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And on to New Hampshire!
Where things are supposed to get even better for the BERN team.
The Iowa caucuses just supercharged the 2016 presidential race. Younger and lower-income voters drove Bernie Sanders into a head heat with Hillary Clinton. A record Republican turnout of white voters elevated an odd couple – two first term Cuban-American Senators – and deflated Donald Trump, the fear peddler.
The winnowing has begun as Mike Huckabee and Martin O’Malley dropped out, with more to come. And now the pace accelerates: New Hampshire next week, followed by South Carolina, Nevada and the Super Tuesday states, as more and more Americans discover that a presidential campaign has begun. Iowa will be dissected over the next days, but here are five quick takeaways the morning after
Sanders is for real
Sanders ended in a stunning dead heat with Hillary Clinton, after starting in single digits in Iowa. Commentators suggest he was no Barack Obama (who is?), but the real measure of his achievement is that he overcame a Hillary Clinton campaign that Obama never faced. Determined not to be blindsided as she was in 2008, Clinton invested early and big in Iowa. She hired the best Obama operatives, and built an unprecedented ground operation. She identified, contacted, and mobilized her voters. And Clinton’s strengths in the voting population – older voters, older women, more educated, more affluent, experienced caucus goers – were exactly the voters most likely to show up on caucus night. Sanders’ strengths – younger voters, first time caucus goers, lower income – were the least likely to show up.
Despite this, the race ended in a dead heat. Sanders is for real. If he sustains his lead in New Hampshire, he’ll come out of the first states with a head of steam
Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is
Sanders is providing the first clear, forceful, populist message and agenda that these younger voters have heard, focused on how our corrupted politics and rigged economy keep us from building a decent, vibrant country of opportunity – where health care is a right, college is free, workers are empowered, big money is curbed, and the rich and powerful pay their fair share. He’s begun to educate a generation — and to transform the activist base of the party. These voters will continue to organize and agitate when the campaign is over, whether Sanders wins or loses. A new force is getting built in American politics that will have lasting impact.Clearly, young voters – the millennials – are attracted to the political revolution that Sanders is championing. Sanders beat Clinton by a staggering 84 to 14 among voters under 29, and 53-37 on voters 30 to 45.
This is the Obama generation. They mobilized to sweep Obama to victory in 2008, with many growing disillusioned along the way. But rather than checking out, many are doubling down, intent on building a movement to transform this country.The leadership of virtually all of the mainstream Democratic linked groups – from the unions to Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign – have endorsed Hillary Clinton. Almost all of the party leaders, gatekeepers, deep pockets, cultural icons line up with Clinton. But the activist energy, the young, the searching are drawn to Sanders. Sanders trails Clinton among voters that are looking for a winner or care about experience. But he wins big margins among those who value most someone who cares about people like me (74-22), or is honest or trustworthy (87 to 10).
And for what is Hillary campaigning?
Or whom?
Hillary Clinton's Deliberate Deceit
Hillary Clinton is an exceptionally skillful politician. Collectively, she and her husband Bill have parlayed their political experience into at least $125 million in speaking fees alone. According to Bloomberg, Hillary was paid $12 million in the 16 months after leaving her role as US secretary of state. Knowing she'd likely run for president, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley (and other big Wall Street corporations) gladly paid her $2.9 million in speaking fees alone. The same Wall Street corporations then gave her campaign super PACs millions more. Coincidence?
Clinton is surely aware that Wall Street won't give politicians millions without expecting something big in return. In a Des Moines Register interview, she justified her $250,000-per-event Wall Street speaking fees, saying, "What they were interested in were my views on what was going on in the world ... there's a lot of interest in getting advice and views about what you think is happening in the world." Does she honestly expect the American people to believe Wall Street pays her $250,000 for a one-hour talk because they want her views on the world? She most surely knows that Wall Street wants her political influence.
My hero, Bill Black (the law professor, not the combo leader although I was enamored with his facility in jazz) is heading up a group of hard-assed regulators and whistleblowers who are now gathering to bring the justice.
To the bad guys.
And how will this go over with the fixers-in-charge?
“The common theme,” Black said with characteristic bluntness, “is the unbelievably pathetic job of the Department of Justice and the FBI.”
One of the first steps the group proposes – echoing the recommendations Senator Elizabeth Warren made last week – involves appointing aggressive leadership at federal agencies with no conflicts of interest with the entities they regulate, and hiring enough staff trained in criminology and financial fraud to attack the problem.
The template for the plan is the saving and loan crisis of the late 1980s, when just one federal agency, the now-defunct Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) issued over 30,000 criminal referrals and over 1,000 major bank executives went to prison.
By comparison, in the 2008 financial crisis, OTS and their bank regulator counterparts made zero outside criminal referrals on financial crimes. And more recently, the rate of corporate prosecutions has been pathetic.
The whistleblowers would restore a job position from that earlier era: Criminal referral coordinators at every federal agency to meet with their counterparts in law enforcement to press for prosecutions and continually improve the process. They would also issue monthly referral reports to make the process more transparent. George W. Bush eliminated criminal referral coordinators in his first term.
