Trump Has Utterly Failed His Test-- Guess Who Suffers (+ Bob Dylan's 17 Minute Song)

The GOP death cult is super-duper strong in Alabama, where the moron governor has challenged the coronavirus to come and kill all her citizens. Still, Nazis, fascists and assorted racists from all over the U.S. head up to their idea of an Aryan Nation-- Idaho's panhandle. The state voted or Trump in 2016 by a massive margin-- 59.25% to just 27.48% for Hillary (who won just two of the state's 44 counties.) The panhandle counties were even Trumpier than the rest of the state:

• Benewah- 74.0%
• Bonner- 60.8%
• Kootenai- 67.1% (the neo-Nazi capital of America)
• Shoshone- 64.4%

And even though Trump's net approval has decreased by 10 points since he first occupied the White House, 58% of Idaho voters still approved of the job he is doing, compared to just 39% who don't. None the less, Idaho's very conservative Republican governor, Brad Little, just issued a statewide 21-day stay at home order. Like most states, there is a long list of exceptions to the shutdown:

• Healthcare operations
• Grocery stores including liquor stores
• Food cultivation such as farming, fishing, and food processing
• Businesses that provide food, shelter and services for economically disadvantaged individuals
• News media services
• Gas stations, auto supply and repair facilities
• Banks, credit unions and financial institutions
• Plumbers, electricians and landscapers
• Hardware stores and firearm businesses
• Businesses providing mailing and shipping services
• Educational institutions to provide distance learning resources
• Childcare providing services that enable employees exempted in this order to work as permitted
• Laundromats and dry cleaners
• Restaurants can stay open but can only provide take out or drive-thru services
• Hotels, motels and shared rental units
• Businesses that supply people products to work from home
• Shipping businesses that deliver food, goods or groceries
• Airlines, taxis and private transportation needed for essential travel
• Home-based care for seniors, adults or children
• Essential tribal operations
• Legal or accounting services when necessary

Yes, even Idaho. And even Fox News. Their website carried a warning from the Surgeon General that the U.S. could be worse than Italy if 15-day guidelines are disregarded. Who's stupid enough to disregard them?

Jerome Adams explained his divergence with Trump by noting that the non-leader in the White House "is trying to be optimistic for Americans with his Easter timeline and also asked those not taking the coronavirus seriously to understand there is a possibility America could reach a worst-case scenario if residents do not follow the guidelines."

And optimistic for himself? I mean, Pope Francis asked the faithful to stay out of churches on Easter Sunday; Trump wants them filled with people celebrating his own resurrection. That's some step from "Hoax!"

Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported that a record-breaking 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits. The Washington Post put it like this: "Last week saw the biggest jump in new jobless claims in history, surpassing the record of 695,000 set in 1982. Many economists say this is the beginning of a massive spike in unemployment that could result in over 40 million Americans losing their jobs by April. Laid off workers say they waited hours on the phone to apply for help. Websites in several states, including New York and Oregon, crashed because so many people were trying to apply at once."

“The most terrifying part about this is this is likely just the beginning of the layoffs,” said Martha Gimbel, a labor economist at Schmidt Futures.

The nation’s unemployment rate was 3.5 percent in February, a half-century low, but that has likely risen already to 5.5 percent, according to calculations by Gimbel. The nation hasn’t seen that level of unemployment since 2015.

...“We may well be in a recession,” said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in his first appearance on morning television on NBC’s Today show. “The first order of business is to get the virus under control and then resume economic activity.”

...Both the scale of the layoffs and the speed at which they are happening are unprecedented. During the Great Recession, for example, the worst week for jobless claims was 665,000. Last week the nation saw five times that amount.

The Trump recession has begun and now what we have to hope for is that it doesn't become the Trump Depression. With him at the helm, we could be looking at 40 million unemployed by Easter. Read any independent economist and the words "it’s going to get worse" are always in their analysis. Writing for HuffPo, Zach Carter and Amanda Terkel reported that Mnuchin is basically in his own delusional world and that everything will be fine after he gets his hands on the half trillion dollar slush fund. After the unemployment spike was announced yesterday, he told CNBC's audience that "I just think these numbers right now are not relevant, and you know, whether they’re bigger or smaller in the short term. I mean, obviously, there are people who have jobless claims. And again, the good thing about this bill is the president is protecting those people. So you know, now with these plans, small businesses hopefully will be able to hire back a lot of those people. Last week, they didn’t know if they had protections. They didn’t have any cash. They had no choice. Now with this bill passed by Congress, there are protections."

This is wishful thinking, to put it mildly. Despite its big price tag, economists believe the legislation passed by the Senate on Wednesday is far too modest to meet the scope of the coming economic crash.

The $349 billion the legislation sets aside for small businesses will be exhausted quickly, but experts also believe that it will take months for the aid to reach most small firms. During that time, many of them will simply fail, and you can’t rehire workers if you don’t have a company.

The key provision of the bailout bill is a $454 billion program overseen by Mnuchin that can be leveraged 10 times over by the Federal Reserve to do essentially anything Mnuchin and the Fed want to do with it. But firms that receive this money will still be allowed to lay off up to 10% of their workforces over the next six months-- and that figure would be calculated based on this week’s employment. The 3.3 million people who were laid off last week wouldn’t count.

The coronavirus crash isn’t a simple shortage of cash. It’s a crisis on several different economic fronts that will require months, if not years, of aggressive government action to combat.

Global supply chains are breaking down as companies that manufacture goods in other countries find themselves unable to access factories and materials that they have relied upon for years. The collapse in U.S. consumer spending won’t simply return to normal.

The legislation’s protections for people who are laid off or struggling to pay the bills are simply too paltry to restore the plunge in purchasing power from unprecedented layoffs, not to mention the fear that most families are now experiencing. Every household in America will be pinching their pennies for the foreseeable future, and that loss of spending translates into a loss of revenue for businesses, and lower payrolls. The loss of American purchasing power will resonate both at home and abroad. This may well culminate in a shock to the financial system akin to the meltdown of 2008.

Thursday’s unemployment number is likely undercounting how many people are without work as well. Some people who have tried to apply for unemployment benefits have reported phone lines and websites frozen and jammed up by the crush of applicants. And people who are self-employed, undocumented, students or gig workers are ineligible to apply and therefore not counted.

Don Beyer (New Dem-VA), vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee: "These numbers are far worse than anything we saw during the Great Recession. We need to move quickly to help those that are getting hurt. It not only protects those families but it protects the economy-- so everyone benefits. That is why the bill passed by the Senate to increase unemployment insurance by an extra $600 a week for four months and make billions available for small business grants and loan payments is so important-- only Congress can make sure that those who are out of work right now, and the small businesses that employ them, do not go broke. It is vital that the federal government continue to follow the directives of medical professionals and public health experts, and not yield to the urge to 'reopen' the economy too soon. Doing so could cost lives and drastically deepen and prolong the damage to the economy. Stopping this pandemic and protecting human life is the most important thing we can do, and it is also the best thing we can do for the economy. I continue to urge all who can to please stay home."

