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PoliGAF 2016 |OT| Ask us about our performance with Latinos in Nevada

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shinra-bansho

Member
So this was the article I was referring to earlier. It's from a couple of months ago but it seems relevant.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/bank-reform-barney-frank-wall-street-213412

Who’s fit to serve in the government? There are any number of reasons to take a hard look at the motives, connections and interests of the people we choose to protect the public good. But I’m very troubled by an approach to this question gaining currency among my liberal friends. You could call it a three-pronged purity test, and the goal is to prevent anyone who seems even remotely tainted by the financial industry from gaining influence over public policy.

The three prongs are pretty straightforward. Has a candidate accepted campaign contributions from banks, securities firms, insurance companies or investment houses? Has he or she worked for any of these entities before taking a government position? And even after retirement, has he or she accepted speaking fees from such firms—or, worse, gone to work for one? If so, such candidates are considered suspect at best, and frequently face what the law calls an unrebuttable presumption that they cannot be trusted to protect the public interest from the industry’s excesses.

The unrebuttability of this accusation is especially disturbing. Once it is leveled, the actual record of the accused is given little or no weight. This is both unfair to the individuals in question and damaging to our capacity to govern—especially to our ability to build the kind of legal structure we need for effective regulation.
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So, am I untrustworthy when it comes to financial issues? Should my career be assessed differently? I’ve read strong critiques of candidates based on affiliations with the financial industry no more extensive than mine. But that hardly makes them unfit watchdogs. In fact, in the extremely remote chance that I were to consider public service again, I’m quite sure the strongest objections would come more from people in that business than from people worried about keeping it under control.

Just take a look at the record: I voted against repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. In 2004, I led an unsuccessful fight against the biggest favor George W. Bush did for the megabanks—the preemption of the authority of the states to regulate subprime mortgages. As Financial Services Committee Chair starting in 2007, I helped pass a tough reform of the big banks’ credit card practices that has saved consumers billions of dollars. And while I know some wanted more in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, I don’t know anyone who thinks that passage of the "Volcker rule" or creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were high on the banks’ wish list. (With the honorable exception, in the latter case, of the Bank of America.)

In retirement, I spoke out strongly against the unfortunately successful push by mortgage lenders—and, sadly, many liberal groups—to weaken the risk-retention rules for residential mortgages authorized by the new law. I also helped lobby to get the votes on the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to insist on fully regulating the derivative activities of the biggest banks—overseas, and over their objections. Both of these happened while I was being paid for speeches by groups opposed to my position on both issues.

I’ve also supported two changes favored by some in the industry, and one—raising the level at which a bank is subject to stricter regulation by the Financial Stability Oversight Council from 50 to 100 billion—would benefit Signature Bank. But I took that position after hearing Fed Gov. Dan Tarullo advocate it in April 2014, well over a year before I had any inkling that I would be invited to join its board. In summary, not only have I not changed my position on any regulatory issue because of my formal industry ties, I’ve also criticized every effort to date by congressional Republicans to weaken the law.
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I guess the crux of this is, do people really want serving in public office and having any career in big bad industry to be mutually exclusive. I assume that this is probably the case for some people. But it's neither realistic nor, in my view, a sound position.
 
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Elaugaufein

Member
OrangeGrayBlue said:
I was just thinking about how "That's what they offered" is asking to be used against her. Something like "College students have $80,000 debt because unaffordable tuition is what the universities offered, the elderly can't afford prescription drugs because expensive medication is what the pharmaceutical companies offered, and yet Hillary is offered several hundred thousand dollars for a speech. I've been fighting on behalf of working people my whole life and I wouldn't be running for president if I felt that Hillary Clinton was doing the same."

It plays up not only the wall street ties, but also the doubts people have, as evidenced in the Iowa entrance polls, that Hillary understands people like themselves. Not sure that Bernie wants to be that aggressive though.
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I don't really think Sanders was expecting to do as well as he has. I mean no one did. If you'd asked me about a populist definitively leftist economic presidential candidate 4 years ago I'd probably still be laughing. And he's still not expectling to win. Which is why he's largely stuck to relatively amiable points and banging everyone over the head with the points he thinks needs to be addressed.

To some extent his success has been a negative because instead of being a weight in the direction of what be wants to achieve a decisive defeat becomes read as a repudiation. And that's really bad in a party that's still running from the ghost of a defeat that happened before I was born (and I'm over 30).
 
