taken over a period of time. It concentrates, as I said, on individual behavior rather than the system as a whole. In her mind, it is corporate wrongdoing that is the problem, not a systemic one.
Legal cases are often made on circumstantial evidence. No one needs to be able to produce direct evidence of her corporate and financial surrogacy to know it’s true. If she were not seen as an advocate and a defender of the interests of the financial class, why would they give her so much money? You don’t tip the maître d’ out of the goodness of your own heart. You expect to be given first-class service. The one who tips knows that. The maître d’ knows that. Only one whose ox is being gored denies it. It is as fair to say Hillary is in the pocket of the financial industry as it is to say that she is a neo-con in terms of foreign affairs as it is to say that she is purely self-interested as it is to say that she is by no means a progressive. You may not like it but there it is.
“Hillary Clinton and the Syrian Bloodbath” by Jeffrey Sachs
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/hillary-clinton-and-the-s_b_9231190.html
“The Wall Street ties of two top aides to Hillary Clinton at the State Department are raising concerns among progressives about the composition of a future Clinton White House.
The former aides, Tom Nides and Robert Hormats, have shuttled between government and Wall Street for years. Nides, who is frequently described as a Clinton confidant, is a longtime Morgan Stanley executive who served as deputy secretary of state for management and resources from 2011 to 2013 before returning to Morgan Stanley. Nides is also the former chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (Sifma), the main lobbying group for Wall Street in Washington DC.
Hormats, a former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served as under-secretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment from 2009 to 2013. He is currently vice-chairman of Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm founded by the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/26/wall-street-links-hillary-clinton-aides-economic-policy-doubts
“Under attack during Saturday night’s Democratic debate over her historical reliance on campaign contributions from Wall Street, Hillary Clinton said she isn’t influenced by such donations and would be at least as tough on the industry as her opponents.
“You can look at what I did in the Senate,” Clinton said. “I did introduce legislation to rein in compensation. I looked at ways that the shareholders would have more control over what was going on in that arena. And specifically said to Wall Street, that what they were doing in the mortgage market was bringing our country down.”
Yet an examination of Clinton’s remarks to Wall Street in December 2007 and her actions as a New York senator—a period when she had the best opportunity to translate her words into deeds—presents a more mixed picture of her record on the financial industry.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/hillary-clinton-told-wall-street-to-cut-it-out-not-so-much-the-record-shows-213363
“What Clinton said in her paid speeches
Recalled one attendee: ‘She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.’”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/clinton-speeches-218969
Ms 57:
You can only have so many links in your replies and some one has to approve your reply. You may be stymied in replying quickly to a comment.
For those who still need more convincing that the HRC corruption is real go see todays PCR.org. Have a nice day and enjoy reading the truth about HRC and Paul Krugman there. Never mind all the smear attacks they are making on Sanders as they are unfounded and not true. It is easy to see who is carrying the mail for the oligarchs. At least the voter in my state got this right.
William Ryan:
Is it PCR.org you meant to reference? I went there and couldn’t find anything relevant. I’d like to know what you are referring to. Cheers.
Bev,
Everybody knows the Daily News interviewers were clueless. And that Sanders was correct, if somewhat waffling, in his views on Dodd-Frank.
Does not mean that Clinton’s comments were a slander, and certainly does not mean that this should go on.
Sorry Ms57 I should have made it more clear to all. It is PaulCraigRoberts.org….I also want to thank you and Bev for the many fine comments made on this…
“Go read Clinton’s proposals for regulating Wall Street,…”
Proposals to regulate anything is great for campaign slogans. Why is it assumed that such a proposal is any more than a campaign promise? Intentions are hidden in relationships that can be shown to exist and those relationships should be exposed to the focus of the voters. I don’t really care what a candidate promises to do. I care about who the candidate has been most closely aligned with, and earning huge amounts of income over a relatively brief period and from limited, but specific, sectors of the economy suggests a close bond with those sectors. Yes, the huge speaking fees tell us more than the promises of what will be because we can more clearly see what has been.