As Chris Martenson says every single day in his podcast-- not to mention Erasure-- it didn't have to be this way. Obama made it look so easy that even a brainless blowhard-- who assured us he only hires "the best people"-- could be president. Turns out, he only hires the worst people. In yesterday's NY Times Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs noted that "Of the 75 senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials, including Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary who recently was unable to tell a Senate committee how many respirators and protective face masks were available in the United States. The National Park Service, which like many federal agencies is full of vacancies in key posts, tried this week to fill the job of a director for the national capital region after hordes of visitors flocked to see the cherry blossoms near the National Mall, creating a potential public health hazard as the coronavirus continues to spread. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, workers are scrambling to order medical supplies on Amazon after its leaders, lacking experience in disaster responses, failed to prepare for the onslaught of patients at its medical centers. Empty slots and high turnover have left parts of the federal government unprepared and ill equipped for what may be the largest public health crisis in a century, said numerous former and current federal officials and disaster experts. Some 80 percent of the senior positions in the White House below the cabinet level have turned over during President Trump’s administration, with about 500 people having departed since the inauguration. Mr. Trump is on his fourth chief of staff, his fourth national security adviser and his fifth secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Between Mr. Trump’s history of firing people and the choice by many career officials and political appointees to leave, he now finds himself with a government riddled with vacancies, acting department chiefs and, in some cases, leaders whose professional backgrounds do not easily match up to the task of managing a pandemic."

Trump rules by chaos, fear, personal loyalty and whim. No American president was ever less prepared for something as catastrophic as this pandemic as Trump was. There is no part of the federal government functioning adequately.





Last night, Bob Dylan alerted his fans, via tweet, that this previously unreleased 17 minute song, "Murder Most Foul," is now available. Alexis Petridis for The Guardian: "People have mooted that it’s a standalone release, appearing now because Dylan understandably thinks it’s timely, March 2020 being a pretty apropos moment to release an epic song filled with death and horror and apocalyptic dread ('The age of the antichrist has just begun... it’s 36 hours past judgment day'), or perhaps to give his diehard fans further incentive to stay indoors. You rather get the feeling some of them will still be self-isolating months after the coronavirus all-clear has sounded, delicately unpicking its manifold knotty allusions-- the line about playing it for Carl Wilson down Gower Avenue requires the listener to know that the late Beach Boy sang backing vocals on Desperados Under the Eaves, the concluding track from Warren Zevon’s eponymous 1976 album, which ended with the line 'look away down Gower Avenue'-- and arguing on message boards as to whether the Susie mentioned midway through is just a reference to the Everly Brothers, or to Suze Rotolo, the girlfriend with whom Dylan watched the aftermath of Kennedy assassination unfolding, holed up in their New York apartment... The point is clearly the lyrics, which are dense and intriguing enough to hold your interest, and give the listener plenty to digest. Quite aside from all the cultural references, there’s a narrator that keeps switching from Kennedy himself to Dylan, who in turn seems to keep switching from firebrand mode to the grimly resigned old grouch of Things Have Changed and It’s All Good ('I hate to tell you Mister but only dead men are free') and a plethora of details about the assassination itself: 'Don’t say Dallas don’t love you, Mr President' is a mangling of the last words spoken to Kennedy by Nellie Connally, the first lady of Texas."

Biden For Dummies/Dummies For Biden

People have been asking me if I hate Biden so much because of Bernie and the 2020 presidential primary. The answer is absolutely not; I've always hated Biden. Biden has been a consistent conservative shit-bag from the very first time I ever became aware of him. I don't have a good thought in my memory bank about this guy. I would no more see him run for president than see his old friend Joe Lieberman run. Policy-wise, there is very little to differentiate them.

Biden's campaign can't be anything but one gigantic apology tour.

Biden is a tired old man if he ever made it to the White House, he'd be taking up public space napping.

Biden will run on a return to normalcy and the last time that happened, it set the clock ticking towards one of the worst couple of decade in American history, including the Great Depression.

Biden is associated with corrupt bottom feeders and the worst of the neocon corporate Democratic establishment. A Biden administration would be horrifying for anyone with any kind of a progressive impulse.

Biden is still a pathetic lech who still thinks women are flattered when he fumbles around trying to feel them up.

Biden is a no-can-do kind of candidate with no vision for the country and no expectations for the country; this is all about himself.

Biden is like Hillary except worse-- and with no inspirational aspiration for breaking through a glass ceiling of any kind.

Biden was espisode IV in The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President but he should have been episode I.

Biden is not Barack Obama-- and he's not even Middle Class Joe; he's Status Quo Joe Biden and people outside the Beltway don't like him once they get to know him. He sees himself as the centrist alternative to Bernie. As Alex Shephard wrote last December for the New Republic, "Biden’s public image has been bolstered by his distance from public life. Even as vice president, he largely kept his hands clean of everyday politics in Washington. If Obama was seen as the brain of the administration, Biden was its heart and soul: an emotional man of the people, simultaneously macho and unafraid to cry in public, who famously pressured Obama (albeit accidentally) into supporting gay marriage. That perception has only grown in his retirement, as Trump’s rise has fueled a nostalgia for more decent times in American politics. But if Biden runs, his past will be raked over-- and his political record looks increasingly checkered in today’s light... A Biden candidacy, like Clinton’s, would serve as a reminder of the many flaws of a party establishment that an increasing number of Democrats would like to overthrow (or at least overhaul)."

Yesterday, Zach Carter put Biden's genuinely repulsive record under the microscope in an excruciatingly forthright essay for HuffPo, Joe Biden’s Biggest 2020 Problem Is Joe Biden. Ripping off the carefully constructed scab, Carter asserted, without the slightest exaggeration that "despite cultivating a populist image, the former vice president has spent his career championing policies favored by Republicans and the corporate elite." That doesn't fit with today's activism and political energies, not one bit. "In more than four decades of public service," wrote Carter, "Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now animate his party. If he declares for the presidency, Biden will face a Democratic electorate that has moved on from his brand of politics."

Carter began by contrasting Biden with Ted Kennedy back in the 1970s after Biden was first elected. Kennedy has a an important anti-trust bill "that would block corporate mergers based on the total size of the resulting company" and Biden, at the behest of Coca Cola, opposed it and joined with the Republicans, who, like him have structured their careers around bribery, and defeated it.

Antitrust law was an early salvo in what became a quarter-century struggle to shift the Democratic Party’s base of support away from organized labor toward large corporations. The Biden-Kennedy split carried symbolic connotations beyond the policy implications of their individual votes. Where Kennedy wanted to use the Judiciary Committee to continue the old New Deal-era attack on corporate power, Biden became an advocate for corporate interests that had previously been associated with the Republican Party.

As Biden fought Kennedy on the Coca-Cola bill, he was also trying to thwart a Kennedy effort that would have empowered consumers to sue over a broader swath of antitrust violations. In 1977, the Supreme Court issued a controversial ruling that only those who directly purchased products could sue companies for antitrust violations. That meant that manufacturers who sold their goods through wholesalers could only be sued by the wholesalers, not consumers.

