May 23, 2016

Donald Trump Celebrates Rebirth of the Boys Club! WYGA Trends Strong

May 23, 2016/ Anne Enke

Shadow Banks Clinton Flags as Risky Put Millions Into Her Run Bloomberg Politics

I would never argue that Wall Street has no influence over politicians. But as this excellent article from Bloomberg Politics points out, the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Wall Street is far more complex than Bernie Sanders would have us believe.

Even though Hillary Clinton has vowed to be very tough on Wall Street -- and her very public, detailed position papers back up that claim -- her campaign is receiving very substantial contributions from the very sectors that she plans to regulate.

Hillary Clinton argues that Bernie Sanders' plan to break-up the big banks is too narrow and should only be executed where the bank doesn't meet criteria for financial stability. Sanders says nothing about shadow banking, even though the Financial Stability Board estimates that the US has the largest shadow banking sector with $14.2 trillion in assets, or about one-third of the total shadow banking assets in the world.

In highlighting the risks posed by shadow banks, Clinton frequently notes the example of American International Group Inc. The insurer had agreed to back securities that were tied to home loans before the 2008 financial crisis. When the mortgage market tanked, the company was on the hook for billions of dollars of payments and ended up needing a bailout from the federal government. As banks face more and more rules, Clinton says she’s concerned that more financing arrangements will move to less-regulated companies.

To regulate shadow banking, Clinton calls for "higher margin and collateral requirements for short-term borrowing like repurchase agreements, new rules for brokers on leverage, and more disclosure for hedge funds and private equity firms."

Rebirth of the Boys Club

Make Yourself Great Again! Politico

Does the Trump movement give hope to especially white men that they can be their best alpha male selves again? Screw feminism!

The most common thread in the world of MYGA is a feral obsession with Trump’s domineering maleness, writes Politico. MYGA writers embrace varying degrees of the idea that the Trump campaign is helping them become real men, inspired by Trump’s testosterone-driven unapologetic, aggressive vision for the country.

“He’s this alpha kind of guy, and I do think that resonates with young men,” a 21-year-old professional athlete from Idaho and a MYGA poster who uses the name HighlyVenomous, told me. MYGA men say that Trump "comes across as an alpha male. He’s sure of himself, and whatever flaws he does have, like his hair, he doesn’t care, and he runs with it." The Trump men reject the so-called feminizaiton of politics -- a joke given America's rank of 90 on the world in electing women to office.

“The Apprentice really showed me what a world class alpha male looks like and operates,” writes one poster in the Reddit thread LifeProTrumpTips. “As a group of dominant alphas you can achieve impossible things.”

As the MYGA crowd’s open obsession with dominance, manliness, and alpha-status suggests, the gospel can quickly turn down a dark corridor. The deeper one ventures into the strange world of MYGA, the more the country’s problems become laced with an array of white-male-themed anxieties—men are apologizing for their maleness, the users say; policies are lifting up the weak and punishing the strong; and culture at large is becoming more feminized. Go deep enough, and you’ll hit the so-called alt-right movement, an online waystation where MYGA has thrived most principally as an ideation of male virility. (The world of the alt-right is best known for creating the “‪#‎Cuckservative‬” hashtag—a racially tinged portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, created to call out those who are insufficiently far-right.)

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton speeches to highlight divisions on guns CBS News

Hillary Clinton policy adviser Maya Harris answered Donald Trump's assertion that she wants to overturn the 2nd amendment.

Clinton believes that the 2008 5-4 SC decision in D.C v. Heller, striking down a longstanding handgun ban in the District of Columbia was made in error.

{Quote}: "Along with the vast majority of Americans, Hillary Clinton believes there are common sense steps we can take at the federal level to keep guns out of the hands of criminals while respecting the 2nd Amendment. As both PolitiFact and Factcheck.org recently reported, Donald Trump is peddling falsehoods," Harris said. "Donald Trump's conspiracy theories are simply his latest attempt to divide the American people and distract from his radical and dangerous ideas, like his promise to mandate that every school in America allow guns in their classrooms."

[ . . . ]

California, already among America's toughest states on gun control, will vote in November on a ballot initiative that would require buyers of ammunition to pass background checks and outlaw high-capacity magazines. This move to tougher gun control comes as other states are moving to allow people to carry concealed weapons more openly, including on college campuses, with no permit required."

Hillary Clinton Headlines March 23, 2016

Podesta attacks Trump's commander-in-chief credentials Politico

Born to Run The Atlantic

Family Feud US News

Who's voting in the Democratic primaries? CBS News

Trump's campaign dwarfed by Clinton's Politico

What Happens When Female Politicians Try to Stand Up to Sports Fans The Atlantic

Sanders Slams Closed Process, Rift With Top Democras Widens Bloomberg Politics

This Is What the Future of American Politics Looks Like Politico

Bernie Sanders Just Declared War on the Democratic Party Washington Post

May 20, 2016

Bernie Sanders Tries To Draw Blood From Hillary Clinton As Her Victory Is Clear

May 20, 2016/ Anne Enke

Sorry, Bernie, Your Nevada Hijack Story Is False

Allegations of Fraud and Misconduct at Nevada Democratic Convention Unfounded PolitiFact

PolitiFact Nevada was present on the floor the entire time and gives an emotionless recap, step by step of what happened. It's even better than the one we posted yesterday.

{Quote}: "Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said Nevada Democratic Party leaders "hijacked the process on the floor" of the state convention "ignoring the regular procedure and ramming through what they wanted to do."

