Does A System Forcing A Choice Between A Trump And A Clinton Deserve Your Participation?

This is a real thing

There was a little brouhaha on Friday over Bernie supposedly telling CNN's Chris Cuomo that he wants a position in Hillary's administration. He doesn't. He's pushing for his policy positions-- not a position for himself. I don't want to see Donald Trump as president. And I don't want to see Hillary Clinton as president either. Unlike Bernie, I have no intention of voting for either one of them. Having known her personally and having watched her career unfold over the decades, I have no doubt that she's the wrong person for the presidency-- despite how unfit and utterly contemptible Trump is. Yes, he's worse than her. But, as I've said endlessly, the lesser of two evils, is still evil.

I'm pretty sure she's going to be president and, like everyone, I'll be glad that she shatters the ultimate glass ceiling for women. That means something; it means a lot. But, after that, every decision she makes will be a nightmare, starting with her personnel decisions. Friday the Platform Committee sessions ended in acrimony when the Clinton and Wasserman Schultz appointees blocked attempts to stop the TPP and to strengthen the party's position on a $15 minimum wage (watch the video below). AFSCME's Paul Booth, a penultimate party hack and Clinton appointee, helped kill the strong $15 minimum wage proposal. Yeah, AFSCME is a kind of union. I wonder if their members know Hank Paulson, Bush's Mr. TARP, has hopped into bed with them to make Clinton president.



At this point one can only imagine what kind of human garbage she has in mind for cabinet positions. Remember Victoria Nuland, the longtime neocon aide to Dick Cheney who seamlessly moved into Hillary's state department and who engineered the coup in Ukraine, putting in place a rouge's gallery of fascists and neo-nazis? She's rumored to be a top contender for secretary of state. Another victory for... feminism?

And if Nuland makes it into the cabinet, she's not going to be the only monstrosity-as-bad-as-anything-Trump-would-pick in there. Wall Street has already paid in advance for the Treasury Secretary position. Larry Fink (of BlackRock) has been rumored to be in position for the job. And nightmare rumors of her cabinet picks include Michele Flournoy as Secretary of Defense. It would be hard to find anyone worse. Glenn Greenwald:

Flournoy, the former Defense Department official whom Defense One calls “the woman expected to run the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton,” this week advocated for “sending more American troops into combat against ISIS and the Assad regime than the Obama administration has been willing to commit.” In an interview with that outlet, Flournoy “said she would direct U.S. troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region.” She had previously “condemned the Obama administration’s ISIS policy as ineffectual,” denouncing it as “under-resourced.”

This week, Flournoy specifically advocated what she called “limited military coercion” to oust Assad. In August 2014, Obama announced what he called “limited airstrikes in Iraq”-- and they’re still continuing almost two years later. Also note the clinical euphemism Flournoy created-- “military coercion”-- for creating a “no-bomb zone” that would entail “a declaratory policy backed up by the threat of force. ‘If you bomb the folks we support, we will retaliate using standoff means to destroy [Russian] proxy forces, or, in this case, Syrian assets,’” she said. Despite D.C. conventional wisdom that Obama is guilty of “inaction” in Syria, he has sent substantial aid, weapons, and training to Syrian rebels while repeatedly bombing ISIS targets in Syria.

Even U.S. military officials have said that these sorts of no-fly or no-bomb guarantees Flournoy is promising-- which Hillary Clinton herself has previously advocated-- would risk a military confrontation with Russia. Obama’s defense secretary, Ash Carter, told a Senate hearing last December that the policy Clinton advocates “would require ‘substantial’ ground forces and would put the U.S. military at risk of a direct confrontation with the Syrian regime and Russian forces.” Nonetheless, the Pentagon official highly likely to be Clinton’s defense secretary is clearly signaling their intention to proceed with escalated military action. The carnage in Syria is horrifying, but no rational person should think that U.S. military action will be designed to “help Syrians.”