Kennedy prepared a bill that would have reversed the court’s decision, but Biden, in the words of the New York Times, “vexed” him by siding with Republicans. Biden was going out on a limb by bucking leadership. Only two of the committee’s 10 Democrats opposed Kennedy on the bill, and the other was Howell Heflin, a conservative Democrat from Alabama. The bill narrowly made it out of committee after Kennedy made some desperate last-minute concessions to win over Republican Sen. Charles Mathias (R-MD), but the bill never got a floor vote. Kennedy’s broader antitrust ambitions died with it.

Earlier in his career, Biden had been the face of unabashed racism in Delaware, a real hero for whites who didn't want their kids going to school with black kids. He built his early career on the kind of ugly anti-busing racism that people my age will never forget Joe Biden for. For many, Biden was "whitewashed" when Obama used him to "balance" the ticket in 2008. Despite his racist background, Carter found an old 1974 quote from The Washingtonian to share, the helps peg the way Biden has long painted himself, inadvertently or not: "A lot of us sit around thinking up ways to vote conservative just so we don’t come out with a liberal rating. When it comes to civil rights and civil liberties, I’m a liberal but that’s it. I’m really quite conservative on most other issues." So who was he sitting around with in 1974 trying to show how right-wing he was and how much disdain he had for working people? He was tight with the Democratic Majority Whip, former KKK member Robert Byrd (WV) and he loved recounting to his pals John Sparkman (AL), James Eastland (MS), John Stennis (MS), Herman Talmadge (GA), John McClellan (AR), Ernest Hollings (SC), J. Bennett Johnston (LA) how Delaware was a slave state and "we wanted to join the Confederacy" but other states were in the way. But not everyone was sitting around thinking up ways to show how conservative they were with Biden. Gaylord Nelson and William Proxmire of Wisconsin weren't; Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota weren't; Mike Gravel (AK) wasn't; Abraham Ribicoff (CT) wasn't; John Tunney and Alan Cranston of California weren't. Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn of Ohio weren't. There were even Republicans in the Senate to the left of Biden, who was pals with Jesse Helms, in those days. And, wrote Carter, "If Biden wanted low marks from liberal groups, he got them. By 1978, Americans for Democratic Action, the preeminent liberal watchdog group of the time, gave Biden a score of just 50, lower than its ratings for some Republicans. Kennedy typically scored in the 90s."

Biden’s ratings recovered in the 1980s, fueled by a liberal foreign policy record. But on domestic policy-- from school integration to tax policy-- he was functionally allied with the Reagan administration.

He voted for a landmark Reagan tax bill that slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and exempted many wealthy families from the estate tax on unearned inheritances, a measure that cost the federal government an estimated $83 billion in annual revenue. He then called for a spending freeze on Social Security in order to reduce the deficits that tax law helped to create.

“While this program is severe,” Biden said on the Senate floor, “it is the only proposal that will halt the upward spiral of deficits,” which supposedly threatened “an economic and political crisis of extraordinary proportions” within 18 months.

By the time Biden first ran for president in 1987, he had adopted much of Reagan’s anti-government message in his pitch to Democratic voters.

“Government can do many things, but in the final analysis, government can act little more than as a catalyst,” Biden said on the stump. “We must demand more of ourselves... our managers, our workers, our consumers are needed to change their attitudes in order to revitalize this society.”

Biden dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after just a few months, unable to deal with a speechwriting plagiarism scandal that today seems quaint. But his ideas would make their way to the presidency in the persona of Bill Clinton. “I was one of those guys in 1987 who tried to run on a platform that Clinton basically ran on in 1992,” Biden told National Journal in 2001. He dismissed criticisms of the Clinton years as empty “class warfare and populism.”

One of the central planks of that platform was welfare reform-- a policy that exacerbated severe poverty by kicking people off of public assistance if they didn’t get a job. The plan ignored the constraints facing most poor families, who often didn’t have access to transportation needed to hold down a job, had small children to care for, or simply couldn’t find work (a particularly serious problem during a recession). The 1996 welfare reform vote divided the party-- 23 Senate Democrats voted against it and 23 voted for it, including Biden. Clinton signed it into law with support from a unified Republican Party.

Biden was a steadfast supporter of an economic agenda that caused economic inequality to skyrocket during the Clinton years. While the poor and middle class made modest gains as a percentage of their income, a pay increase of 2.5 percent wasn’t terribly meaningful for people who didn’t make much money to begin with. The fortunes of the rich, by contrast, swelled as Clinton cut taxes on capital gains from real estate and financial investments. While Clinton’s 1993 budget raised the top income tax rate from 36 percent to 39.6 percent, the economic gains from his 1997 tax cut were heavily concentrated among the rich. As a result, the top 1 percent’s share of the national income grew dramatically. Biden voted for all of it.

At the same time, landmark banking deregulation further concentrated the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few big players. Biden voted for the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking Act, which allowed banks to expand across state lines. He voted to repeal Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that barred traditional commercial banks from engaging in risky, high-flying securities trades. These laws encouraged Wall Street mega-mergers that created too big to fail and too big to manage behemoths like Citigroup and Wells Fargo. He voted to bar federal or state supervision of credit default swaps, which later became become ”financial weapons of mass destruction″ during the 2008 financial crisis.

These were not controversial votes in the 1990s, a time when Democrats were happy to accept anything that looked like a policy victory over an unhinged Republican opposition. Only three senators opposed Clinton’s 1997 tax cut, and just eight opposed the repeal of Glass-Steagall. But the Wall Street crash discredited the entire agenda. In 2016, Biden himself called his vote to repeal Glass-Steagall the biggest regret of his career.

Biden also spent roughly a decade pursuing an overhaul of American bankruptcy law to discourage debt-strapped households from discharging their financial obligations in court. As then-academic Elizabeth Warren warned at the time, Biden’s bankruptcy law boosted revenues for credit card companies at the expense of families struggling with job losses and medical bills. Unlike the Clinton-era deregulation, the bankruptcy bill was unpopular with Senate Democrats, who voted against it 31 to 14.

Biden partially atoned in the Obama years,  intervening to get presidential support to prohibit banks that benefit from taxpayer perks from speculating with risky securities. But Obama also dispatched Biden to try to ink a “grand bargain” with the House GOP in which Democrats would accept long-term cuts to Social Security in exchange for modest tax increases on the rich. Like just about everything Biden supported in his congressional career, that measure enjoyed tremendous support with centrist elites in both parties.

Biden’s regular Joe credibility is based entirely on his personal background, as someone who grew up working class and speaks with the rough masculinity that Washington interprets as authenticity. But his politics have always relied on elite assumptions about the economy: Deficits are bad, deregulation is smart and the government is at best a clumsy steward of economic prosperity.

Task For Democrats-- Winning Back The Midwest

Yes, this does speak to voters in the Midwest

This morning we took a look at the economic uber-populism that dominates one lane of the Democratic primary-- and influences, for better or worse, another, more centrist lane occupied by careerists like Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, etc. Zach Carter's observation ended the post:

Running for re-election in 1936, FDR noted that the “economic royalists” of “business and financial monopoly, speculation” and “reckless banking” all counted themselves among his political “enemies.” 
“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” Roosevelt said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me-- and I welcome their hatred.” 
For today’s Democrats, that’s the ticket.