Caucuses and delegate math can be incredibly confusing, and the arcane party structures don’t reflect how most people assume presidential selection works.

But the howls of unfairness and corruption by the Sanders campaign during Nevada’s state Democratic Convention can’t change the simple fact that Clinton’s supporters simply turned out in larger numbers and helped her solidify her delegate lead in Nevada.

There’s no clear evidence the state party "hijacked" the process or ignored "regular procedure."

We rate this claim False." {End Quote}

Bernie's Boys Club Gets Blistering Criticism

Bernie Sanders Is Hurting Himself by Playing the Victim by Joan Walsh The Nation

{Quote}: " The defections of some supporters, the increased skepticism of even once-friendly cable hosts, and a rebuke by Politifact isn’t fatal to Sanders’s campaign, of course. What will be fatal to Sanders’s future as a mass-movement leader—as opposed to the messiah of an angry, heavily white, and male cult—is his continued insistence that his enemy now is not so much the corporate overlords, or income inequality, or the big banks, but a corrupt Democratic Party, epitomized by Wall Street flunkie Hillary Clinton, that has “rigged” the election to thwart him—as he raged in a tone-deaf speech Tuesday night, as cable news was showing the texted death threats to Roberta Lange in the background (which Sanders did not even mention).

{ . . . }

First of all, I don’t accept the presumption of moral and ideological superiority from a coalition that is dominated by white men, trying to overturn the will of black, brown, and female voters or somehow deem it fraudulent. There’s a growing element of male entitlement in the Sanders “movement” that supporter Sally Kohn articulates well:

{ . . . }

If you’d told me a year ago that we’d go into Philadelphia with 45 percent of the delegates committed to a socialist, as a firm flank on the left, backed by the many millions of Clinton supporters like myself who also identify with the left, I’d have said we were on the verge of transforming the party into a vehicle for racial and economic justice. Now I’m afraid of what’s coming. If Sanders wants to destroy the party instead of change it, if he wants to demonize progressives like Barney Frank and Connecticut Governor Daniel Malloy (Devine has suggested he wants them removed from leadership roles because they endorsed Clinton), if he wants to turn the first female presidential nominee into a corrupt caricature of herself, a cross between Carly Fiorina and Marie Antoinette, then Philadelphia will be a disaster. For the party, and for Sanders too. He thinks he’s the only one who can defeat Donald Trump. But in fact, he’s the only one who can elect him, by tearing the party apart. " {End Quote}

I Felt the Bern but the Bros Are Extinguishing the Flames by Sally Kohn TIME

This essay from Sally Kohn really speaks to all of us. Kohn is a Sanders supporter and spoke at his huge Brooklyn rally. We would have little difficulty communicating with each other.

{Quote}: "The Bernie Bros are real. I’ve been the target of Bernie Bros on social media, and when I endorsed Sen. Sanders at a Brooklyn rally in front of more than 30,000 people, a not insignificant portion of the audience booed me for praising Clinton in my remarks. Forget the plainly self-defeating results of that behavior in terms of trying to recruit would-be Hillary supporters to Bernie’s column. It was disturbing from a visceral, human level.

It’s also too easy to suggest that Sanders’ supporters are a different kind of angry than Trump’s. Are we entirely sure about that? The populist right may be more inclined toward misogyny and xenophobia, but the populist left is not immune from these afflictions. And as I’ve written before, when you see progressive white men—many of whom enthusiastically supported Barack Obama’s candidacy—hate Clinton with every fiber of their being despite the fact that she’s a carbon copy of Obama’s ideology (or in fact now running slightly to his left), it’s hard to find any other explanation than sexism. Either way, the brutish, boorish behavior of Bernie Bros (and their female compatriots, too) was a huge reason I was reluctant to seemingly side with them in endorsing Sanders—and has been the only reason I have ever questioned my decision to do so since.

But what’s perhaps most disconcerting to me about the events in Nevada is that if you remove the ideological valence, it’s easy to see an anti-establishment movement rising across the U.S. that is disturbingly proto-violent. Let me be clear: I am all for populist mass social movements and even anti-elite revolutions. The sooner the better. But what I am not for is hate and violence in the service of those ends, movements that seek to lift up their marginalized base by marginalizing others.

This is the philosophy behind Trump. I’m not saying that all or even most of Sanders’ white male supporters are violent xenophobes, but they are certainly angry, and in the past and present of America it is impossible to disentangle white male anger from gender and racial bias and resentment. This is, after all, all happening at a time when white male supremacy is finally, if only slightly, on the decline. . . . " {End Quote}

Come on, Bernie, Time to Level with Your Dreamers by Joy-Ann Reid The Daily Beast

{Quote}: If Sanders does hope to have a future in Democratic Party politics, he will eventually have to tell his supporters the truth: that he simply lost the primary contest, despite a hard-fought race. He’ll have to walk back some of his sharpest anti-Clinton rhetoric, and find some way to become a bridge to the voters who have become so fervently devoted to him.

{ . . . }

Of course, Sanders could refuse to do that, perhaps concluding that he would lose too much credibility with the rather angry movement he’s built, and go right on hitting Hillary Clinton instead. But he risks winding up an isolated figure in Philadelphia, surrounded by his diehards but scorned by Democrats who blame him for weakening the nominee, tolerated by Camp Clinton only because they have to, and unable to win meaningful platform concessions from a party that could well view him as an enemy invader, rather than a bluntly critical, but ultimately valuable friend.