The exchange is now famous.
Bernie calling Hillary out on her Wall-Street-funded campaign, and Hillary responding with a bizarre answer invoking women and 9/11.
From the Washington Post transcript,
“SANDERS: ‘I have never heard a candidate never, who has received huge amounts of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street, from the military industrial complex, not one candidate say, oh, these campaign contributions will not influence me. I'm going to be independent. Well, why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something. Everybody knows that.
Once again, I am running a campaign differently than any other candidate. We are relying on small campaign donors, 750,000 of them, 30 bucks a piece. That's who I'm indebted to.’
CLINTON: ‘Well John, wait a minute. Wait a minute, he has basically used his answer to impugn my integrity. Let's be frank here.’
SANDERS: ‘No, I have not.’
CLINTON: ‘Oh, wait a minute, Senator. You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small. And I'm very proud that for the first time a majority of my donors are women, 60 percent. So, I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.’”
The articles are everywhere —
Huffington Post, Washington Post, CNBC, Politico, Washington Times, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Week, Chicago Tribune, Breitbart, etc.
As are Hillary’s fire-putter-outers —
At the Central Iowa Democrats barbecue on Sunday, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, said,
“I think she’s got a strong record on Wall Street reform. She’s put forward the strongest policies on Wall Street reform. I think that she was feeling that unfair charges were made and she pushed back.”
And Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, added that —
"The point that she was making is, as senator, she did things that were supportive of Wall Street, particularly after 9/11… But she also spoke out as senator, and now, when she thought they were going too far and pursuing reckless behavior."
Clinton’s campaign is saying the 9/11 deflection doesn’t matter ‘cause she’s got a “strong record” and the “strongest policies.” She’s the best candidate for “Wall Street reform” because of what she’s done and what she’s calling for now, making her Wall Street donors inconsequential.
But in the Democratically controlled Senate, Clinton introduced 140 bills between 2007 and 2008 (before, during, and after the economic crisis), yet only —
“...Five were related to housing finance or foreclosures… Only one of those five secured any co-sponsors. No Senate committee took action on any of them and they died without any further discussion.”
That runs counter to her “getting things done” claim.
And —
“When a broad housing bill finally became law in 2008, Clinton was not among the more than dozen senators credited by party leaders as playing a key role.
Clinton didn’t actually do anything to stop the housing bubble from getting larger, popping, or happening all over again. She didn't even follow the people who were working to protect the American people, let alone lead them. That doesn’t look like a “strong record” to me.
Furthermore —
Clinton in 2007 publicly decried a tax break for hedge-fund and private-equity executives — and continues to do so in her current campaign. But she didn’t sign on as a supporter of a Senate bill that would have curbed the break.
[When] her rival for the [2008] nomination, then-Sen. Barack Obama, became a co-sponsor on July 12… Clinton gave a campaign speech [the next day] criticizing the tax provision. Yet she still didn’t put her name to the legislation, according to records.
Hillary publicly advocates for closing rich people’s tax breaks, but doesn’t back it up in Congress. She follows Obama, she follows Sanders, but only in speeches and campaign trail rhetoric, not in actually supporting legislation to close the loopholes her Wall Street donors enjoy.
Hillary Clinton’s words do not reflect her actions.
And the speaking out Palmieri cited as proof of Clinton’s “strong record?” That was when, in Clinton’s own words,
“I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 — before the big crash that we had. I basically said, ‘Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.’”
...But then the economy crashed. Less than a month later. Her words were the opposite of effective — they were totally ineffective. She might as well never have spoken them.
And she’s fudging the details on what she actually said —
From The Daily Beast,
“[She] gave a shout-out to her ‘wonderful donors’ in the audience and asked the bankers to voluntarily suspend foreclosures and freeze interest rates on adjustable subprime mortgages. She praised Wall Street for its role in creating the nation’s wealth...”
