The cynical among us were not surprised that the day after HRC won multiple state primaries on Tues, DNC chairwoman and Congresswoman DW Shultz co-sponsored a bill with the GOP to gut the new Consumer Protection Agency and delay new rules about Payday lenders.
After all, Shultz has done yeoman duty helping the Clinton campaign, creating so much tension on the DNC that one of the vice-chairs resigned and endorsed Sanders. Now that Shultz’s work is coming to fruition, its time to strike while the iron is hot, attack a thorn in the side of her corporate paymasters and align herself with the Republicans. The new rule would stop any Federal regulation of payday lending if there are state laws, no matter how slack those state laws are….as in Shultz’s state of Florida- where recent studies show there is a weakness in the law. At huge costs.
What is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fighting that makes Shultz and her corporate paymasters frightened? Take a look-
http://www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/cfpb-finds-four-out-of-five-payday-loans-are-rolled-over-or-
renewed/
But you know, principles are fungible things. So what if thousands are foreclosed, dispossessed, forced into years of debt servitude…as long as someone’s log gets rolled.
Expect a lot more from a new Clinton Admin. probably with Shultz in the Cabinet.
(But, there is pushback about HRC’s email server problems and many are pinning hope on Federal action; just like they are pinning hope on Trump’s University problems. don’t count on it.).
R
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/debbie-wasserman-schultz-paylenders-cfpb_us_56d4ce38e4b03260bf77
e8fc
Recent Pew info-
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/collections/2014/12/payday-lending-in-america
Clinton campaign internal polling must look great for them to begin shedding any vestige of being economic liberals this early in the election cycle.
Payday lenders are a blight on poor communities. This is one issue that Sanders really should have (and can still do) put into his campaign. Cut the knees out from under these usury scum and advocate for Postal banks.
With all the attention on the GOP circus, the Dem primaries are going under the radar. Any pushback against HRC is lost in the shuffle. But, and I keep saying this, the low info voters don’t know or don’t care if Trump is correct or not. He is “Standing up to THEM!”. I work and live with those people. If there is the slightest weakness from the Dem nominee, Trump can win.
That’s why I’m not convinced she is the best candidate, she has too many weaknesses.
R
Are the numbers of GOP low-info voters more than the numbers of DEM low-info voters?
I hear what you’re saying that you’re seeing, but it’s too soon to have any insight into how that half (or more) of the electorate will weigh Clinton’s weaknesses in comparison to Trump’s. In ’08 I never argued that Clinton couldn’t win the general election. I sensed that Obama could be a bit stronger than her, but as he wouldn’t need to be to win didn’t view my sense as relevant. I just thought he would be the better person to have in the office. Not anywhere close to as much better as I’d hoped, but still better. That’s where I am with Sanders.
As it turned out in ’08, Clinton as the nominee could have ended up the loser. McCain wouldn’t have selected a dumbass for VP and the financial meltdown in September wouldn’t have been that hard to pin on Bill Clinton. McCain, with his dumbass sidekick, couldn’t do anything with that because it couldn’t be attached to Obama.
A seemingly sudden economic downturn could hit anytime between now and election day and only one candidate, Sanders, wouldn’t suffer from it. However, there was nothing sudden about the ’08 meltdown. Many could see that it was just a question of time a good three years before it happened and new it would be centered in residential real estate, but others didn’t get jittery until much later. The level of jitters today are closer to what they were in ’05 than even ’06 or ’07 and there’s no focal point. This suggests to me that an economic downturn in the next eight months is of low probability. That said, I’d much prefer Sanders in the WH to handle economic affairs than Clinton because a slowdown will happen sometime in the next four years.
Did you get a look at this?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/social-security-privatizer-larry-fink-of-giant-asset-manager-
blackrock-is-clintons-treasury-secretary-in-waiting.html
○ BlackRock: The Devil in the Details: Five Retirement Budget Proposals- BlackRock’s Fink says country is at ‘a crossroads’
- Teresa Ghilarducci: Economists debate role of government in economy
- Teresa Ghilarducci explains the connection between income inequality, retirement readiness
○ Global Future of Retirement Conference Roundup – Systemic risk: Fink calls for big thinking
That’s rich: “Focus on what you can control,” Kron said. “You can’t control what will happen to Social Security by the time you retire.”
In other words, you have no say in your government and how funds are allocated because we have a lock on everything. Just give us your money and trust us, we have your best interests at heart. Your votes and political influence are meaningless: you live in our reality of dollars and cents. And I must add that this Wasserman Schultz is a total piece of work, refusing to alleviate the financial woes of the poor to line the pockets of her constituents with interest rates of 300 percent for payday loans. She is literally and figuratively a sight to behold. A ladyfriend of Clinton I suppose who thinks only about the needs of rich women. Is she what anyone should call a Democrat? What a comedown. Plastic people everywhere you look.
