Election 2016

[Prak]

So... the fact that she's giving a speech to one of the companies that fucked over our economy isn't a concern to people? Just a manufactured talking point?

[Kaelik]

So... the fact that she's giving a speech to one of the companies that fucked over our economy isn't a concern to people? Just a manufactured talking point?

If the content or context of her speech is a problem, complain about that. But no, the mere fact that she gave a speech to a company is not itself concerning. I can think of lots of good reasons politicians should talk to banks.

Believe it or not, Banks are made of groups of individual humans.

[erik]

Prak, stop typing. You're lowering the IQ of the entire forum with each word you post.

[Username17]

On there being people to the left of Hillary: obviously there are and I never said otherwise. Hillary Clinton is measuredly to the left of 70% of the Democratic party. That makes her solidly in the party's left flank, but also means that most of the people in the party's left flank are to the left of her. But she isn't a right wing neoliberal corporate shill, she's a Liberal Democrat. More centrist than most Liberal Democrats, but more liberal than all Centrist Democrats and Conservative Democrats. And compared to the Republicans, she's basically a Trotskyite.

There is a persistent view on the left that voting for Clinton is settling for less than half a loaf or the lesser of two evils or something. And yes, this view is supported by a multimillion dollar ratfucking effort from the Republicans. But the truth is that Hillary Clinton is like two thirds of a loaf or a little bit more than that. Back in 2008, Obama won running to Hillary'right, not her left. Clinton looks to be a continuation of the Obama administration plus some extra leftist ideas. Remember that Obama ran in 2008 specifically on having a less audacious and left wing healthcare plan. Let that sink in.

On bros: there are Bros 4 Trump, and Bros 4 Hillary, and Bros 4 Bernie. I imagine that Lyin Ted and Little Marco probably had partisan bros as well, but everyone is motivated by a hatred of Cruz and noone really liked RubioBot so you never heard from them. Bros are simply a demographic that exists. Trump has the most Bros, because he is leading with that demographic. Trump Bros are also the worst behaved, and regular say racist and mysogynistic things that will chip paint. We don't single them out though, because Trump supporters are pretty much all doing shit like that. Bernie Sanders is winning the Bro demographic in the Democratic primary. Demographic models predict victory for Sanders when the share of the electorate of Bros is large, and they have done very well.

As for Bernie Bros behaving badly, that's totally a thing. It happens all the time. Go read the comments on like any story at all on Daily Kos right now and see what the under 30 white male Bernie supporters say about Hillary and her supporters. Seriously. Any article at all. Now one thing is that a non-zero number of them are actually right wing trolls trying to take down Clinton. Probably a shockingly high number are going to turn out to be sock puppets for Rove. But some of them are legit leftist white guys who feel entitled to mansplain to everyone how the only thing that matters is making a statement in support of the leftist white guy.

Yes, demographicly we have shown that the toxic BernieBros we complain about and the ridiculous Bernie or Bust crowd with which they overlap are small groups. But they are loud and obnoxious on the internet. It is reasonable to talk about them and to do so with derision.

-Username17

[Starmaker]

So... the fact that she's giving a speech to one of the companies that fucked over our economy isn't a concern to people? Just a manufactured talking point?

If the content or context of her speech is a problem, complain about that. But no, the mere fact that she gave a speech to a company is not itself concerning. I can think of lots of good reasons politicians should talk to banks.

Believe it or not, Banks are made of groups of individual humans.

Speech fees (and consulting gigs) are often bribes. Politicians should talk to banks, but banks which fucked over the economy shouldn't like [non-corrupt] politicians talking to them.

[Username17]

Banks do a lot of things besides crashing the economy into the sun and laundering money for drug cartels. They facilitate financing for activities of literally every kind. Businesses, charities, governments and private individuals of all stripes use banks for all but the smallest ventures. Banks have a legitimate reason to listen to talks about the state of water purification technology or intellectual property laws in South Asia. The fact that a bank wants to pay to listen to a famous person speak is completely uninteresting.

As it happens, there is a Hillary Clinton speech given at a Clinton Foundation event sponsored by Goldman Sachs available on youtube. You can watch it whenever you want and have been able to since well before primary votes started happening. It's pretty unobjectionable, and she is talking about the status and independence of women around the world. I guess the bank cares because some day half of their customers are going to be women.