I agree; that's the ticket. And I want to run it through a filter Elana Schor and Sara Burnett set up for the Associated Press: 2020 Democrats weigh how to recapture voters in Midwest. A successful Democratic presidential campaign in 2020 needs to recapture the blue-leaning states that Bernie won in the primaries but that the centrist/corporatist who the Democrats burdened themselves with in the general election did so poorly in the general. The Upper Midwest went for Bernie's from-the-gut economic populism and rejected Hillary conventional establishment approach, even after she tried a Bernie-lite approach she barely understood (ala Kamala Harris today). Bernie won Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota and Illinois minus-machine-controlled-wards in Chicago. Hillary lost Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana and drastically underperformed Obama everywhere in the Midwest (while outperforming Obama in many areas of the more traditionally conservative Sun-Belt).

Let's take Indiana as an example. Obama beat McCain there in 2008. In the 2016 primary primary, Bernie beat Hillary 355,256 (52.5%) to 303,382 (47.5%) and a severely corrupt Democratic Establishment led by a still-in-office Debbie Wasserman Schultz promptly awarded Hillary 47 delegates and Bernie 44 delegates. A few months later the Democratic Establishment and their candidate got a perfectly understandable response from Indiana voters. Trump swept all but 4 of Indiana's 92 counties and eviscerated Hillary 1,556,220 (57.2%) to 1,031,953 (37.9%).

No one-- except me (in my most optimistic of moods)-- believes the Democrats are going to wrest Indiana away from Trump next year. But everyone is counting on Wisconsin to come home. Last year the Democrats' very weak, generic gubernatorial candidate, Tony Evers, beat incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker 1,324,307 (49.6%) to 1,295,080 (48.5%) while progressive Democrat Tammy Baldwin crushed Republican Leah Vukmir in the Senate race, 1,472,914 (55.4%) to 1,184,885 (44.6%).

In 2016 Bernie's economic populism resonated among Wisconsin Democrats. Although Wasserman-Schultz fixed the delegate situation so that Bernie got only 49 to Hillary's 47, he crushed her in the primary, 567,936 (56.6%) to 432,767 (43.1%). On primary day Cruz beat Trump, 531,129 to 386,370 but I'm sure you noticed that Bernie beat each of them. Look what happened in Dane County (Madison) on primary day:

• Bernie- 102,585
• Hillary- 61,072
• Cruz- 26,320
• Trump- 20,884
• Kasich- 20,055

Trump beat Hillary in both Racine and Kenosha counties-- must wins for Democrats if they want to win statewide. But Bernie won both counties in the primary. Kenosha:

• Bernie- 14,612
• Trump- 11,139
• Hillary- 10,871
• Cruz- 10,855
• Kasich- 9,730

Racine told a similar story, also worth taking into account today when you hear pundits shrieking about how only a centrist like Biden or Bloomberg or Gillibrand can win in Wisconsin:

• Cruz- 18,698
• Bernie- 14,651
• Hillary- 14,086
• Trump- 11,756
• Kasich- 5,269

Despite a silly narrative that fans of Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Sherrod Brown are pushing, "success in the Midwest comes down to more than geography."

Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law Poll at Milwaukee’s Marquette University, said he’s “somewhat dubious” that being a Midwesterner translates into success at the regional or national level.

“It’s not like his neighborliness did him any favors,” Franklin said of Walker.

More fundamentally, there’s no guarantee that voters are familiar with-- or fond of-- their regional political leaders. In a Marquette Law poll conducted earlier this month, nearly two-thirds of Democrats and independents said they didn’t know enough about Klobuchar to have an opinion about her. Of the eight candidates whose names were included in the poll, only Julian Castro of Texas was less familiar to Wisconsin voters.

With name identification numbers far lower than coastal rivals such as Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Brown and Klobuchar have their work cut out for them. Brown’s new tour, which will also stop in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, could give him a needed boost as he weighs a primary campaign.

As the tour begins, even Brown says he doesn’t see his potential candidacy as solely geared to the Midwest.

“I think it’s an appeal to working-class voters from all regions and of all races,” Brown told The Associated Press, describing his message as a product of “who I am and my whole career,” not shaped by “focus groups.”

Klobuchar also dismissed the notion that her commanding re-election victory in November, in which she won 42 counties that Trump claimed in 2016, makes her uniquely qualified to capture Midwestern voters. Yet she also touted the power of the playbook she’s used to win over Minnesotans “in this time of highly polarized politics, where people are in opposite corners of the boxing ring.”

“While I stand my ground on issues that matter to me, I’m also someone who looks for common ground,” she said in an interview. “That’s only way you can get to higher ground.”

Still, if she mounts a presidential bid-- she said she’ll announce a decision “shortly”-- Klobuchar could surprise rivals in Iowa, a neighboring state she’s visited multiple times since Trump’s election. David Johnson, a former Iowa state senator who switched his affiliation from Republican to independent in 2016 out of opposition to Trump, said Klobuchar is a familiar face who shares the workhorse sensibilities of many people in the state.

“She’s real knowledgeable, and she has a real sense of humility about it,” Johnson said. “She’s level-headed. She’s not a grenade-thrower.”

Recalling Klobuchar’s pitch to bridge the divide between rural and metro areas during remarks to the Iowa Farmers Union last month, Johnson added that “a majority of Americans want some sanity to return to Washington and the Congress, and I believe she’s the one candidate that can bring that together, rather than both parties operating in the extremes.”

Brown’s keen focus on blue-collar areas feeling the economic wallop of globalization has its own dark-horse potential. He also brings a fluency in civil rights issues that could break through with black and Hispanic voters in early primary states that follow the overwhelmingly white electorate in Iowa.

Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper pointed to one small but meaningful touch that’s succeeded for Brown: publicly name-checking their state’s smaller manufacturing hubs, a signal that he cares about areas seeking “a role that’s positive in this 21st-century economy.”

Pepper recalled that Democrats instinctively pushed back at Trump’s call to “make America great again” in 2016, but the president connected with Midwestern voters who “thought, at least they saw someone who seemed to appreciate they are struggling.”

That connection is at the core of the presidential pitch from another Midwestern hopeful, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. “To me, the really important thing to do in the so-called Rust Belt is to demonstrate there’s a way forward that isn’t soaked in nostalgia,” the 37-year-old Buttigieg said this month as he announced his candidacy. “So, yeah, we have a relationship to our past, but we’re not trying to recapture it.”

No One Gets To The Left Of Bernie

If the Trump-hating/AOC-hating/Elizabeth Warren-hating/Bernie-hating, clueless Starbucks Guy is running on reducing a deficit his class built up and on cutting what he calls "entitlements," and on opposing Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal and fair taxes on the wealthy, why doesn't he just run as the Republican his top aides and advisors all are?