Throw a few bucks this guy’s way: https:/timcanova.com
Probably a Forlorn Hope and I don’t know what he is really like, but this time it’s enough that he’s not DWS.
Thanks for pointing this out. Of course, kiss any real Wall St. reform good-bye.
But only low-info and/or irrational DEMs are in denial about this.
I think there is an air of denial going on about how “progressive” Hillary is. She ain’t. Charlie Pierce commented she would form a committee and focus test whether to order plain or pepperoni. Her instincts are not for Progressive policies if they would cause trouble down the line. I just saw on another site that any diputing HRC after March 15 would be verboden. We must all rally around the flag in preparation for Nov.
But as we have discusseg in this and other threads, it is only pressure that provides any possibility of Democratic as opposed to old school GOP policies out of a HRC admin. Once the pressure lets up a little, their true colors come out. I know that the current GOP has gone off the rails but that doesn’t mean Republican pollicies of the 1980’s are what the nation needs from its Democratic leadership. And that is what we will get from Hillary.
R
I just saw on another site that any diputing HRC after March 15 would be verboden.
Banning criticisms of HRC raises several issues.
First, it comes from a place of fear. But of what? It’s seems to me to be an inchoate fear. The only thing cited was “no R/W talking points.” That seems bizarre to me because if R/W talking points are being used, then they already exist and are and will continue to be used by the GOP in the general election. OTOH, HRC supporters label anything critical of HRC (even her own words and actions) as R/W talking points.
Anticipating that anything said at dKos (and only at dKos) months before the nomination would spin out into the general public and hurt Clinton in the general election suggests power that dKos doesn’t have.
Will negative things about HRC said at dKos dampen enthusiasm for her in the GE? Difficult to imagine that enthusiasm for her could get much lower than it already is. At this point it appears to be lower for her than it was in ’08.
Second, to suppress criticism of Clinton now means that she doesn’t have to bother with any of that and can proceed to tack right in her quest for moderate conservative voters and once there, she sure isn’t about to tack left if elected. Thus, it means that the left is to give up what little power they have to get another neoliberalcon administration.
I’ve been online for years and participated in many communities, even running one myself. Anytime you try to limit discussions as to person or subject…you do nothing but generate ill will. Yeah you are “making” it safe for common users or refocusing the site…but it never works out. It always kills the spirit of the place. If you pay for the site through donations, then you can’t really do it. If you pay for it yourself, or run it with paid advertising; then you call the shots.
Either way, the best leadership is little to none. Adults can govern themselves. Any conflict is just electrons on a screen. The thought that DKos will have an impact on the General Election or influence at the table with Hillary is illusionary.
R
Too bad Booman has not shared this article from WMo on the Pond blog.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2016/03/trade_trump_and_downward_class059814.php
And a discussion from a group of liberal-ish economists…http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/03/trade-trump-and-downward-class-warfare.html
Great find – good read!
○ Thoughts on Bernie Sanders’s Democratic Socialism and the Primary | Roosevelt Institute |
○ Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders has the best policies
Period Vietnam War and its aftermath: 1960-1970s sees US government spending, low unemployment, surging labor costs, economic inflation, dollar crisis 1971, monetary inflation turning into a recession.
The economy seemed trapped in the new nightmare of “stagflation,” so called because it combined low economic growth and high unemployment (“stagnation”) with high rates of inflation. Traditional macroeconomic policy tools seemed powerless to deal with this new beast. In the 1960s, the idea of a stable inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation (known as the “Phillips curve“) became part of the economic-policy orthodoxy. If the unemployment rate was high, inflation was likely to be low, and vice versa. This “tradeoff” left policymakers with the means to combat unemployment or inflation when either appeared separately.
When facing a recession, policymakers could lower interest rates, increase government spending, or lower taxes to stimulate demand and bring down the unemployment rate, at the cost of some increase in the inflation rate. When dealing with inflation, they could raise interest rates, lower spending, or raise taxes to reduce demand and “cool off” the economy, at the cost of some increase in unemployment. When high rates of inflation and unemployment appeared simultaneously, however, orthodox policy seemed to lack a solution.
[Source: That ’70s Crisis]My interpretation was always the US government wiyh it’s monetary policy made the western world pay for the cost of the Vietnam War. In linked article I can understand the three periods in the 20th century where capitalism failed the happy 1%.
The most severe crises may actually threaten not only the established framework, but even the continued existence of the capitalist system itself. In the last century, there have been three periods of profound crisis in the framework institutions of U.S. capitalism: the Great Depression of the 1930s, the crisis of the 1970s, and the current crisis.
…
The radical economists Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf, in their influential book Beyond the Waste Land, identified three key pillars of the postwar social structure of accumulation, which they termed the “limited capital-labor accord,” the “capitalist-citizen accord,” and the “Pax Americana.”
[My earlier post @MoA]