“[And] said the brewing economic troubles weren’t mainly the fault of banks, ‘not by a long shot,’ but added they needed to shoulder responsibility for their role. While there was plenty of blame to go around for the spate of reckless lending, and while Wall Street may not have created the foreclosure crisis, it ‘certainly had a hand in making it worse’ and ‘needs to help us solve it.’
Finally, Clinton said, if the banks didn’t take the voluntary steps she proposed, ‘I will consider legislation to address the problem.’
The lenders did not adopt Clinton’s proposals.”
She told them they weren’t responsible for what was happening, when they absolutely were. She said there was “plenty of blame to go around,” when, no, the blame went squarely at their big financial institution feet. She praised Wall Street for creating “the nation’s wealth,” the “nation” being the top 3%. And then she politely asked them to voluntarily stop being so greedy, all the while thanking them for giving her money.
She didn’t go in there demanding they listen to her. That “Cut it out!” was a toothless plea more along the lines of, “If you don’t mind, sirs and madams, would you pretty please stop screwing over my constituents?”
Her record is not “strong.” She doesn’t breathe fire for us. She won’t force her donors to stop careening down the dangerous path that economists are worried might crash our economy again, because she didn’t in 2007. Instead, she politely asked them to change voluntarily, and then said, if they still wouldn't, she’d maybe begin to “consider legislation to address the problem.”
Surprise, surprise — they didn’t do what she asked. Despite Hillary shaking a kindly finger at them, Wall Street still plunged this country into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
It’s exactly the vein of policymaking she’s proposing now. Careful, cautious, light regulation — seeing if Wall Street misbehaves yet again before actually putting some bite in our laws.
It works for her, because it doesn’t make Wall Street mad and continues to get her in office. But it doesn’t work for us. We need a little bit more than a “tut tut.” We need a smashing up, a restructuring, an exactly what Bernie Sanders is calling for, of the financial system in this country.
The big banks have got to be broken up, which Bernie wants, and Hillary does not.
Yet she claims that her plan is,
“...tougher, more effective and more comprehensive because I go after all of Wall Street, not just the big banks...
We have to go after what's called the shadow banking industry, those hedge funds. Look at what happened in '08, AIG a big insurance company, Lehman Brothers, an investment bank helped to bring our economy down. So I wanna look at the whole problem. And that's why my proposal is much more comprehensive than anything else that's been put forth.”
Sanders is not advocating we go after certain big banks and not others. Bernie wants to break up the “too-big-to-fail financial institutions,” and that includes the insurance companies, the investment banks, and the shadow banking industry. His platform is currently less detailed, but, despite what the oft-cited Krugman piece says, it is not true that President Sanders’ legislation would be less effective.
As the International Business Times reports,
“’Their policy proposals have two really different focuses,’ said Mike Konczal, a fellow at the progressive Roosevelt Institute… ‘They seem to reflect their public personas. Hillary’s has a lot of footnotes and wonky details whereas Bernie wants to take on the power of the big banks.’
Marcus Stanley, executive director of the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform, said the differences are largely conceptual. ‘Clinton calls for fine-tuning what regulators are doing already and taking them a step further in some cases. The Sanders proposal is more of a change in direction.’
Her opponents, O’Malley included, are going bigger, more populist, more democratic, and more liberal than she is, so, in order to distinguish herself as having the “more effective and more comprehensive” plan, she zeroes in on a few small specifics, the spirit of which the other candidates agree with.
Her plan is not tougher. It is smaller and less effective. It just looks good since it’s more intricately specific — 10x the length of Sanders’.
As the Atlantic puts it,
”She’s proposing tweaks, when it needs an overhaul...
[In] contrast [to FDR’s Glass-Steagall, Securities, etc. Acts], the Clinton plan is small-scale. It’s Dodd-Frank 2.0: a list of regulatory tweaks requiring various agencies to write complicated new rules governing obscure corners of the financial markets.
