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Tag: hilary clinton
Wall Street Won Bigly By Running Against Wall Street

Wall Street Won Bigly By Running Against Wall Street

In the closing ad of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he promised to oppose a “global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

The ad never used the words “Wall Street,” but the faces you see filling up the the screen — many of whom just happen to be Jewish — include Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein.

In the primary, Trump ripped Ted Cruz for his loans from that firm and, by implication, Cruz’s wife’s employment as a Goldman executive. Last summer, the GOP nominee claimed “Hillary will never reform Wall Street. She is owned by Wall Street!” — playing on the notion that she’d been paid off with the millions she got from speeches delivered to Goldman and other banks.

Wall Street — particularly (((Goldman Sachs))) — was the perfect anchor to toss at his opponents. And you’ll never guess what happened next.

Since won the presidency, Trump has hired three current or former executives of the investment bank for key economic positions to serve in or along side his cabinet of billionaire donors and fired generals, as they plot what is beginning to look like the biggest transfer of wealth to the richest in human history.

A fast food CEO who opposes the minimum wage has been picked to run the Department of Labor. A state attorney general who cuts and pastes from the oil industry is Trump’s choice to handle environmental protection. And the president who has never revealed the full extent of his businesses and has no plans to divest from them is operating a partnership with his daughter/First Lady, who will use his presidential power to open new opportunities to profit around the globe.

Meanwhile, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee plans to focus on intentionally failing to do any actual oversight. The committee will let Trump loot undisturbed, so long as he lets the GOP’s ruthless ambitions for hollowing out the middle class go unchecked.

And Wall Street loves it — as you can tell by the extended orgasm the stock market has been enjoying over Trump. From his massive tax breaks for the rich to Republican plans to privatize everything from Medicare to roads to schools, the bankers won bigly.

As we look back and try figure out what went wrong in 2016 for Democrats, your calculus has to start with the undeniable impact of the two letters from FBI Director James Comey and then include the mysterious variable of foreign hacking weaponized by the complicity of the media in spreading the stolen private information. Despite all this, Clinton still won the popular vote by almost 3 million, as she lost three Democratic strongholds by about 70,000 votes altogether. (And you have to factor in some misogyny unless you want to make a John Roberts-like assertion that American has solved sexism, despite our record of electing zero women presidents.)

However, it’s evident that part of that loss can be blamed on allowing Trump to pose as the scourge of Wall Street as he was acting as its Trojan horse.

Let’s clear some dangerous myths up. Clinton led in nearly swing state when it came to the economy. Trump amped up his support by focusing on cultural resentments of the “the dispossessed” with an appeal so coded to bring out the latent conservatism in our brains that it even won over some Obama voters. But that wasn’t enough for him to win.

“Clinton didn’t need to win over a single white Trump voter to take Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania,” writes New York Magazine‘s Eric Levitz. “She just needed to turn out working class Democrats.”

Clinton’s choice to make those speeches on Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ effective use of the millions she made as a slur against her character — along with her husband’s role in the deregulation of the late 90s, which passed with veto-proof majorities — made her particularly vulnerable to Trump’s ability to frame her as a shill of the Wall Street elite. But even that wasn’t decisive.

Clinton’s choice to focus on protecting Obama’s legacy from Trump instead of an economic argument in the closing weeks as a defensive stand against Comey likely cost her those crucial few votes she needed, according to pollster Stanley Greenberg.

“This was a ‘change election’ for the new American majority too, and that late turn by Clinton produced disappointing turnout among Hispanics, African Americans, single women and millennials,” he writes. “The African Americans’ greatly diminished turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee likely gave the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to Trump.”

She had the most progressive platform in history yet Trump won the change argument because he focused voters on an enemy besides the clown she was opposing. That’s how populism works — you’ve got to give people something big in the status quo to oppose. And it has to be the right thing.