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ugaboga232

Member
Why does Hillary keep saying we shouldn't debate healthcare again, I get shes against self payer which is fine but why can't we debate it or rather why does she want to not debate it again.
 
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Elaugaufein

Member
ugaboga232 said:
Why does Hillary keep saying we shouldn't debate healthcare again, I get shes against self payer which is fine but why can't we debate it or rather why does she want to not debate it again.
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I think she's advocating for a gently, gently, slowly , slowly approach. Admittedly I don't think she's doing so well but advocating for that approach is really hard to do well because you risk giving the game away.
 
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pigeon

Banned
Here's my new slate pitch for the day: it should be obvious that Hillary is not a pawn of Wall Street because if she actually were altering her actions to further their aims she would have prepared a better answer for when people ask her about her ties to Wall Street. Only innocent people sound that uncomprehendingly guilty.
 
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Elaugaufein

Member
pigeon said:
Here's my new slate pitch for the day: it should be obvious that Hillary is not a pawn of Wall Street because if she actually were altering her actions to further their aims she would have prepared a better answer for when people ask her about her ties to Wall Street.
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But what if thats what she wants you to think ? (Even I'm not sure if I'm serious)
 
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Overlee

Member
To those that don't think money seriously distorts American politics in every serious way, WAKE UP!

Lobbyist don't give bribes they give "gifts"

Lawrence Lessig's TED Talk based on his book Republic, Lost explains it well. It was basically his platform for the DNC.

Or you can read Vox's very own Ezra Klein take on it:

Lists like this one are common when writing about money and Congress, and for good reason: the numbers are enormous, and unsettling. In fact, they are much more than unsettling. They are discrediting. Whether the reality is as corrupt as these figures suggest, most Americans believe it is as corrupt as these figures suggest. “In a poll commissioned for this book,” Lessig writes, “75 percent of Americans believe ‘campaign contributions buy results in Congress.’ Three to one, with Republicans (71 percent) just as convinced of this as Democrats (81 percent).” That alone should be reason enough to drastically change how Washington works.

But it is not. The American people have been hearing numbers like these for years, and little has been done about them. In part, that’s because legislators themselves do not want to do much about them. They don’t believe money buys their votes. They believe they are decent, honorable people, and they think that many of the lobbyists they work with are, too. In theory, what should happen next is voters should kick them out of office. After all, the American people want the money out of politics, and their elected representatives aren’t getting that done for them. But that doesn’t happen, either. In part, that’s because procedural reforms aren’t the foremost issues in people’s minds. But it’s also because people tend to have a much higher opinion of their member of Congress than they do of the institution as a whole. They may believe Congress is corrupt, but they don’t believe their congressman is corrupt.


Nor does Lessig. “When we actually meet our congressman,” he writes,

we confront an obvious dissonance. For that person is not the evil soul we imagined behind our government. She is not sleazy. He is not lazy. Indeed, practically every single member of Congress is not just someone who seems decent. Practically every single member of Congress is decent. These are people who entered public life for the best possible reasons. They believe in what they do. They make enormous sacrifices in order to do what they do. They give us confidence, despite the fact that they work in an institution that has lost the public’s confidence.

Lessig’s book is a theory of how decent souls have come together to create an indecent system. At its core is the idea of the “gift economy.” As Lessig explains it,

a gift economy is a series of exchanges between two or more souls who never pretend to equate one exchange to another, but who also don’t pretend that reciprocating is unimportant—an economy in the sense that it marks repeated interactions over time, but a gift economy in the sense that it doesn’t liquidate the relationships in terms of cash. Indeed, relationships, not cash, are the currency within these economies.

To see how a gift economy works, Lessig offers an everyday example:

I give you a birthday present. It is a good present not so much because it is expensive, but because it expresses well my understanding of you. In that gift, I expect something in return. But I would be insulted if on my birthday, you gave me a cash voucher equivalent to the value of the gift I gave you, or even two times the amount I gave you. Gift giving in relationship-based economies is a way to express and build relationships.

The key mistake most people make when they look at Washington—and the key misconception that characters like Abramoff would lead you to—is seeing Washington as a cash economy. It’s a gift economy. That’s why firms divert money into paying lobbyists rather than spending every dollar on campaign contributions. Campaign contributions are part of the cash economy. Lobbyists are hired because they understand how to participate in the gift economy.
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And if you still think companies poured 2.6 billion into the lobbyist industry last year for nothing, maybe this Atlantic article would change your mind?