Anyway, that speech is apparently not enough for the Sanders campaign, because they want the long form birth certificate the speeches given for bank events rather than for events of the foundation sponsored by the bank. Because the fact that she wasn't hiding anything in the last quarter century and tens of millions of dollars of investigations leveled at her doesn't mean she isn't hiding anything under the next rock or the one after that.

It never ever ends.

-Username17

[MGuy]

While I understand how fucking stupid it is to try and get the notes on speeches Clinton has made, as if she's going to lace words that connect her to the illuminati in them, I don't understand what people mean by manufactured talking points where Hillary's connections with big businesses are concerned. One of the big things this time around is pushing back against "the establishment". Big names like Sachs are part of that establishment. Seems relevant to people who care about that sort of thing even though you can just look at her campaign funding to get the same narrative.

[Username17]

Guilt by association is a poor way to try to play politics. Actually let me rephrase that - guilt by association is a disastrously bad game to try to play, and the only possible end to demands for purity is failure on every issue. Every good guy in the Senate is one degree of separation from every bad guy in the senate, because they are in the senate together.

The reality is that a politician has to meet with people on both sides of every issue. Sometimes you have to let bad guys have some of the things they want so they will let you have some of the things you want. Making deals with bad people is not inherently a bad thing, it's how sausage is made.

Further, while some groups are in fact all bad and support only evil things like the Family Research Council or the Christian Coalition or the KKK, most groups support good things in addition to evil things even when they are bad on the balance. A classic example might be Walmart. They use public assistance to supplement the wages they pay so that their employees can survive day to day. That's immoral and also basically stealling from the government, we can all agree that Walmart is bad in this equation. But when the question of public assistance comes up, do we really want the zombie eyed granny starvers to take away the supplemental income of Walmart employees and leave them to starve? Of course not! We are on the same side as Walmart when it comes to extending public assistance for poor working people and on the opposite side when it comes to questions of raising the minimum wage.

That's why the game X person "has a connection" to Y group is so fucking ridiculous. Just by trying to play that game you have basically surrendered ever winning anything in the political arena. The only groups you can play that game with are single issue groups or hyper-partisan groups. If someone gets money from the NRA, they are bad on the guns issue. If someone gets money from the Sierra Club, they are good on the environment. But remember that even in those cases there are behind closed doors pragmatic calculations being made. In a tight race, the Sierra Club might support a candidate who is merely less bad than their opponent. The Koch brothers or Karl Rove might spend millions of dollars in pro-Bernie ads because they think he will be easier to beat in the general and so on.

But the mere fact that you can play six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon between a politician and a company means jack shit. Even bad companies like banks and coal producers also do good stuff and support initiatives that are good in isolation.

American politics is so fucked up that there really are straight up evil organizations that support only bad things. But even those don't support only bad candidates because sometimes their calculations are more complicated.

Remember: Hillary Clinton had an honest to goodness seat on Walmart's board, and used it to advocate for more environmentally friendly practices by the company. People who condemn her for doing that are engaged in immature splitting behavior.

-Username17

[MGuy]

That seems like a hard sell for people who are anti establishment. Senators have to speak and deal with other senators yes. However getting paid heaps of money at a company's "pretend we care" event is not that and because she's not as anti big business as some would like her to be it seems like an easy connection to make. Is her campaign using your reasoning to defend against critics? (I don't know as most of what I hear nowadays is focused more on Trump). Also I thought you were more than sure that just the threat of a republican nominee winning would be enough to win the race and now that Trump (probably the most reviled choice) is up as the rep candidate and all projections have Hillary winning why even worry about the late primary grumbling?

[RadiantPhoenix]

That seems like a hard sell for people who are anti establishment. Senators have to speak and deal with other senators yes. However getting paid heaps of money at a company's "pretend we care" event is not that and because she's not as anti big business as some would like her to be it seems like an easy connection to make.

Based on the New York debate, Bernie isn't tougher on business than Hillary is, he's just louder and doesn't understand the issues as well.

Because I'm not sure that the government should say is you are too big to fail. You've got to be a certain size. And, then the banks themselves can figure out what they want to sell off. I don't know that it's appropriate that the Department of Treasury to be making those decisions. What we need is to make sure that they are safe.

...sometimes the government may have to order certain actions. Sometime the government can permit the institution themselves to take those actions. That has to be the judgement of the regulators.

But, there's another element to this. I believe strongly that executives of any of these organizations should be financially penalized if there is a settlement.

[applause]

They should have to pay up through compensation or bonuses because we have to go after not just the big giant institution, we have got to go after the people who are making the decisions in the institutions.