When Clinton targeted the “basket of deplorables” she was rightly calling out the hatred encouraged by the Trump campaign — but she missed the key point. That hatred was used to scam voters, even the deplorables, into ignoring the reality of what Trump would do to them as president.

Immigrants won’t take away your Medicare and Social Security — actually, they’ll help extend the life of both programs. Trump and his Wall Street pals will.

The economic horrors of Trump’s policies were never an issue because his policies were never connected to who would benefit from the ripoff. And the media was so sure he was going to lose that they never bothered to even ask Trump if he would sign off Paul Ryan’s agenda to rip away the safety net.

Greenberg’s new research on Trump voters finds they aren’t troubled by his stocking his cabinet full of bankers and billionaire donors. But they’ll be pissed as hell if his tax breaks mostly benefit the rich as he breaks his promise to protect Social Security and Medicare.

As unpopular as Trump was, he found an enemy that America hates more — rich people who get rich off of you. And he was talented enough to use his experience ripping people off as evidence that he knew how to stop it. Now the payback is coming. Thanks to Trump, the richest — who have never been richer — will be getting even richer still.

Clinton had the agenda but not the populism that worked for Senators Al Franken and Gary Peters as they won in the Midwest just two years earlier. Now the wave of devastation to the middle class is coming, as Trump expects Americans to trade their retirement and health security for a few dollars a day in tax breaks,

Democrats need to make it clear: Trump has betrayed you for Wall Street. And that was his plan all along.

IMAGE: A view of the Goldman Sachs stall on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

 

Pay For Play? Consider Donald Trump’s Crony Cabinet

Pay For Play? Consider Donald Trump’s Crony Cabinet

Only Donald Trump would continue sponsoring campaign-style rallies, a full month after Election Day. And only Trump’s most fervent followers, the zealots who still show up to hear him gloat at those “thank you” events, would continue to chant “Drain the swamp!” at his command — when he is so obviously emptying that swamp into the White House swimming pool.

The bad joke of 2016 is that Trump routinely perpetrates every one of the offenses charged against Hillary Clinton, whether invented or plausible, yet escapes all the blaming and shaming that fell so heavily upon her. The starkest example is the contrast between the Clinton Foundation, an enormous force for good that was falsely accused of wrongdoing in countless stories, columns, and broadcasts, and the Trump Foundation, a vainglorious vehicle for tax evasion that has confessed to unlawful self-dealing and remains barred from doing business by authorities in its home state.

But it is the Clintons’ reputation that suffered damage, even as Trump and his family remain unscathed.

During the campaign, Trump shrieked “pay for play!” to defame the Clintons over and over again, without proof. But now he is doling out top positions in government to the patrons of his campaign, his businesses, and even his foundation. To Trump, a post in his cabinet is not a commitment of trust granted on behalf of the people, but a plum to bestow on any crony who once did him a favor.

The most wanton example is designated Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, a political and financial opportunist who predicted months ago that if he raised enough campaign money, then Trump would reward him with precisely this powerful post. Imagine the outrage if Clinton had appointed someone like Mnuchin — a former top executive of Goldman Sachs who ruthlessly exploited government bailouts and crushed poor homeowners in the wake of the financial crisis — after he had raised millions of dollars for her campaign and predicted his payoff.

The hair on every pundit and anchor across America would simultaneously burst into flame.

But when those same media sages watch Trump appoint Mnuchin, they shrug and comment wryly on his Goldman pedigree. Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon is from Goldman as well, of course — and on December 9, Trump chose Gary Cohn, the Wall Street mammoth’s chief operating officer, to head the National Economic Council.

As someone observed, it’s as if Trump will be giving a speech to Goldman Sachs every time he addresses a White House meeting.

Another billionaire financial operator elevated by Trump is Wilbur Ross, a “vulture” capitalist who got to know the real estate mogul when Trump was going bust, bigly, in Atlantic City. It was Ross who gave him the most important boost of his business career. Rather than force him into a personal bankruptcy that would have destroyed his career (and saved us from his impending presidency), Ross persuaded the banks that owned Trump to let him survive.

