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Elizabeth Warren Throws Down The Gauntlet To Donald Trump

Elizabeth Warren Throws Down The Gauntlet To Donald Trump

By Lisa Lambert

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Democrats’ liberal firebrand, Senator Elizabeth Warren, threw down the gauntlet to President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday, telling labor union members there are financial and social issues where her party will fight him and continuing to blast the Republican.

Battling bigotry is the first job for Democrats after the election, said Warren, of Massachusetts, giving a sense of how her party will operate now that it no longer controls the White House and remains the minority in both chambers of Congress.

“We will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled Americans – on anyone,” said Warren, who sparred frequently over Twitter with Trump and criticized him on the campaign trail in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election. “Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever.”

She said Trump had “encouraged a toxic stew of hatred and fear” and during the campaign “regularly made statements that undermined core values of our democracy.”

In the speech to the AFL-CIO labor federation, Warren also said Democrats will resist attempts to loosen financial regulation, “gut” the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

“If Trump and the Republican Party try to turn loose the big banks and financial institutions so they can once again gamble with our economy and bring it all crashing down, then we will fight them every step of the way,” she said.

Warren did highlight areas of agreement. She said “count me in” on Trump’s support of a new Glass-Steagall law to separate investment and retail banking, reforming trade deals, maintaining Social Security benefits, helping on childcare and college costs and rebuilding infrastructure.

Warren rose to lead the liberal wing of the party during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. After Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s attempt to appoint her as the first director of the CFPB, she won a seat in Congress.

In 2015, progressive groups and a political action committee pressed her to run for president. Since Trump’s victory on Tuesday, many have already renewed their calls, for the 2020 presidential election.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)

IMAGE: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) takes part in the Washington Ideas Forum in Washington, U.S., October 1, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

Presidential Candidate Sanders Takes Aim At Wall Street, Clinton In Speech

Presidential Candidate Sanders Takes Aim At Wall Street, Clinton In Speech

By Amanda Becker

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders warned on Tuesday that financial-sector greed was “destroying the fabric of our nation” and said the starting point of any Wall Street reform effort is breaking up “too big to fail” banks.

“If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist; when it comes to Wall Street reform, that must be our bottom line,” Sanders said in a blistering speech. He said allowing banks that are too big is essentially providing them with a “free insurance policy” to make risky investments knowing the U.S. government will prevent their collapse.

The U.S. senator from Vermont – an independent and a democratic socialist popular with the Democratic Party’s populist wing – gave his speech at a theater near New York’s Times Square, just “a few subway stops away from the epicenter of the global financial crisis,” as his campaign put it.

Sanders also called for structural reforms to the Federal Reserve, making credit rating agencies nonprofit entities, and a tax on speculative investments. He urged increased penalties for financial fraud or malfeasance by institutions, calling fraud the business model of Wall Street.

His remarks were laced with direct and indirect criticisms of the policies and track record of primary campaign front-runner Hillary Clinton, whose constituency when she was a U.S. senator from New York included the financial industry. The former secretary of state, however, has taken a tougher stance against Wall Street as a presidential candidate.

Clinton, Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley are vying to face the Republican nominee in the November 2016 election.

Sanders and Clinton have tussled over the best way to curb the risky behavior on Wall Street that caused the 2008 financial crisis and triggered the worst U.S. economic slump since the Great Depression.

Sanders favors breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and reinstating a version of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prohibited commercial banks from engaging in investment banking activities.

Clinton has endorsed an approach that would break up large banks if they take excessive risks. She also believes that reinstating Glass-Steagall, an idea popular with progressive Democrats, would not address the types of institutions that have risen since the law was written in the 1930s.

Glass-Steagall’s main provisions were repealed in 1999 during the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton – a fact that Sanders highlighted in his speech.

The back-and-forth between Sanders and Clinton over breaking up banks and regulating the so-called shadow banking sector intensified this week, with one of Clinton’s top Wall Street advisers, former U.S. financial regulator Gary Gensler, criticizing Sanders as not focusing on regulating non-bank institutions such as hedge funds and insurance companies.

Sanders said Tuesday that if elected, “Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks will not be represented in my administration.”

Gensler, before serving as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama and a U.S. Treasury Department official under Bill Clinton, was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson were also Goldman alumni.

Sanders highlighted how he has pushed for legislation to reinstate Glass-Steagall alongside Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a favorite of progressives. He also quoted another progressive icon, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, as criticizing Clinton’s proposals to regulate Wall Street as too weak.