Basically Clinton’s touting a bunch of minor changes to fill the hole in her Elect ME! argument. Policy experts came up with
“a long list of regulatory ‘enhancements’”
so she’d have a plan of specifics to get behind. And now she’s trying to sell it as the “tougher one,” when, in reality, —
“Clinton is proposing very little beyond what currently exists — nor does she explain how she will get regulators to use the powers they already have.
It sure sounds good, though — which is the whole point.
Clinton is losing ground to Bernie Sanders… whose biggest political asset is his willingness to say what he actually believes.
In response, Clinton is trying to portray herself as the responsible adult who really understands the complexity of the financial system and how to fix it… The premise of Clinton’s plan is that sweeping reforms such as restoring Glass-Steagall are childish, so instead she has to use complexity to communicate seriousness.
If the past seven years — the ones since the financial crisis — have demonstrated anything about the financial system, however, it’s that regulators have little chance of containing the risks posed by large banks such as JPMorgan and Citigroup.
Why do politicians persist in thinking they can change the way the world works by forcing regulators to write some more rules and then try to enforce them? What’s needed are structural changes that reduce the sources of risk directly — for example, by breaking up large banks.. — not more regulatory discretion.
Clinton’s supporters will argue that their candidate understands what she is up against, and that’s why her strategy is to give incremental powers to regulators and encourage them to use those powers (even if they aren’t actually new).
But that was the Obama-Geithner-Summers strategy, and it has had little impact on.. the mismanagement of the financial system.
In the end, the Clinton plan looks like a laundry list of marginally better-than-nothing reforms that are likely to vanish into an abyss of rule-writing and regulatory dithering.
If she wanted to position herself as the heir to President Obama — who talked a good game while leaving Wall Street largely as he found it — she couldn’t have done a better job.”
I had to include all that because it explains, extremely well, why we need to break up the banks. Why Clinton is basically going to accomplish nothing, while Sanders is talking about leading a mighty charge for change.
Clinton’s supporters actually know this, but because they’ve been fighting the Republicans for so long, they think it’s what’s necessary.
From Salon,
“Clinton’s talking point in the primary race is, “I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.” It’s… a line…. [that] calls to image boring, incremental change done with lots of meetings and red tape and compromise and bargaining and bureaucracy. This is not the language of revolution. But it is the language of change.”
This is exactly the kind of establishment Democratic thinking that feeds into the idea of no, little children, you can’t have a country for the people, by the people. That’s just not how things work.
As Matt Taibbi writes in his Rolling Stone piece,
“Whether it’s the Clintons with their foundations… or the Bush/Cheney axis of hereditary politics and energy commerce… Successful politicians today on both sides of the aisle are sprawling celebrity franchises. They seem always to be making piles of money and hobnobbing with Beautiful People when they're finished moving the status quo in some incremental direction, which some hack somewhere will always be willing to call change.”
To the people getting screwed by big business, it doesn’t matter if Thing 1 or Thing 2 is in office. They’re still getting paid way too little and being taken advantage of way too much by the huge financial institutions that control this nation’s political system. Even if Clinton stops Planned Parenthood from being gutted or prevents a war with Iran, she will not truly change things for the better for Americans. She's not going to overhaul our economic system to make it work for the people. She’s just a block against the Republicans — is that really the standard we must settle for?
There is this massive defeatist notion in the Democratic Party that we have to slog along against the “red tape” and “bureaucracy” instead of upending the whole thing for good. Have we learned nothing from our K-12 public education and repeated units on the American Revolution? The people are all-powerful, if united. And Bernie, going to Liberty University, “making friends,” in the head’s own words, and inviting tough discussions, is doing exactly that. Uniting us.
And, in head-to-head match-ups with Republicans, BernieSanders wins in a landslide, while polls showHillaryClinton losing.
As Robert Reich puts it,
“Hillary Clinton’s proposals would only invite more dilution and finagle.
The only way to contain the Street’s excesses is with reforms so big, bold, and public they can’t be watered down –- busting up the biggest banks and resurrecting Glass-Steagall.”