[MGuy]

If I were to base my opinion of what you just said off of what you quoted I would not come to the same conclusion.

[RadiantPhoenix]

If I were to base my opinion of what you just said off of what you quoted I would not come to the same conclusion.

One of them thinks we should just trust the banks to handle breaking themselves up, the other isn't so sure. The latter also wants to assign some personal financial liability to the decision-makers in the banks being broken up.

What do you see differently?

[MGuy]

The Bernie quote you have, in the line before he says that he specifically wants to break up banks. In the line you have I read it as him just not giving specifics about how they should be broken up. Clearly he believes they should be forced to split and him saying that the company can decide what to toss and what not to doesn't really sound crazy. I'm not sure how other big break ups have gone (because I don't know much about business) but for me it doesn't sound crazy that, as long as you broke them down enough where they didn't threaten to tank the economy, leaving the details to them is fine.

The quote you have from Hillary to me reads that the guvment 'may' have to do something but maybe not. For sure though people should be penalized. I'm fine with that as long as the penalties are really heavy and actually get the right people and are not smaller than the money they helped lose the economy AND hit the right people (that one is important).

Both statements, I suppose, are fine but it doesn't read to me like Sanders doesn't know what he's talking about and he seems more set on breaking up banks than Hillary is. She comes off as more vague about what happens to the institutions themselves and wants penalties and something to happen to bonuses.

[SlyJohnny]

Hillary's actual policy, speechifying aside, is going to have banks pay into sort of insurance fund, rather than attempt to break them up or reduce their power or overhaul how much money they can put into a political candidates campaign and associated super PACs.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The Bernie quote you have, in the line before he says that he specifically wants to break up banks. In the line you have I read it as him just not giving specifics about how they should be broken up. Clearly he believes they should be forced to split and him saying that the company can decide what to toss and what not to doesn't really sound crazy. I'm not sure how other big break ups have gone (because I don't know much about business) but for me it doesn't sound crazy that, as long as you broke them down enough where they didn't threaten to tank the economy, leaving the details to them is fine.

No matter how small you break up the individual banks, the banking system as a whole will remain "too big to fail". When the great recession started, it wasn't just one bank that had trouble, it was a lot of them.

[MGuy]

It's harder to coordinate if you have more entities you have to coordinate with.

[RadiantPhoenix]

It's harder to coordinate if you have more entities you have to coordinate with.

... which makes it harder to regulate things.

The recession wasn't caused by some grand conspiracy, it was caused by recklessness driven by small-scale greed and permitted by inadequate oversight.

[hyzmarca]

So, just nationalize all banks and merge them into the Federal Reserve.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, just nationalize all banks and merge them into the Federal Reserve.

We'll consider putting that on the grand list of 'things to do once we have unlimited political capital and a bunch of time to spare'. For this century, regulation.

[MGuy]

It's harder to coordinate if you have more entities you have to coordinate with.

... which makes it harder to regulate things.

The recession wasn't caused by some grand conspiracy, it was caused by recklessness driven by small-scale greed and permitted by inadequate oversight.

How would it be harder to regulate? From what I understand it wasn't even just banks in the US that were the problem. The thing is after it happened the banks were so big that allowing them to tank would've been bad. SO you split them up until certain ones CAN go under without blowing everything up.

[RadiantPhoenix]

It's harder to coordinate if you have more entities you have to coordinate with.

... which makes it harder to regulate things.

The recession wasn't caused by some grand conspiracy, it was caused by recklessness driven by small-scale greed and permitted by inadequate oversight.

How would it be harder to regulate? From what I understand it wasn't even just banks in the US that were the problem. The thing is after it happened the banks were so big that allowing them to tank would've been bad. SO you split them up until certain ones CAN go under without blowing everything up.

The 2007 crisis wasn't just one or two banks failing, it was just about the whole investment banking industry going up in smoke.

Ten smaller banks can all go ahead and invest in the same fractal CDOs everyone else is investing in without any coordination at all, just the same as a big bank. In fact, I'd say they're more likely to, because they each have less resources to devote to assessing risk.

[MGuy]

... which makes it harder to regulate things.

The recession wasn't caused by some grand conspiracy, it was caused by recklessness driven by small-scale greed and permitted by inadequate oversight.

How would it be harder to regulate? From what I understand it wasn't even just banks in the US that were the problem. The thing is after it happened the banks were so big that allowing them to tank would've been bad. SO you split them up until certain ones CAN go under without blowing everything up.