Earlier in the week Miss McConnell and John Thune proposed repealing the weak estate tax, which is expected to be paid by fewer than 2,000 Americans a year. As Erik Sherman pointed out for Forbes readers, "The PR game that was waged to promote and forcibly sell the massive tax cut of 2017-- a move that has only begun to put the country into trouble-- is over. Corporations, the rich, and the politicians that serve them had their way. Now that particular façade has been dropped by those who erected it and the likely truth is out. The $1.5 trillion giveaway was supposed to create new jobs and significant investment by companies in facilities and equipment, all of which would drive economic growth." It turns out that 84% had not changed investment or hiring plans because of the drastically diminished corporate tax cuts and only 4% of corporations hired more people because of the tax cuts. The vast majority did nothing more than they would otherwise have. Trickle down/voodoo economics still doesn't work-- except for the already very wealthy. McConnell, Thune and the rest of the GOP are waging class war against the rest of us-- we most of us don't even know it. "GOP senators are now arguing to end the estate or inheritance tax because it's such a burden-- on fewer than 2,000 families a year," Sherman continued. "Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, and John Thune on the Senate Finance Committee are all saying that there has to be a big cut." How about a guillotine?



Yesterday, there was something strange about Sydney Ember's NY Times headline-- in 2019, rather than say 1980-- saying Sanders Unveils Estate Tax Plan, Joining Democrats Who Want to Tax the Rich. Bernie, she wrote, "introduced legislation on Thursday that would increase the number of wealthy Americans subject to the estate tax. With the bill, Mr. Sanders joins a growing chorus of left-wing politicians calling for new ways to tax the rich. Welcome to the party begun by Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren? Ummm.... maybe Sydney's headline writer is a 5 year old child prodigy who missed what Bernie had been talking about since 1970?

If passed and signed into law-- it may take a few years-- Bernie's new bill, the For the 99.8% Act, would establish a progressive estate tax on the fortunes of the top 0.2 percent of Americans and significantly increase rates on billionaires, raising $2.2 trillion from the nation's 588 billionaires. Bernie: "At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, when the three richest Americans own more wealth than 160 million Americans, it is literally beyond belief that the Republican leadership wants to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top 0.2 percent. Our bill does what the American people want by substantially increasing the estate tax on the wealthiest families in this country and dramatically reducing wealth inequality. From a moral, economic, and political perspective our nation will not thrive when so few have so much and so many have so little."

His bill only applies to the wealthiest 0.2% of Americans. It would establish a 45% tax on the value of an estate between $3.5 million and $10 million; a 50% tax on the value of an estate between $10 million and $50 million; a 55% tax on the value of an estate in excess of $50 million; and a 77% tax on the value of an estate above $1 billion-- a return to the top rate from 1941 through 1976, while also closing tax loopholes that have allowed billionaire families to pass fortunes from one generation to the next without paying their fair share of taxes. BONUS: "The Kochs, a family worth over $97 billion, would owe an estate tax of up to $74 billion. And the family of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who has a net worth of more than $130 billion, would pay an estate tax of up to $100 billion."

The For the 99.8% Act was endorsed by a number of leading economists including Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Robert Reich and Darrick Hamilton.

"The estate tax was a key pillar of the progressive tax revolution that the United States ushered one century ago. It prevented self-made wealth from turning into inherited wealth and helped make America more equal. However, the estate tax is dying of neglect, as tax avoidance schemes are multiplying and left unchallenged. As wealth concentration is surging in the United States, it is high time to revive the estate tax, plug the loopholes, and make it more progressive. Sen. Sanders' bill is a bold and welcome leap forward in this direction," said Emmanuel Saez, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

“One century ago, the US invented steeply progressive estate and income taxes in order to maintain the egalitarian and democratic legacy of the country. Today's US is becoming even more unequal than Pre-World War I Europe. The way out is stronger investment in skills, higher paying jobs and a more progressive tax system. Sen. Sanders' estate tax bill, including a 77 percent tax rate on estate values above $1 billion, is an important step in this direction,” said Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics professor.

One of the country's best political-economics reporters, Zach Carter took this on from another perspective yesterday. Carter wrote that "Socialism is having a big moment in America. After a surge in popularity during the financial crisis of 2008, the long-verboten political label at last lost its toxicity after Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run and the election of democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in 2018. Among self-identified Democrats, socialism is now more popular than capitalism, reflecting a trend that has been evident among young voters for years. Bankers and billionaires are, of course, desperate to reverse this political tide. Eyeing the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, the CEO of one giant bank recently told Politico that the party’s nominee “can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders.” To plutocrat Michael Bloomberg, Sanders is a “demagogue” preaching “unreason,” while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) will transform the United States into a “non-capitalistic” system where “people are starving to death,” like “Venezuela.” The rhetoric from the 0.01 percent is more than a little overheated. But for most people, Warren and Sanders hail from the same left flank of the Democratic Party-- both are supporters of enacting Medicare for all, breaking up the banks and dramatically increasing taxes on the very wealthy... Whatever Warren and Sanders say to establish their political brands, the two senators do in fact represent a very similar way of thinking about politics. That’s why billionaires hate them both.

All of these proposals transfer money and power from the super-rich to the not-rich. Take postal banking. About 32.6 million households rely on a check-cashing service, payday lender or other expensive, small-dollar financial bottom-feeder at least once a year, according to the FDIC. On average, these households earn about $25,500 a year and spend nearly 10 percent of their income-- $2,412-- on these sketchy financial products. That’s over $82 billion going from hard-up homes to predators every year. You can deal with payday lenders a lot of different ways: ban them, regulate them or, the preferred tack of Warren and Sanders, have the government make them obsolete. If every household can get a low-fee bank account with the Post Office, they won’t have to turn to legalized loan sharking to get by. That’s bad news for payday loan executives, like ACE Cash Express CEO Jay Shipowitz, who made almost $4.5 million in 2004 alone. Is postal banking socialism or reformed capitalism? Yes.

In America today, the super-rich not only control an outrageous share of the national wealth, they also exercise a degree of political power incompatible with basic democratic principles. The choice for Democrats in 2020 is not really about policy minutia-- it’s about power-- who has it, and who doesn’t. And both Sanders and Warren have proved they are willing to confront the powerful and attack their sources of power. We can call this socialism, New Deal liberalism or Jeffersonian democracy-- whatever the label, it’s a critical ideological test for anyone who wants to be the next president of the United States.

Running for re-election in 1936, FDR noted that the “economic royalists” of “business and financial monopoly, speculation” and “reckless banking” all counted themselves among his political “enemies.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” Roosevelt said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me-- and I welcome their hatred.”

For today’s Democrats, that’s the ticket.

Yeah, that populist approach that Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson and Jeff Merkley are taking... not this:

What Do The Results Of The U.K. Election Tell Us About Our Own Politics?

Writing for Bloomberg about the Conservatives' disastrous snap election in the U.K. Thursday, Tim Ross noted that "For some Conservative lawmakers, who saw their 20-point poll lead over Labour evaporate, May is now little more than a caretaker, holding the fort while a wounded party puts itself back together and finds another leader for whenever the next election comes. That vote, they say, could come within months, if the minority government-- propped up by the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland-- falls apart."