Federal agencies would also be required to create a “Top 100” list of elite fraud schemes in their jurisdiction, borrowing another successful technique from the S&L crisis. These top 100 schemes would hold priority over small fry prosecutions that look good on a tally of convictions but don’t attack the most damaging fraud.
“When we created the Top 100 project,” said Bill Black, “the assistant U.S. attorney had to report every month to someone who got on your ass if the cases weren’t progressing.”
Black says the Top 100 list led to prosecuting 300 savings and loans and 600 officials. “And despite the banks having the best lawyers in the world, we still got a 90 percent conviction rate.”
The proposal would end the emphasis on deferred prosecution agreements that let corporations and individuals get away with paying a fine or agreeing to independent monitoring instead of facing a criminal conviction.
It would end prosecutions of mortgage fraud “mice” – cases against people who defraud banks – and transfer the resources to financial fraud “lions” – when banks defraud people.
It would end an existing partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association trade group. “In essence,” the Bank Whistleblowers Group writes, “DoJ has made itself the collection agency for the worst criminal enterprises in the nation.”
The whistleblowers even believe that quick action could lead to immediate indictments. For instance, they call for the public release of the still-secret reports from Clayton Holdings, a third-party due diligence firm that tested mortgage loans from practically every major bank during the housing bubble, and told the banks that 1 in 3 were improperly made. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission chair Phil Angelides this week identified the Clayton reports as the key to a “last chance for justice.” The statute of limitations on the final securitizations doesn’t end until 2017.
“It’s already baked in that this will be the biggest strategic failure of DOJ in history,” said Black. “But they could still indict the top ten frauds.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Rubio's Billionaire Vulture
Paul Singer, the GOP's Baddie Sugar Daddie
The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul "The Vulture" Singer and why he needs to buy the White House
It's out of the closet – or, more accurately, out of the coven. The list of the billionaires who have given at least $2.5 million to Conservative Solutions, the pro-Rubio Super PAC, is headed by Paul Singer. Singer and his hedge fund crew at Elliott Associates, with their donations to the Republican National Committee and other "independent" groups like "Solutions", makes it likely that Singer is now the top funder for the GOP.
Surely Hillary Clinton Knows Why Wall Street Pays Her
Hillary Clinton is an exceptionally skillful politician. Collectively, she and her husband Bill have parlayed their political experience into at least $125 million in speaking fees alone. According to Bloomberg, Hillary was paid $12 million in the 16 months after leaving her role as US secretary of state. Knowing she'd likely run for president, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley (and other big Wall Street corporations) gladly paid her $2.9 million in speaking fees alone. The same Wall Street corporations then gave her campaign super PACs millions more. Coincidence?
Clinton is surely aware that Wall Street won't give politicians millions without expecting something big in return. In a Des Moines Register interview, she justified her $250,000-per-event Wall Street speaking fees, saying, "What they were interested in were my views on what was going on in the world ... there's a lot of interest in getting advice and views about what you think is happening in the world." Does she honestly expect the American people to believe Wall Street pays her $250,000 for a one-hour talk because they want her views on the world? She most surely knows that Wall Street wants her political influence.
In that same interview (as if to say, "Bernie does it too"), Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders for his 2000 vote for deregulating swaps and derivatives (the Commodity Futures Modernization Act), which was one of the main causes of the economic collapse in 2008. Of course, she didn't mention that Sanders forcefully spoke out against the bill, and Sanders, like the rest of Congress, was essentially blackmailed into voting for it. She didn't mention the bill was inserted at the last minute in omnibus legislation needed to keep the government going. She didn't mention only four members of Congress dared to vote against it. She didn't mention the bill came from a deal between her husband and the Senate Banking Committee chairman, Phil Gramm. Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, ensuring Hillary would collect millions from Wall Street for her Senate campaign (and she did).
After speaking at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, in January, Hillary Clinton was asked if she would release the transcripts of her $600,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs (a bank that just agreed to pay $5 billion for mortgage fraud). She laughed and turned away. Political pop quiz: Would those transcripts reveal: A) Clinton telling Goldman Sachs, "cut out that mortgage fraud right now" or B) Clinton pandering for super PAC campaign money?
Clinton distorted Bernie Sanders' single-payer health-care plan in a deceitful way. She emphasized the billions in taxes that would be needed to fund a single-payer system without mentioning the many billions more that would be saved by eliminating individual and company health-care premiums. As a well-informed advocate of health-care reform, she's surely aware single-payer countries provide generally superior health care for less than half of what we pay - for everyone. She's also surely aware single-payer would cost the giant health insurance corporations billions in profits. According to "The Intercept," from 2013 to 2015, Clinton took in $2.8 million (on top of the above $2.9 million) from 13 paid speeches to the health-care industry. Does she honestly expect the American people to trust her judgment about single-payer health care?
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