It’s long been beyond doubt that Clinton intends to embark upon a far more militaristic path than even Obama forged-- which is saying a lot given that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner has bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries in seven years. Repeatedly, Clinton has implicitly criticized Obama for excessive hostility toward Israel, and she has vowed more uncritical support for Israel and to move closer to Netanyahu. Just yesterday, Clinton surrogates battled Sanders’s appointees in the Democratic Platform Committee meeting over Israel and Palestine, with Clinton’s supporters taking an even more hard-line position than many right-wing Israeli politicians. Clinton was the leading voice that successfully convinced a reluctant Obama to involve the U.S. in the disastrous intervention in Libya.

Her past criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy were based overwhelmingly in her complaints that he did not use enough military force, including in Syria. As the New York Times put it in 2014: “That Mrs. Clinton is more hawkish than Mr. Obama is no surprise to anyone who watched a Democratic primary debate in 2008... She favored supplying arms to moderate Syrian rebels, leaving behind a somewhat larger residual military force in Iraq and waiting longer before withdrawing American support for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt during the historic protests in Cairo.”

...But the fact that Hillary Clinton has a history of advocating more war and killing and support for heinous regimes and occupations is the one thing Democratic pundits have, with remarkable message discipline, completely ignored. From Bernie Bros to Sanders’ Secret Service costs to Hillary’s kick-ass, mic-dropping, slay-queen tweets, they’ve invented the most embarrassingly childish and trivial distractions to ensure they don’t have to talk about it. But now Clinton’s almost-certain defense secretary is already-- months before she’s in power-- expressly advocating more war and bombing and dangerous interventions. That makes the costs of a Clinton foreign policy-- at least for those who assign any value to lives outside of American soil-- much harder, and more shameful, to ignore.

I Can't Sleep Nights, Worrying I'm Not Doing Enough For Bernie

Progressive pundit Michael Tomasky has given his permission for Bernie to stay in the race but warned him that "if he wants to remain a major progressive leader in a Clinton presidency, it’s time to ratchet back his attacks on the presumptive nominee." Has Bernie been attacking her? I must've fallen asleep and missed it. "From here on in," write Tomasky, "Sanders ought to lay off the attacks on Hillary Clinton, the Goldman Sachs speeches and all the rest. Eventually, he’s going to lose. She’s going to win. He can do it in a way that burnishes his standing in the party he’s decided to be a member of and that makes him a pivotally powerful senator during a potential Clinton presidency. Or he can do it in a way that damages her reputation and ultimately his own." I'm sure the rest of his story is wonderful but I deleted it. I was too eager to get to get to something less silly. The Intercept ran a piece by David Dayen yesterday that Tomasky should read. Perhaps it would help him focus on why it's so, so important that Bernie turn up the heat and do everything he can to save the country from a Trumpf presidency by beating the unelectable Democratic establishment candidate. In fact, anyone who doubts, Hillary plans to turn the country over to Wall Street-- so if you've been living under a rock (though not a BlackRock) for a year-- needs to read it.

Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches, but an even bigger Wall Street player stands ready to mold and enact her economic and financial policy if she becomes president.

BlackRock is far from a household name but it is the largest asset management firm in the world, controlling $4.6 trillion in investor funds — about a trillion dollars more than the annual federal budget, and five times the assets of Goldman Sachs. And Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, has assembled a veritable shadow government full of former Treasury Department officials at his company.

Fink has made clear his desire to become Treasury Secretary someday. The Obama Administration had him on the short list to replace Timothy Geithner. When that didn’t materialize, he pulled several members of prior Treasury Departments into high-level positions at the firm, which may improve the prospects of realizing his dream in a future Clinton Administration.

And his priorities appear to be so in sync with Clinton’s that it’s not entirely clear who shares whose agenda.

Clinton, for her part, has refused to rule out a Treasury Secretary drawn from Wall Street.

Fink’s ready-made team available for a move from Wall Street to Washington includes... Cheryl Mills, arguably Clinton’s most trusted confidant. Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, was deputy White House counsel in the Bill Clinton administration and is on the board of directors of the Clinton Foundation. Fink hired Mills for the BlackRock board of directors in October 2013, in what observers mused was a ploy to insinuate himself into the Clinton inner circle.