How did the Conservatives projected landslide turn into a rout? On May 10 the media leaked Labour's manifesto-- Corbyn’s entire program to crank up spending and raise taxes-- and the "press tore it to pieces." Unfortunately for the Conservatives, Corbyn's "plans for pumping money into schools and nationalizing rail transport captured the public imagination after years of grinding austerity." [I want to just note here that the DCCC still insists that congressional candidates avoid contentious issues, not put up issues pages on their websites, and, worst of all, try to run as Republican-lite candidates. It's why they have seen a decade of catastrophic failure and they are determined to do it again-- and, worse yet, teach it to their poxy candidates and campaign staffers at the new DCCC U, an operation that will bake even more endemic failure into the Democratic cake for another generation. Back to the U.K.]

May’s Tories, meantime, were drafting their own manifesto under the leadership of her co-chief of staff, Nick Timothy, and Cabinet Office Minister Ben Gummer. It was these two men who got the blame for the Conservatives’ controversial policy, announced on May 18, that would have required seniors needing help with daily care to pay out of pocket until they ran down their assets, including housing, to the value of 100,000 pounds ($127,000).

The outcry was immediate against what came to be known as the dementia tax. After just four days, a rattled prime minister ditched the policy, pledged to cap the total amount that anyone will be forced to pay for care in old age.

Are the Democrats at least learning that cutting health care benefits is a terrible electoral strategy? The Republicans certainly aren't-- which is why Paul Ryan's own seat in southeast Wisconsin is now considered to be in serious jeopardy as progressive forces help put together an electoral team for iron worker and union activist Randy Bryce that is likely to be the closest thing to a presidential campaign in the 2018 cycle. Expect more news on this by midweek.

An OpEd by author Rachel Shabi in the NY Times this weekend reminded her readers that progressives in the U.K. "want the party to win not for the sake of winning, but in order to bring Labour’s economic and social agenda to Britain, to measurably improve people’s lives."

Part of this extraordinary success was a result of the party’s campaign. Fun, energetic, innovative and inspiring, it created its own momentum, with organic support mushrooming out of the most unlikely places, flooding social media with viral memes and messages: Rappers and D.J.s, soccer players, economists and television personalities alike climbed aboard the Corbyn project. Momentum, a grass-roots organization of Corbyn supporters, activated the party’s estimated 500,000 members-- many of whom had joined because Mr. Corbyn was elected as leader-- into canvassing efforts across the country, including, crucially, in up-for-grabs districts. Supporters were further encouraged by the sight of Labour candidates demolishing long-hated Conservatives on television, appearances that were swiftly turned into video clips and raced around the internet.

But the main mobilizer of support was the party’s politics. For decades, Labour has been resolutely centrist, essentially offering a slightly kinder version of neoliberal consensus politics. Those on the left had long said that this was what had caused the party’s slow decline, a hemorrhaging of support from its traditional working-class voters. With Mr. Corbyn at its helm, the party tacked firmly to the left, proposing to tax the few for the benefit of the many and offering major national investment projects, funding for the welfare state, the scrapping of university tuition fees and the re-nationalization of rail and energy companies.

It was a hopeful vision for a fairer society, offered at a time when the country is experiencing wage stagnation and spiraling living costs, with many buckling under because of the economic crash of 2008 and the Conservative Party’s savage austerity cuts that followed. Given the chance for the first time in decades to vote for something else, something better, a surprising number of voters took it. Young people, in particular, seized this offer: With youth turnout unusually high at 72 percent, it’s clear that Labour brought them to the ballot box in droves.

But leave it to HuffPo's Zach Carter, as we mentioned last night, to explicitly-- and with exquisite perception-- tie the great results for Labour to the morass in U.S. Democratic politics where, he wrote, "Democrats must choose between being the party of the Good Aristocrats and the party that fights Authoritarians. He noted that "the centrist, finance-friendly approach of George W. Bush [and Bill Clinton] ally Tony Blair had been upended, and Labour was returning to the populist thinking that defined it for most of the 20th century. But Corbyn’s victory is about much more than the internal dynamics of The Left. It is a critical event for anti-authoritarian politics more generally, one with implications that span the globe, and that carry a particular resonance in the United States in the age of Donald Trump."

Do You Think The Economy Will Escape A Trump Meltdown?

From time to time I asked my financial advisor when she thinks the Trump Crash will come. She doesn't see one coming any time soon. I hope she's right. Do you know who Jim Rogers is? I used to see him on TV all the time when I watched financial news programs. Usually termed a "legendary investor," he was one of the founders of the Quantum Fund. He was just interviewed by Business Insider's Henry Blodget. He predicted "a market crash in the next few years, one that he says will rival anything he has seen in his lifetime." (He was born in 1942.)

He grabbed the first opportunity to make his prediction-- less than 30 seconds in: "Some stocks in America are turning into a bubble. The bubble’s gonna come. Then it’s gonna collapse and you should be very worried. But Henry, this is good for you. Because someone has to report it. So you have job security. You’re a lucky soul." Blodget, of course, asked when and why. Rogers said "Later this year or next... Write it down."

Well, it’s interesting because these things always start where we’re not looking. In 2007, Iceland went broke. People said, ‘Iceland? Is that a country? They have a market?’ And then Ireland went broke. And then Bear Stearns went broke. And Lehman Brothers went broke. They spiral like that. Always happens where we’re not looking. I don’t know. It could be an American pension plan that goes broke and many of them are broke, as you know. It could be some country we’re not watching. It could be all sorts of things. It could be war. Unlikely to be war but it’s going to be something. When you’re watching Business Insider and you see, ‘That’s so interesting. I didn’t know that company could go broke.’ It goes broke. Send me an email and then I’ll start watching.

So how bad will it be?

Rogers: It’s going to be the worst in your lifetime.

Blodget: I’ve had some pretty big ones in my lifetime.

Rogers: It’s going to be the biggest in my lifetime and I’m older than you. No, it’s going to be serious stuff. We’ve had financial problems in America-- let’s use America-- every four to seven years, since the beginning of the republic. Well, it’s been over eight since the last one. This is the longest or second longest in recorded history, so it’s coming. And the next time it comes-- you know, in 2008, we had a problem because of debt. Henry, the debt now-- that debt is nothing compared to what’s happening now. In 2008, the Chinese had a lot of money saved for a rainy day. It started raining. They started spending the money. Now, even the Chinese have debt and the debt is much higher. The federal reserves, the central bank in America, the balance sheet is up over five times, since 2008. It’s going to be the worst in your lifetime, my lifetime too. Be worried.

Blodget: I am worried.

Rogers: Good. Good.

Blodget:  Can anybody rescue us?

Rogers: They will try. What’s going to happen is they’re going to raise interest rates some more. Then when things start going really bad, people are going to call and say, ‘You must save me. It’s Western civilization. It’s going to collapse.’ And the Fed, who is made up of bureaucrats and politicians, will say, ‘Well, we better do something.’ And they’ll try but it won’t work. It’ll cause some rallies but it won’t work this time.

Blodget: And we are in a situation where Western civilization already seems to be possibly collapsing, even with the market going up all the time. Often when you do have a financial calamity, you get huge turmoil in the political system. What happens politically if that happens?