Her policy proposal is the weaker, not stronger, one.
And Clinton, like Obama, is basically calling for the American people to elect her and then relax because, once in office, she’ll have us covered. If only we catapult her into the presidency, she can “get things done” all by herself. She’s talking “a good game” while, like Obama, going to leave “Wall Street largely” as it is now.
Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has said this cannot end with his election.
He’s talking about a sustained revolution, the continued involvement of the American people in the political process, a complete change in how we think about our political system. He’s calling for a prolonged charge to get people who vote against us out of Senate and House seats, so we can actually change the country, while Hillary is only asking to get elected.
Her record isn’t strong, her current policy proposals aren’t strong, and the promise of “getting things done” she’s running on is 100% empty. Her “marginally better-than-nothing reforms” will “vanish into an abyss of rule-writing and regulatory dithering.”
The big bank executives on Wall Street are actually telling us so.
From Politico —
"Back in Manhattan, the hedge fund managers who’ve long been part of her political and fundraising networks aren’t sweating the putdown and aren’t worrying about their take-home pay just yet.
‘It’s 'just politics,' said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street, explaining that some of Clinton’s Wall Street supporters doubt she would push hard for closing the carried-interest loophole as president, a policy she promoted when she last ran in 2008.
And Robert Wolf, former CEO of UBS Americas and a major Democratic fundraiser, said, ‘As a CEO and former Wall Street executive, I applaud Secretary Clinton’s remarks, and I do not view them as populist nor far left.’
‘'I think people are very excited about Hillary,' says one Wall Street investment professional with close ties to Washington. ‘Most people in New York on the finance side view her as being very pragmatic. I think they have confidence that she understands how things work and that she’s not a populist.’”
She puts Wall Street down in speeches, while talking to citizens, and Wall Street doesn’t care. They know it’s empty. They know it’s just to please us. They know she’s really on their side.
From CNN,
"’We continue to believe Clinton would be one of the better candidates for financial firms,’" wrote Jaret Seiberg of Guggenheim Partners in a note to clients analyzing her plan.
They’re supporting her because she’ll do what they want.
She’s “pragmatic.” She “understands how things work.” She’s “not a populist.”
All those liberal policies she’s espousing? The reason people are drawn to her? The promises she’s giving about what she’ll do in office?
That’s “just politics.”
And when responding to issues with her Wall Street donors, when finally getting firmly pushed on the inherent contradiction of a populist campaign run by elitists — Hillary crumbled. She illogically fell back on two national travesties — the oppression of women/their historical under-representation in the political process and the murder of almost three thousand people — to avoid answering the question.
I guess the question, “How will you stop your wealthy, powerful donors having a wealthy, powerful hand in your presidency?” is one not even a skilled political team can manufacture a coherent answer to.
In that exchange Saturday, Hillary accused Sanders of trying to “impugn my integrity.” But, actually, she impugned her own integrity by failing to give a credible answer.
Batting away questions by attacking the questions themselves is, as O’Malley put it, “weak tea.” It’s a Republican-esque thing to do. If you think your reputation is being attacked, Hillary, why don’t you defend it with facts? If Sanders is wrong, why can’t you respond with concrete reasons explaining why?
Because she's got no answer. Because her Wall Street donors have and will continue to influence her. Because her record isn’t strong, and neither are her policy proposals.
And, far more telling than how many women have donated to her campaign is Hillary’s false claim that “most of [my donors are] small.” Actually, only 17% of her donations come from “everyday Americans” (as she used to call them before the focus groups) donating less than $200.
That number for Bernie Sanders? 74%.
Hillary Clinton is fighting for the status quo, while masking it as the more “adult” and “responsible” approach to changing our crippled system.
Hillary Clinton is saying, “Revolution never came. I waited and I got the scars to show for it.”
But Bernie Sanders is not waiting for the revolution.
He’s leading it.