“In the year of the Sandy Hook massacre, Secretary Clinton approved $120 million in sales for the companies that made the murder weapons Adam Lanza used to kill 20 children and 6 adults, including a $4 million sale for gun maker Remington…
On 14 April 2016 a judge ruled that the Sandy Hook families’ lawsuit against gunmaker Remington Arms can move forward. Hillary Clinton is using the massacre for political gain in the presidential campaign. At the Univision debate in March, Clinton said “you want to talk about corporate greed? The gun manufacturers sell guns to make as much money as they can make.” But a newly identified Pentagon document shows that Clinton herself aided ‘corporate greed’ of Remington…
The document shows Clinton approved a sale of over 4 million dollars ($4,195,110.40 by my count) by the Remington Arms Company of New York in 2012. This is particularly notable because Remington is the same gun maker that made the AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle (a Bushmaster XM15-E2S) used by Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook massacre in December of 2012. Remington Arms is now the subject of the families’ lawsuit. Remington also made one of the assault rifles used by the San Bernardino killers, a DPMS Panther Arms A15…
All foreign weapons sales required approval from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The sales include over $100 million dollars ($100,737,273.66 by my count) of gun sales in 2012 alone. A sizeable fraction of these were handheld guns manufactured by household name gun makers: Colt, Beretta and Remington. These approvals represented lucrative deals for gun manufacturers that fund the National Rifle Association.
The Pentagon document also shows Clinton that year approved over $100 million dollars ($116,160,367.19 by my count) in ammunition sales by Alliant Techsystems, the parent company of Savage Arms, which makes the MK II-F bolt action rifle Lanza used to kill his mother…
While at State, Clinton was particularly generous with sales approvals for weapons manufacturers. David Sirota and Andrew Perez have shown she oversaw an 80% increase in weapons sales approvals compared to Secretary Condoleeza Rice, including a special 143% increase for her Foundation’s donors. Thailand and the United Arab Emirates are two donors who received gun purchase approvals from Clinton’s State Department in 2012 after they donated upwards of $1,250,000 to the Clinton Foundation…
General Dynamics was approved by Clinton to sell $103 million dollars of ammunition in 2012. General Dynamics is represented in Washington D.C. by The Podesta Group, a lobbying firm co-founded by Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chair John Podesta, and currently run by his brother.
John Podesta recently held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s campaign that was co-hosted by longtime NRA lobbyist Jeff Forbes, as exposed by Zaid Jilani. Over her career, Clinton has received millions of dollars in various forms of support from major gun manufacturing investors, including $2,475,000 in speaking fees and $1,700,000 in donations to her Foundation.
http://www.acq.osd.mil/dpap/cpic/cp/docs/DoD_Sales_of_Significant_Military_Equipment_to_Foreign_Entities_FY11%20.pdf
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36369-focus-secretary-clinton-approved-a-4-million-sale-for-sandy-hook-gun-maker-remington-in-2012
*****************
“Speaking on Long Island, New York, this week, Clinton said that when Sanders is “challenged on his gun stances, he frequently says: ‘Well, I represent Vermont. It’s a small, rural state.'”
Clinton added: “Here’s what I want you to know: Most of the guns that are used in crimes and violence and killings in New York come from out of state. The state that has the highest per-capita number of those guns that end up committing crime in New York come from Vermont.”
That drew audible gasps from her audience, convened by the campaign to talk specifically about gun laws.
For months, Clinton has used the gun issue to cast Sanders as a minion for gun makers and out of step with a Democratic primary electorate that favors tighter firearms restrictions. While technically correct, her latest charge relies on a carefully crafted framing of statistics…
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms compiles data about weapons recovered from crime scenes nationwide, along with data, where possible, about where those guns were originally sold by licensed dealers. The agency reports that in 2014, law enforcement officials in New York recovered and traced 7,686 guns.
The state itself was the source for 1,397 of the weapons, making it the leader in absolute numbers. Virginia was runner-up, with 395. Vermont ranked 15th on the list, accounting for 55 of the weapons — less than 1 percent of the total.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fact-check-clintons-latest-gun-law-broadside-on-sanders/ar-BBrHl5S?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=ASUDHP