The 2007 crisis wasn't just one or two banks failing, it was just about the whole investment banking industry going up in smoke.

Ten smaller banks can all go ahead and invest in the same fractal CDOs everyone else is investing in without any coordination at all, just the same as a big bank. In fact, I'd say they're more likely to, because they each have less resources to devote to assessing risk.

I'm of the opinion that it is better to have several, smaller, banks all up and decide to make the same mistake over time, than one large bank going all in on one big mistake. What's more, my question was how would it be harder to regulate? The crisis wasn't just one in our own country. I don't think the US can leverage the kind of regulation that would ALSO rein in banks abroad. What we can do is at least partition our banks so we have more options whenever another crisis comes up.

[Prak]

Hillary's actual policy, speechifying aside, is going to have banks pay into sort of insurance fund, rather than attempt to break them up or reduce their power or overhaul how much money they can put into a political candidates campaign and associated super PACs.

I thought banks were already insured?

[hyzmarca]

So, just nationalize all banks and merge them into the Federal Reserve.

We'll consider putting that on the grand list of 'things to do once we have unlimited political capital and a bunch of time to spare'. For this century, regulation.

Just declare martial law, liquidate Congress, and suspend elections. And pack the supreme court with people who'll say it's legal, after a series of unfortunate accidents clears the board for new justices.

Have FEMA round up dissenters and force them to shop a Walmart.

[Username17]

Hillary's actual policy, speechifying aside, is going to have banks pay into sort of insurance fund, rather than attempt to break them up or reduce their power or overhaul how much money they can put into a political candidates campaign and associated super PACs.

I thought banks were already insured?

It is tempting to think that the economy crashed because not enough banks were allowed to fail and collapse, because that makes for a good morality play. Banks take big risks and then a prudent government tells them they have been naughty and get no bailouts and the economy is saved. That is, however, complete horseshit and not only never happened but could never happen. The morality play is pure fiction. The reality is that the economy collapsed because any of the banks were allowed to fail. Dumbass free market fundamentalists in the Bush Administration thought they'd look like they were wearing big boy pants if they let Bear Stearns fall apart and the world economy caught on fire.

A bank takes other peoples' money, aggregates it, and then invests that money in multiple ventures that individually succeed or fail. They pay the owners of the money less than the investments take in, so if the failure rate is low enough they make a profit. And if they chose investments which were too risky or they just got unlucky, then the failure rate will be higher and the bank will lose money. And either result is fine. But if the failure rate is high enough, then the entire bank fails, and that is not fine. Because if the bank fails, then all those people whose money got aggregated by the bank lose their money. That is to say, the people who didn't do anything dangerous with their money at all and merely put it in the fucking bank like they are supposed to lose their fucking savings because too many investments made by the other side of the bank went south. That is fucked.

But the really fucked thing is that if people get wind that a bank might fail and take all their money into a dark hole of failure and never give it back, then the logical thing to do is to take their money out. That's called a "bank run" and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where everyone takes their deposits out of the bank because it might fail and then it definitely does fail because it instantly got liabilities equal to its assets.

The US has historically kept this shit from happening by insuring the banks. All the banks are required to pay some FDIC taxes to the government and then the government insures everyone's deposits. If a bank actually failed, all the depositors would get their money back by having the government fly in like the fucking Tooth Fairy and bail them out. Which is fine, and totally worked. But in the run up to the financial crisis, various corporations started doing "Shadow Banking." That's where they do things that are structurally the same as banking, but are called something else in order to evade the taxes and oversight that doing per se banking would bring. So instead of having depositors and interest bearing loans, it's all in terms of insurance on future events. So I'm not loaning the company money that the company pays back next Thursday, I am taking out an insurance policy that the company pays out on next Thursday. So it has all the possibility of a bank run if it looks like the failure rate is going to be too high, but the governmental guarantees don't exist.

Lots of people, including both Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, seem to think that companies try to become too big to fail. But actually companies go to court to argue against being listed as too big to fail. Being too big to fail is simply the government recognizing that an institution could create a bank run if it started teetering on the verge of collapse; and the government's response to that is to inflict the kind of mandatory oversight and insurance that they inflict on banks. This in turn means that the ordinary people don't have to get their money out of failing institutions under any time pressure, so bank runs don't happen. But financial shenanigans companies aren't happy about it because it means they have to kick back extra money to Uncle Sam.

-Username17