Rogers: Well, that’s why I moved to Asia. My children speak Mandarin because of what’s coming. You’re going to see governments fail. You’re going to see countries fail, this time around. Iceland failed last time. Other countries fail. You’re going to see more of that. You’re going to see parties disappear. You’re going to see institutions that have been around for a long time-- Lehman Brothers had been around over 150 years. Gone. Not even a memory for most people. You’re going to see a lot more of that next around, whether it’s museums or hospitals or universities or financial firms.

And not a whisper or even a hint about Trump causing anything. This morning, HuffPo's Zach Carter, writing about what Democrats can learn from Corbyn's big win in the U.K., was more insightful about the relationship between politics and financial (and economic) swings. "Financial crises," he wrote, "foment authoritarianism. This idea is not controversial in Europe, where authoritarian scars are still historically fresh. Stateside, many financial journalists intuitively grasp the connection between banking crashes and far-right politics, after witnessing the pattern in country after country... As Donald Trump surged in the Republican primaries, a flurry of academic papers began making the rounds highlighting the moderately high median incomes of his supporters. These are still trickling out. They continue to serve as feature fodder for centrist publications and continue to be largely irrelevant to the political landscape. It doesn’t matter how rich the authoritarians are. Their key feature is their authoritarianism."

We have had few financial crises in the United States since the Great Depression, and our political thinkers are accustomed to grappling with aristocratic conservatism, not authoritarianism. Aristocratic conservatism-- the type espoused by House Speaker Paul Ryan and establishment Republicans of the past 50 years-- seeks to protect the financial interests and social status of the wealthy. Banking elites want low capital gains taxes, but they are in many ways more protective of their position on top of the American social hierarchy. Even as he scuttled prosecutions for financial fraud and protected bonuses for bailed-out bankers, former President Barack Obama prompted hysterical denunciations from Wall Street by casually dismissing “fat cat bankers” in a single TV interview early in his first term.

The Democratic Party can sometimes defeat aristocratic conservatives by publicly shaming them as extremists. Aristocratic conservatives are sensitive to elite social pressure and respond to attacks on their dignity. This was a key plank of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 general election strategy, and in some ways, it worked: Clinton really did win over a big chunk of millionaires who had previously voted Republican.

But shame is a terrible strategy for defeating authoritarian candidates after a financial crisis. Banking meltdowns don’t unleash a wave of aristocratic sympathy. They cause widespread, unfair suffering and create tremendous uncertainty. People lose their jobs and homes through no fault of their own. Even working families who survived the 2008 crash relatively unscathed did not do so without having to confront new psychological strains. Millions of people who kept their jobs had to come to the aid of family members who did not. The prospect of economic ruin was always right around the corner.

Authoritarians exploit this uncertainty by promising stability, order and safety. This is not a mathematical equation guaranteeing higher incomes. It is a social rebellion against the governing aristocracy that has just failed and-- even in the most just and perfect bank rescue-- enjoyed the political prioritization of its own interests over the needs of the broader citizenry.

In the wake of a financial crisis, the public does not interpret centrist politics as an appeal to moderation or reasoned debate. It sees centrism as an attempt to rehabilitate the legitimacy of the aristocracy which has just pushed the country into disaster. “Countrymen, I have been approved by the finest minds of the old order as an eminently reasonable leader!” is a poor slogan when measured against “I will crush your enemies and restore your glory!”

A much better pitch? “I am on your team and will protect you.” This works very well with promises to expand and improve social welfare programs. “I will break the cheating aristocrats who did this to you” can also be effective. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put the Democratic Party in power for only the third time since the Civil War by campaigning on a combination of both messages.

Whatever the slogan, anti-authoritarian politicians need to make a clean break with what failed and offer a psychological alternative to authoritarianism’s call for order through violence and suspension of civil liberties.

The specific policy agenda is important-- politicians need good ideas that people actually like. Corbyn appears to have significantly boosted the youth vote by promising to abolish college tuition fees entirely. But policy mostly functions as a guidepost for voters. A leader’s tone and presentation matter just as much-- the point is to project a sense of safety and community. Corbyn nailed that part, too. When May called the election, she and the Conservatives believed Corbyn’s left-wing priorities would alienate him from voters. His stump speeches did the exact opposite.

...Trump is the American strain of the authoritarian virus that has infected much of Europe. In France, its standard-bearer is Marine Le Pen. In Greece, it is the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. Finland has the True Finns; Hungary has Jobbik. In the U.K., this faction was represented by Nigel Farage and the U.K. Independence Party, which won 4 million parliamentary votes in 2015 and successfully mobilized a campaign to push their country out of the European Union by demonizing refugees and promising better health care for native Britons.

Farage is still at it. During a Fox Business interview with Maria Bartiromo last week, he raised the prospect of mass “internment” of “thousands” of terror suspects. But under May, the chief vehicle for authoritarian politics in the U.K. has become the Conservative Party. She has embraced Farage’s Brexit cause and floated the repeal of human rights laws in the name of stability in opposition to Corbyn’s “weak” approach to terrorism. On Thursday night, UKIP was decimated, its vote split between the new ethno-nationalist haven in the Conservatives, and the populist alternative offered by Corbyn’s Labour party.

The same union of authoritarian insurgents and the aristocratic old guard is taking place in the United States. After campaigning as an authoritarian populist, Trump has filled his administration with Goldman Sachs alums and is embracing the aristocratic economic agenda of Paul Ryan’s Republican Party.

And the Republican aristocracy, with a few Never-Trumper exceptions, is reciprocating. Just ask Paul Ryan about James Comey’s Senate testimony. Then ask him about Dodd-Frank.

Corbyn made significant gains where nearly every political expert in Europe expected him to march off an electoral cliff. He did so by abandoning dyed-in-the-wool aristocratic Tory voters, energizing new, young Labour voters with policy, and making a direct psychological challenge to authoritarian appeals.

There’s a lesson there for the Democratic Party. It can be the party of the Good Aristocrats, or it can be the Anti-Authoritarian Party. But it can’t be both.

Who Has Bad Judgment?-- Wall Street Version

Zach Carter is one of Huff Po's most perceptive reporters and yesterday he warned his readers that while we were all distracted by the clown show Trump had finally delivered one on big campaign promise-- not for his voters, of course, but for his Wall Street donors-- he pretty much gutted Dodd-Frank. "Trump," he reminded us, "campaigned on conflicting promises about big banks. One minute, he was going to stick it to the corrupt financial insiders who had wrecked the middle class. The next, he’d vow to liberate our benevolent princes of capital from crushing regulations Obama had cruelly imposed." Pushed by the traditional GOP swamp creatures all around him-- from Pence, Ryan, Priebus and Hensarling to Mnuchin, Ross and Cohn-- the Trump Regime has been all about deregulation.

Last week, a council of top regulators quietly met to discuss the future of the Volcker rule-- the most important structural change Obama established for the financial system. A few days later, a freshly installed Trump official went further, threatening to defang the rule “unilaterally” by “reinterpreting” its entire purpose.

The rule is basically dead, Keefe Bruyette & Woods analyst Brian Gardner wrote in a note to clients last Monday: “Examiners can start giving banks the benefit of the doubt regarding compliance with Volcker almost immediately.”