That was a bad decision for many of Trump’s creditors, who saw their companies ruined, but years later turned out to be a good decision for Ross — who will soon wield influence over major policy decisions affecting trade and industry as Commerce secretary. Of course, Ross too made large donations to Trump’s campaign.

Then there’s Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive and failed Republican Senatorial candidate from Connecticut just appointed by Trump to run the Small Business Administration. Promoting a fake sport may not qualify her to operate an important agency. And her family company has many embarrassing moments in its past, including the unlamented XFL. McMahon has no experience in government at all, but she does possess even more important credentials: She and husband Vince donated $5 million to the Trump Foundation between 2009 and 2014, and $6 million to a Trump SuperPAC this year.

Pay for play? Hillary Clinton never did anything nearly so brazen, as Senator, secretary of state, or candidate. But for the man who can get away with everything, his crony cabinet is only the beginning.

First Polls Close In Eastern Time Zones, More Will Close Shortly

First Polls Close In Eastern Time Zones, More Will Close Shortly

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Polls began to close in the long and bitter race for the White House between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump on Tuesday, with last-minute opinion polls giving Clinton the edge in the final hours of the race.

Polls in the Eastern time zones of Indiana and Kentucky were the first to close, and a flood of vital battleground states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio – where polls were due to close in the next 90 minutes – would provide initial clues of the possible winner.

Clinton led Trump, 44 percent to 39 percent, in the last Reuters/Ipsos national tracking poll before Election Day. A Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation poll gave her a 90 percent chance of defeating Trump and becoming the first woman elected U.S. president.

The campaign focused on the character of the candidates: Clinton, 69, a former U.S. secretary of state, and Trump, 70, a New York businessman. Each accused the other of being fundamentally unfit to lead the United States or to deal with such challenges as an arduous economic recovery, Islamist militants and the rise of China.

Trump again raised the possibility on Tuesday of not accepting the election’s outcome, saying he had seen reports of voting irregularities. He gave few details and Reuters could not immediately verify the existence of such problems.

Financial markets, betting exchanges and online trading platforms largely predicted a Clinton win, although Trump’s team said he could pull off a surprise victory like the June “Brexit” vote to pull Britain out of the European Union.

Voters appeared to be worried about the country’s direction and were seeking a “strong leader who can take the country back from the rich and powerful,” according to an early reading from the Reuters/Ipsos national Election Day poll.

The poll of more than 10,000 people who voted in the election showed a majority worried about their ability to get ahead, with little confidence in political parties or the media to improve their situation.

A strong turnout of voters for Clinton could jeopardize Republican control of the U.S. Senate, as voters choose 34 senators of the 100-member chamber on Tuesday. Democrats needed a net gain of five seats to win control. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives were being contested. The House was expected to remain in Republican hands.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average index ended up 0.4 percent as investors bet on a win for Clinton, seen by Wall Street as more likely to ensure financial and political stability. Mexico’s peso hit a two-month high on Tuesday on the expectation of a loss for Trump, who has vowed to rip up a trade deal with Mexico.

(Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson and Amanda Becker traveling with the candidates, Letitia Stein in St. Petersburg, Florida, Luciana Lopez in Miami, Doina Chiacu, Andy Sullivan and Susan Heavey in Washington, Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem and Kim Palmer in Ohio; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Will Dunham and Howard Goller)

IMAGE: People wait in line to cast their ballots at the Aynor Town Hall during the U.S. presidential election in Aynor, South Carolina, U.S. November 8, 2016.  REUTERS/Randall Hill

Wikileaks: What If Someone Hacked Julian Assange’s Emails?

Wikileaks: What If Someone Hacked Julian Assange’s Emails?

To understand the exposure of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails by Wikileaks, it may be helpful to try a few simple thought experiments.