As companies became more politically active and comfortable during the late 1980s and the 1990s, their lobbyists became more politically visionary. For example, pharmaceutical companies had long opposed the idea of government adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, on the theory that this would give government bargaining power through bulk purchasing, thereby reducing drug industry profits. But sometime around 2000, industry lobbyists dreamed up the bold idea of proposing and supporting what became Medicare Part D—a prescription drug benefit, but one which explicitly forbade bulk purchasing—an estimated $205 billion benefit to companies over a 10-year period.

What makes today so very different from the 1970s is that corporations now have the resources to play offense and defense simultaneously on almost any top-priority issue. When I surveyed corporate lobbyists on the reasons why their companies maintained a Washington office, the top reason was “to protect the company against changes in government policy.” On a one-to-seven scale, lobbyists ranked this reason at 6.2 (on average). But closely behind, at 5.7, was “Need to improve ability to compete by seeking favorable changes in government policy.”
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Call me crazy but a big part of me doesn't think Hillary and Bernie would share a 93% voting record or whatever if we didn't have corporate lobbyists controlling our legislature.
 
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ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
pigeon said:
Here's my new slate pitch for the day: it should be obvious that Hillary is not a pawn of Wall Street because if she actually were altering her actions to further their aims she would have prepared a better answer for when people ask her about her ties to Wall Street. Only innocent people sound that uncomprehendingly guilty.
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Get Matt Yglesias on it.

Call me crazy but a big part of me doesn't think Hillary and Bernie would share a 93% voting record or whatever if we didn't have corporate lobbyists controlling our legislature.
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Members of the same side tend to vote for similar things.
 
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PBY

Banned
"Progressive who gets things done, that's progress"

Looks like she's really gonna hammer home this theme.


And yep here comes the Twitter stuff.
 
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Overlee

Member
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
Members of the same side tend to vote for similar things.
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Yes because the only legislature getting put into the house is written by corporate lobbyists. We would have UHC already if the insurance companies didn't buy politicians to vote against it. Why do you think its a 2 billion dollar industry?
 
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ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
Overlee said:
Yes because the only legislature getting put into the house is written by corporate lobbyists. We would have UHC already if the insurance companies didn't buy politicians to vote against it. We would have a congress that actually governs based on what their constituents think.
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.... Uhh, I don't think so? Mike Lee and Ted Cruz believe the things they propose and what they propose are generally batshit insane.

Is Big Pregnancy the reason why almost all Democrats are pro-choice?
 
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NeoXChaos

Member
The Republicans(Rubio or Cruz) will run circles around Bernie in a debate. It will make Obama vs Romney look good. Bernie is in debates too scripted which is ironic considering people think that way with Hillary
 
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ugaboga232

Member
PBY said:
Bernie really hits his marks and doesn't stray from the message huh. To his detriment almost.
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I think he knows he is going to lose and thinks that if he doesnt hammer this home hillary won't talk about them or try to fix them to the same extent.
 
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Elaugaufein

Member
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
.... Uhh, I don't think so? Mike Lee and Ted Cruz believe the things they propose and what they propose are generally batshit insane.

Is Big Pregnancy the reason why almost all Democrats are pro-choice?
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Almost all Democrats share values because strong political allegiances are effectively subcultures and you'll get cross-pollination of the ideas of the various member groups of those sub-cultures even if they joined for different reasons. If you don't then groups who's ideas are rejected split away and so aren't Democrats.
 
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Elaugaufein

Member
Wilsongt said:
Always love on Facebook when they have this little reaction poll to debates, everyone is always angry.
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I mean that's the weirdest thing about competitive primaries that run almost like mini-presidential campaigns, you spend 6+ months giving many people who you need to vote for your party in the general phenomenal reasons not to while providing the opposing party a wealth of partisan lines to beat you over the head with.
 
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PBY

Banned
Elaugaufein said:
I mean that's the weirdest thing about competitive primaries that run almost like mini-presidential campaigns, you spend 6+ months giving many people who you need to vote for your party in the general phenomenal reasons not to while providing the opposing party a wealth of partisan lines to beat you over the head with.
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Yeah that was my point above. Bernie comic with real substantive attacks that Hillary is bought- people don't just forget this shit.
 
O

Overlee

Member
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
.... Uhh, I don't think so? Mike Lee and Ted Cruz believe the things they propose and what they propose are generally batshit insane.

Is Big Pregnancy the reason why almost all Democrats are pro-choice?
Click to expand...



Their is no pregnancy lobby. There is however tons of lobbyist that have resumes from banks and oil companies. And they often revolve within the government as well. Imagine that.
 
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