The Volcker rule was conceived as an update to the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law, which banned traditional banks from engaging in risky, high-stakes securities ventures, which became the domain of investment banks, hedge funds and other firms that didn’t rely on federal support. Until its repeal in the 1990s, Glass-Steagall put an end to many conflicts of interest that had plagued banking during the Roaring Twenties, and prevented government subsidies from flowing into speculative securities schemes, which made it harder for big crazy asset bubbles to accumulate.

Glass-Steagall was as powerful as a sledgehammer, but only slightly more precise. The Volcker rule tried to draw a finer distinction. Instead of banning banks from the securities business outright, it only barred proprietary trading. Banks were no longer allowed to make reckless bets for their own accounts, but other types of trading to help clients meet legitimate market needs would be permitted. Done right, the Volcker rule would have been a technocratic improvement on Glass-Steagall, providing all the benefits of its New Deal predecessor without its costs.

It reflected the broader approach Obama and congressional Democrats took with Wall Street reform, treating the financial crisis as a mechanical malfunction best corrected by expert regulators who could write specific rules for nuanced situations. The economic system, they believed, could not be properly repaired with blunt instruments or lines in the sand.

Twenty-first-century banking is indeed a nasty thicket of money and numbers. But the financial crisis was more than a technocratic breakdown. It was an abuse of power. And the 2010 Dodd-Frank law didn’t really try to reshape the political dynamic between Wall Street and Washington. A handful of financial titans retained control over multitrillion-dollar institutions tasked with socially essential functions. They were not prosecuted for fraud, they continued to lobby both Congress and federal agencies with ferocity, and their firms continued to provide lucrative jobs for political operatives from both parties. Against this mountain, Obama set the willpower of individual regulators.

It didn’t work. Consider the Volcker rule, which ran into trouble almost immediately. “One of the world’s largest banking firms” enlisted the Podesta Group-- a lobbying powerhouse founded by Democratic power brokers John and Tony Podesta-- to water down the rule in Congress. The Podesta Group still boasts about the effort on its website, under “Wins.”

“The client’s desired language on the ‘Volcker Rule’ was passed into law,” reads the page, titled “Challenging Wall Street Reform To Defend Jobs.” The lobbying barrage continued at the regulatory agencies, whose final version of the rule stretched to 300 pages of loopholes, exemptions and special considerations. Bank lobbyists succeeded in delaying the implementation of key elements of Volcker for years. Now the beast is being put out of its misery by Trump appointees with close ties to the financial industry, demonstrating that Wall Street’s political clout remains as strong as ever. Volcker’s destroyers will include former bank lawyer Keith Noreika, along with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs alum, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton, who served as Goldman’s bailout attorney.

A similar fate will soon follow for the derivatives regulations and other rules written during the Obama years. Even capital requirements, the simplest and last line of defense against bad bank behavior, are under assault following the resignation of Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo. We will never know if Obama’s tweaks and adjustments would have prevented or ameliorated another financial crisis. Today, big banks are bigger than they were before the crash, and are returning to pre-crash levels of oversight. The potential for financial turmoil under an erratic president is just as strong as the potential for foreign policy dislocation.

The one element of Dodd-Frank that will likely survive the Trump presidency is also the only aspect that seriously restructured the power relationship between government and finance. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is important not because it involves a host of complicated new rules-- stealing from customers was illegal before, during and after the crisis-- but because it changes the way these protections are enforced. Prior to Obama, consumer banking products were regulated by five different agencies that competed with each other for “assessment” fees paid by the banks they regulated. This gave banks political power over their regulators-- an agency that was too tough on consumer protection risked losing its banks, and the funding they brought, to another regulator.

Obama scrapped this regime in favor of a single consumer finance overseer, the CFPB, and charged lifelong consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren with setting up the agency and hiring critical personnel. This established a new power center in Washington capable of challenging not only big banks, but also broken bureaucracy. When Obama’s Education Department turned a blind eye to student loan abuses, the CFPB took action. It has returned over $11 billion in ill-gotten bank gains to customers since its inception.

So the next meltdown probably won’t be caused by consumer fraud. Other than that, we’re pretty screwed.

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the corrupt nest of thieves headed by Texas crook Jeb Hensarling-- the House Financial Services Committee-- has almost been entirely bought off by the banksters. Millions and millions of dollars in bribes have gone to corrupt Republicans like Hensarling ($7,372,690), Ed Royce ($6,931,797), Steve Stivers ($4,192,037), Patrick McHenry ($3,949,286), Peter King ($2,761,274), Sean Duffy ($2,376,646) and Blaine Luetkemeyer ($2,371,565) and to corrupt Democrats on the committee as well-- Jim Himes ($5,545,212), Gregory Meeks ($3,120,688), DavidScott ($2,770,894), Charlie Crist ($2,474,349), John Delaney ($2,100,202) and Kyrsten Sinema ($1,662,043).

There's no doubt the House is going to pass the legislation the bank lobbyists have written for Hensarling, destroying as many consumer protections as they can, especially the CFPB. But even McConnell admits that the greed and avarice of the banksters and the bribed House members won't get the legislation through the Senate for Señor Trumpanzee to sign. McConnell told Bloomberg News "I’d love to do something about Dodd-Frank, particularly with regard to community banks but that would require Democratic involvement. I’m not optimistic... So far, my impression is the Democrats on the banking committee believe that Dodd-Frank is something akin to the Ten Commandments."

Despite McConnell’s remarks, helping community lenders hasn’t been the main sticking point in negotiations between Republicans and Democrats. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, the banking panel’s top Democrat, has said he supports relaxing rules for the smallest banks. But Democrats have been vocal in resisting any changes to Dodd-Frank that they say will aid Wall Street, such as scrapping Volcker Rule trading restrictions and weakening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

On Tuesday, Brown pushed back on McConnell’s contention that Democrats are blocking efforts for a bipartisan compromise.

“The Senate Republican leader seems to have forgotten the harm Wall Street’s greed and reckless behavior caused to millions of working families and taxpayers,” Brown said in a statement. “If this were really about community banks, we might have come to an agreement years ago. Republicans are once again using them as leverage to help a rogue’s gallery of special interests.”

[Senate Banking Committee chair Mike] Crapo has previously said efforts to revise Dodd-Frank would be slow as most major bills require 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Republicans hold just 52 seats. The House is moving faster, with that chamber’s Financial Services Committee approving legislation earlier this month that would alter many of the law’s key provisions. House Speaker Paul Ryan has said he wants the legislation to move to a floor vote as soon as possible.

Absent action by Congress, McConnell said rolling back Dodd-Frank will fall to the Trump administration. After a slow start, President Donald Trump has made progress in recent weeks in filling the agencies that oversee Wall Street with his own appointees.

Trump, who has called Dodd-Frank a “disaster” that has made it difficult for businesses to get loans, signed an executive order in February requiring regulators to examine financial rules. The Treasury Department is scheduled to issue a report on the findings next month, kicking off what the administration has promised will be a broad rewrite of regulations implemented under Dodd-Frank.

Unless the situation in Congress changes, we will be “stuck with whatever the administration thinks it can do on its own to modify the impact of Dodd-Frank,” McConnell said.