What if the National Security Agency stole tens of thousands of emails from a politician in another country — or better yet, from a different politician here — and then published them on a friendly website, creating humiliation and chaos in order to sway a national election?

It isn’t hard to imagine the cries of indignation, the furious editorials, and the thunderous demands for official heads to roll in the face of such terrible constitutional violations.

Or what if the NSA purloined the email traffic of a troublesome American journalist, in order to showcase the less uplifting details of how our best newspapers pursue and publish controversial stories — including the doubts often expressed by reporters, editors, and lawyers about sources and methods? The explosion of anger in the press at any such incursion would be thermonuclear.

Or what if, even more pertinently, the NSA contrived to hack the communications of Wikileaks itself, releasing electronic proof of its rumored ties to the Trump campaign via dirty trickster Roger Stone — and its suspected dependence on the Kremlin’s corps of outsourced hackers? Wikileaks founder Julian Assange probably wouldn’t appreciate the irony of a US government agency applying his vaunted “transparency” ethic to his own operations. And just as surely, his defenders in the press and civil society would be outraged too.

Historians know that various agents of the United States government have committed similar acts and much worse from time to time. When their misconduct was discovered, they were subject to harsh criticism and occasionally even punishment.

But why should anyone still object to such intrusive actions by our government, when the pilfering of Podesta’s private communications — apparently perpetrated by an unfriendly foreign government — is not only accepted but celebrated?

Journalists rummage through all the personal messages gleefully, with little thought for the harm their publication may inflict on innocent people. Last week, for instance, many outlets quoted emails that named a former Clinton Foundation executive who suffered from bouts of suicidal depression. She is a single mother who isn’t involved in the Clinton presidential campaign. Revealing her distress had no high-minded purpose; its only aim was to smear reputations and its only effect was to damage a struggling family.

But that didn’t matter if her lonely nightmare could be spun into a sensational story about the Clintons. Protecting the privacy and security of American citizens — a principle described as universal during the debate over NSA surveillance — seems to be highly selective in practice. Of course, that’s how the Clinton Rules work.

Perhaps a bombshell of world-shattering consequence is hidden in the remaining cache of emails, but what we have learned so far from thousands of numbing pages is instead banal. Was anyone unaware that Hillary Clinton is a cautious, thoughtful, sometimes calculating politician? Is anyone surprised that people in and around a presidential campaign, a government bureaucracy, a charitable foundation, or any human organization, are sometimes prone to insults and intrigues?

And does anyone believe that emails hijacked from another campaign would prove less mortifying? Think what the Republican chairman might be saying about his candidate’s self-inflicted sex scandal. Or what Bernie Sanders, his wife Jane, and campaign aides discussed when they decided not to reveal their federal income taxes, as they had publicly promised.

As for Clinton, negative inferences about her sincerity are balanced if not erased by more positive impressions. An October 10 editorial in the Washington Postobserved that her Wikileaks persona is “a knowledgeable, balanced political veteran with sound policy instincts and a mature sense of how to sustain a decent, stable democracy,” as well as “a level of self-awareness unimaginable in her opponent.”

It is fair to say that journalists searching for scandal in the Wikileaks emails are merely doing an unlovely job that cannot be avoided; some of the Podesta emails are indeed newsworthy. But still more newsworthy than anything uncovered so far is that one candidate must endure this scathing process, while the other evades even the most basic disclosures expected of every presidential candidate.

Many of those same eager journalists dismiss comparisons between Wikileaks and Watergate, another felonious scheme to steal politically sensitive materials from Democratic leaders. They scarcely seem to comprehend the true scandal: a criminal conspiracy behind the theft and distribution of these documents, enacted on behalf of a fascistic candidate and an authoritarian regime. They do no service to democracy by minimizing or ignoring it.

IMAGE: File photo of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gesturing during a news conference at the Ecuadorian embassy in central London