New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, a progressive, is among those in Clinton’s corner. In a statement on Tuesday, he said that “having studied all the Wall Street reform proposals,” he believes Clinton’s is the “toughest, farthest-reaching plan of anyone running for president.”

On the Federal Reserve, Sander said it should not pay financial institutions interest for the money they keep at the Fed and that such institutions should instead pay the U.S. central bank a fee. He also said he would not put financial industry executives on the Fed’s presidentially appointed board.

Individual companies were also name checked by Sanders. He said that JPMorgan Chase & Co , Bank of America Corp and Wells Fargo & Co are nearly 80 percent bigger than when they accepted money from the U.S. government during the 2008 bailout.

(Reporting By Amanda Becker; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Photos: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders shakes hands with supporters after speaking at a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire January 4, 2016.   (REUTERS/Gretchen Ertl)

Carbon Tax, ExIm Bank, Glass Steagall: Hard Questions For Democratic Debaters, Please

Carbon Tax, ExIm Bank, Glass Steagall: Hard Questions For Democratic Debaters, Please

Imagine for a moment that the purpose of a presidential debate is to elucidate policy differences on matters of concern to American voters – instead of engaging the leading Democrats in still more boring babble about Hillary Clinton’s email habits or Bernie Sanders’ socialist sympathies.

What might a diligent debate moderator ask, if she is seeking substance and happens to have done her homework?

One urgent issue that has received too little attention – and sharply divides the Democratic candidates — is the fate of the Export-Import Bank, an independent federal agency that provides financing for the export of goods and services produced by American companies. Thanks to hard-right Republicans in Congress, who have denounced the bank as a sinkhole of “crony capitalism,” its financial authority lapsed last July, endangering thousands of American jobs that are being transferred to countries where such government financing is available.

Sanders has repeatedly denounced the bank as an example of “corporate welfare” and says killing it will “protect American taxpayers and workers.”

It is true that ExIm Bank financing is made available to companies like General Electric, which shouldn’t require federal largesse, but it is also true that the great majority of its loans are made to small business exporters. The Bank costs taxpayers nothing because it runs at a profit, returning more than $7 billion to the Treasury since 1995. Its default rate is far below one percent and its backers point out that more than 50 other countries use similar agencies to bolster job creation here.

ExIm Bank supporters include most industrial unions and the AFL-CIO, whose president Richard Trumka demanded last month that the Senate act to save the bank immediately. “Any [further] delay,” said Trumka, “would jeopardize the economic future of thousands of American families.”

So why would labor ally Sanders – unlike every progressive Congressional Democrat — join with reactionary Republicans to oppose reauthorization, which Clinton supports?

Yet another macro-economic matter that deserves deeper discussion is Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era statute that prohibited banks with federally insured deposits from engaging in stock trading.

Its repeal was signed in 1999 by President Clinton as part of a broader financial deregulation — which some economists, such as former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, have blamed for the high-risk and sometimes crooked speculation that led to the crash in 2008. Other economists, including former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, have insisted that Glass-Steagall repeal didn’t cause the crash.

This is a dispute worth exploring, especially because Clinton is so often accused of excessive affection toward Wall Street. Sanders has announced his support for Warren’s bill, which has no chance of Congressional approval in the near future, while Clinton has said she would not support reinstating Glass-Steagall. Someone should ask her to explain clearly: Why not? Both she and Sanders should be asked to explain whether they believe that financial deregulation caused the Great Recession – and what steps should be taken to prevent another speculative disaster.

The Democratic candidates ought to be asked about their differences in dealing with the most challenging issue of our time: global climate change. It is easy enough to denounce the denialists on the Republican side, whose abject obedience to the Koch brothers and the dirty-energy industry is perfectly obvious. Both Sanders and Clinton have suggested ambitious clean energy objectives. Clinton and her husband have long advocated the expansion of solar, wind, conservation, and other alternative sources of power. 

But so far the former secretary of state has failed to endorse a tax on carbon emissions, which the senator from Vermont supports and many experts believe is essential if the world is to avoid a climate calamity. She should explain her objections. It is literally the burning issue of our time.

Photo: Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shakes hands with rival candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (L) and thanks him for saying that he and the American people are sick of hearing about her State Department email controversy and want to hear about issues that effect their lives as they participate in the first official Democratic candidates debate of the 2016 presidential campaign in Las Vegas, Nevada October 13, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson