DC Press Corps Spins Itself Silly Over Sanders’ Specifics

By Dean Baker

http://fair.org/home/dc-press-corps-spins-itself-silly-over-sanders-specifics/

The Washington press corps has gone into one of its great feeding frenzies over Bernie Sanders’ interview with New York Daily News. Sanders avoided specific answers to many of the questions posed, which the DC gang are convinced shows a lack of the knowledge necessary to be president.

Among the frenzied were the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, The Atlantic‘s David Graham and Vanity Fair‘s Tina Nguyen, with CNN‘s Dylan Byers telling about it all. Having read the transcript of the interview, I would say that I certainly would have liked to see more specificity in Sanders’ answers, but I’m an economist. And some of the complaints are just silly.

When asked how he would break up the big banks, Sanders said he would leave that up to the banks. That’s exactly the right answer. The government doesn’t know the most efficient way to break up JP Morgan; JP Morgan does. If the point is to downsize the banks, the way to do it is to give them a size cap and let them figure out the best way to reconfigure themselves to get under it.

The same applies to Sanders not knowing the specific statute for prosecuting banks for their actions in the housing bubble. Knowingly passing off fraudulent mortgages in a mortgage-backed security is fraud. Could the Justice Department prove this case against high-level bank executives? Who knows, but they obviously didn’t try.

And the fact that Sanders didn’t know the specific statute—who cares? How many people know the specific statute for someone who puts a bullet in someone’s head? That’s murder, and if a candidate for office doesn’t know the exact title and specifics of her state murder statute, it hardly seems like a big issue.

Vanity Fair (4/5/16)

There is a very interesting contrast in media coverage of House Speaker Paul Ryan. In Washington policy circles, Ryan is treated as a serious budget wonk. How many reporters have written about the fact this serious budget wonk has repeatedly proposed eliminating most of the federal government? This was not an offhand gaffe that Ryan made when caught in a bad moment; this was in his budgets that he pushed through as chair of the House Budget Committee.

This fact can be found in the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of Ryan’s budget (page 16, Table 2). The analysis shows Ryan’s budget shrinking everything other than Social Security and Medicare and other healthcare programs to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050. This is roughly the current size of the military budget, which Ryan has indicated he wants to increase. That leaves zero for everything else.

Included in everything else is the Justice Department, the National Park System, the State Department, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, Food Stamps, the National Institutes of Health and just about everything else that the government does. Just to be clear, CBO did this analysis under Ryan’s supervision. He never indicated any displeasure with its assessment. In fact, he boasted about the fact that CBO showed his budget paying off the national debt.

So there you have it. The DC press corps that goes nuts because Bernie Sanders doesn’t know the name of the statute under which he would prosecute bank fraud thinks a guy who calls for eliminating most of the federal government is a great budget wonk.

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Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (4/5/16).

L.A., Where Sanders Backers Are Still Making Happy Music

By Bill Boyarsky

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_blues_for_bernie_in_la_where_sanders_backers_20160407

As I stood in a park amid dead-serious Bernie Sanders volunteers on a recent Saturday afternoon, it occurred to me that the media is missing the real story of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

There was an upbeat determination—instead of the pessimism reflected in news stories and analyses—at this Sanders rally, in Pan Pacific Park in Los Angeles’ Fairfax district. Basketball was being played at nearby courts, but the Sanders supporters weren’t there for recreation.

Sanders’ double-digit victory in the Wisconsin primary Tuesday showed that his contest with Hillary Clinton is far from over. Still, he trails in national polls and is well behind Clinton in the race for national convention delegates, and the mass media gives him little chance of winning. Take, for example, the New York Times story that more than 15 Sanders associates told reporters he fouled up by not starting out with an aggressive campaign against Clinton. “By the time he caught fire with voters this winter and personally began to believe he could defeat Mrs. Clinton, she was already on her way to building an all but insurmountable delegate lead,” the Times said. The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll had Clinton leading in California 45 percent to 37 percent as of late March.

The 200 or more people at the Pan Pacific Park rally didn’t seem to consider the lead insurmountable. Rather, they threw themselves into the complicated process of picking Sanders’ delegates. The California’s June 7 primary will decide how many Sanders and Clinton delegates go to the Democratic convention in July. Most of the state’s 548 Democratic delegates will be selected in contests in each of the 53 congressional districts, with 105 at-large delegates going to the candidate who wins the entire state. The rest are well-known politicians favoring either Sanders or Clinton—most of them for Clinton, the establishment favorite.

“An intentionally mysterious process” is how Nathan Fisher, who was instructing the rallygoers on how to participate in the congressional district voting, put it. Fisher is a candidate to be a Sanders delegate in one of the districts, and he’ll have to round up enough friends, relatives and other supporters to be elected.

“Every congressional district must have a full slate of Bernie supporters,” Fisher emphasized. What is important, he added, is to elect delegates who will hit the convention floor “very strong for Sanders.” And he told the group that only registered Democrats can vote. He noted that some Sanders supporters couldn’t stand the Democratic Party. “I know for some people this is a bridge too far, but they register as a Democrat,” he stated.

This process is being repeated throughout the nation for Democrats and Republicans, following rules so complicated—and generally so rigged against outsiders and newcomers—that only experts can understand them. At this stage of the game, the most valuable players are those who understand the twists and turns. If Sanders manages to deny Clinton enough delegates on the first ballot, a contested convention would be thrust into a delegate-by-delegate fight, and victory would go to the smartest, toughest and best organized. That is why Fisher’s presentation was so important.

Joining the volunteers at the park were three organizers just sent to California by Sanders’ national headquarters, joining up with the local volunteers. The volunteers have been working hard, since last year, and don’t want to be ignored by the paid newcomers.

Megan Harris, in charge of Sanders’ Southern California campaign, seemed aware of their concerns. “You folks have already done a ton of work,” she told them. “We’re not going to take over. We’ll work with you and bring you into the national umbrella” and aim for registering 200,000 more Democrats in California.

She and her co-workers, she said, are traveling light, bringing their sleeping bags and looking for volunteers to put them up. “We don’t want to spend all the money on hotel rooms,” she said.

I talked to Montgomery Markland, one of the main organizers of the rally. Markland, who produces video games and movies, was an aide in the Texas Legislature and ran campaigns in that state. “Right now, we are dealing with the problem of getting people to work together,” he said. He was confident that would happen. In the end, he said, Sanders “will be relying on the largest grass-roots organization in history and also the best trained.”

There may have been bigger grass-roots organizations in history, but he’s got a point about the training. I’ve been following these folks for several months and have seen some of them evolve from computer-wary to proficient, tech-oriented workers who can make targeted phone calls from lists sent digitally from campaign headquarters in Vermont.

Such efforts are why the obituaries being written about the Sanders campaign are so premature.

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In Fact, Sanders Has a Very Clear Plan on How to Break Up Too-Big-to-Fail Banks

Sanders campaign, analysts counter media frenzy lambasting Daily News interview

by Andrea Germanos, staff writer

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/04/06/fact-sanders-has-very-clear-plan-how-break-too-big-fail-banks

Following suggestions that he somehow "bungled" when asked about how he would, if elected president, break up Wall Street's largest and most dangerous institutions, the Bernie Sanders campaign on Tuesday offered a detailed explanation of how he would end "too-big-to-fail banks."

Sparking corporate media's "great feeding frenzy" was an interview the presidential candidate had April 1 with the New York Daily News editorial board, the transcript of which was published online Monday.

The Washington Post described it as "pretty close to a disaster," while Jeremy Stahl wrote at Slate that Sanders "appeared to struggle" on the details of how to break up the big banks.

Hillary Clinton also seized on the interview, sending the transcript to supporters in a fundraising email that stated: "even on his signature issue of breaking up the banks, he's unable to answer basic questions about how he'd go about doing it." She also told MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday, "The core of his campaign has been breaking up the banks, and it didn’t seem in reading his answers that he would understand exactly how that would work under Dodd-Frank."

But as New York Times finance and business reporter Peter Eavis argued, "taken as a whole, Mr. Sanders's answers seem to make sense. Crucially, his answers mostly track with a reasonably straightforward breakup plan that he introduced to Congress last year."

Sanders told the Daily News, "How you go about [breaking up the dangerously large institutions] is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail," later adding that it'd be the banks' decision "how they want to reconfigure themselves."

"You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up," he said.

His campaign on Tuesday released a statement on how a Sanders administration would take on the issue, also stating that he and rival Clinton "have very different points of view on how to reform Wall Street and the largest financial institutions in this country." The statement reads, in part:

Within the first 100 days of his administration, Sen. Sanders will require the secretary of the Treasury Department to establish a “Too-Big-to Fail” list of commercial banks, shadow banks and insurance companies whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout.

Within a year, the Sanders administration will work with the Federal Reserve and financial regulators to break these institutions up using the authority of Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Sen. Sanders will also fight to enact a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act to clearly separate commercial banking, investment banking and insurance services. Secretary Clinton opposes this extremely important measure.

President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall Act into law precisely to prevent Wall Street speculators from causing another Great Depression. And, it worked for more than five decades until Wall Street watered it down under President Reagan and killed it under President Clinton. That is unacceptable and that is why Sen. Sanders will fight to sign the Warren-McCain bill into law.

Like the Times' Eavis, other analysts questioned the dominant media narrative that has emerged since the interview.

The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim charged that, as the interview went on, "it began to appear that the Daily News editors didn't understand the difference between the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve."

Grim wrote, "Sanders has also taken a beating for saying he couldn't cite a particular statute that may have been violated by Wall Street bankers during the financial crisis. But, quickly, without searching Google, can you name the particular statute that outlaws murder?"

Economist and Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder Dean Baker takes issue with that criticism as well, writing in a blog post Thursday:

Knowingly passing off fraudulent mortgages in a mortgage backed security is fraud. Could the Justice Department prove this case against high level bank executives? Who knows, but they obviously didn't try.

And the fact that Sanders didn't know the specific statute, who cares? How many people know the specific statute for someone who puts a bullet in someone's head? That's murder, and if a candidate for office doesn't know the exact title and specific's of her state murder statute, it hardly seems like a big issue.

Baker also wrote:

I certainly would have liked to see more specificity in Sanders' answers, but I'm an economist. And some of the complaints are just silly.

When asked how he would break up the big banks Sanders said he would leave that up to the banks. That's exactly the right answer. The government doesn't know the most efficient way to break up JP Morgan, JP Morgan does. If the point is to downsize the banks, the way to do it is to give them a size cap and let them figure out the best way to reconfigure themselves to get under it.

Baker goes on to contrast the media's treatment of Sanders with that of House Speaker Paul Ryan, touted as a "serious budget wonk [but who] has repeatedly proposed eliminating most of the federal government."

"So there you have it," Baker wrote. "The D.C. press corps that goes nuts because Bernie Sanders doesn't know the name of the statute under which he would prosecute bank fraud thinks a guy who calls for eliminating most of the federal government is a great budget wonk."