It’s worth considering how Fink’s recent experiences might inform his approach at Treasury. Asset management firms invest pools of money into securities on behalf of their clients, which in BlackRock’s case include 94 of the Fortune 100. They don’t issue securities themselves; they just buy stuff.

Asset managers don’t package and sell dodgy financial products like investment banks, and don’t trade with borrowed money like hedge funds, so they are typically viewed as more restrained and less averse to regulation than their colleagues in those related industries.

But they are embedded in the broader financial system as voracious buyers of securities. For example, BlackRock holds major share amounts in nearly every mega-bank, takes funds from scores of Wall Street investors, and manages a majority of the federal government’s bailout programs. They may not create the risk, but they own a lot of it. Fink, who co-created the mortgage-backed security while a trader at First Boston in the 1980s, is a longtime respected figure on Wall Street; Geithner reportedly used him as a conduit between Treasury and the financial industry.

He also knows how to work the levers of power to achieve his ends.

Whether buy-side firms like BlackRock represent a systemic risk to the financial system is the subject of some debate. Some believe asset managers could trigger problems by failing to pay off counter-parties, or being forced into a fire sale of their assets.

But Fink and BlackRock pushed hard to successfully resist the designation of asset managers as systemically important financial institutions (or SIFIs), which would be subject to additional regulation like larger capital requirements.

Fink also opposes efforts to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall firewall between investment and commercial banks, as does Clinton.

In fact, Fink’s views on Wall Street are so similar to Clinton’s that it’s hard to see that as a coincidence. Most notably, Clinton’s financial reform plan is mute when it comes to regulating asset management firms as SIFIs.

Fink has in recent months stressed an end to “short-termism” in the financial markets. For example, he wants to limit share buybacks that pump up stock prices, and encourage investors to hold stock longer, to focus on long-term corporate performance. Clinton has mirrored this language to such a degree that the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin suggested that Clinton “could have been channeling Laurence D. Fink.”

While the call to end short-termism is in some ways laudable, in Fink’s case it certainly reflects his self-interest. Clinton’s tax plan, for example, would keep capital gains rates higher for short-term holdings and decrease the rate for investors who hold assets over five years. Because BlackRock buys and holds most of its investments, any policy favoring long-term strategies in the markets would improve the firm’s bottom line.

Victor Fleischer, a leading tax lawyer and professor at the University of San Diego, questioned Clinton’s embrace of the short-termism argument in the New York Times earlier this month, saying it would “do little to address top-end income inequality,” since plenty of wealthy people buy and hold. And Fleischer explicitly worries that the short-termism idea originated from Fink. “I find it hard to shake the feeling that at the end of the day, in a Clinton administration, it would be Larry Fink, not the technocrats, calling the shots,” Fleischer wrote.

Fink has also promoted the privatization of Social Security, while mocking the idea of retiring at 65, which is easy for a business executive who sits at a desk all day to say, rather than working on an assembly line or as a waiter. Fink owes his initial backing at BlackRock to Pete Peterson, the former commerce secretary who has been at the forefront of the campaign to cut or privatize Social Security. He sat on the steering committee of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a stalking horse for Peterson’s ideas.

While Clinton has adamantly pledged not to cut or privatize Social Security benefits, Fink’s track record would cause concern among advocates, were he to obtain a cabinet post. And having a ready-made team of trusted advisors who know their way around the Treasury building and the players in a potential Clinton West Wing can only help Fink in that campaign.

I can imagine her giving the nomination speech now... "who better to deal with those horrible Wall Street cheats than a Wall Street cheat expert?" Maybe that's what she was doing with Giovanni Gambino in Charleston, South Carolina. Attorney General? Remember, a vote for Hillary is a vote for Wall Street and, probably, a vote for the cruel reality of a Herr President Trumpf. The alternative to another Wall Street Administration: