Why Bernie is the true outsider and political revolutionary.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Robert Reich on Bernie's Plan to Break Up Wall Street--Huffington Post Article
The Big Short and Bernie's Plan to Bust Up Wall Street
If you haven't yet seen The Big Short - directed and co-written by Adam McKay, based on the non-fiction prize-winning book by Michael Lewis about the housing and credit bubble that triggered the Great Recession -- I recommend you do so.
Not only is the movie an enjoyable (if that's the right word) way to understand how the big banks screwed millions of Americans out of their homes, savings, and jobs -- and then got bailed out by taxpayers. It's also a lesson in why they're on the way to doing all this again -- and how their political power continues to erode laws designed to prevent another crisis and to shield their executives from any accountability.
Most importantly, the movie shows why Bernie Sanders's plan to break up the biggest banks and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act (separating investment from commercial banking) is necessary -- and why Hillary Clinton's more modest plan is inadequate.
I'll get back to Bernie and Hillary in a moment, but first you need to know why Wall Street wants us to forget what really happened.
The movie gets the story essentially right: Traders on the Street pushed highly-risky mortgage loans, bundled them together into investments that hid the risks, got the major credit-rating agencies to give the bundles Triple-A ratings, and then sold them to unwary investors. It was a fraudulent Ponzi scheme that had to end badly -- and it did.
Yet since then, Wall Street and its hired guns (including most current Republican candidates for president) have tried to rewrite this history.
They want us to believe the banks and investment houses were innocent victims of misguided government policies that gave mortgages to poor people who shouldn't have got them.
That's pure baloney. The boom in subprime mortgages was concentrated in the private market, not in government. Wall Street itself created the risky mortgage market. It sliced and diced junk mortgages into bundles that hid how bad they were. And it invented the derivatives and CDOs that financed them.
The fact is, more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private institutions, and nearly 83 percentof the subprime loans that went to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
Why has Wall Street been pushing its lie, blaming the government for what happened? And why has the Street (along with its right-wing apologists, and its outlets such as Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal) so viciously attacked the movie The Big Short?
So we won't demand tougher laws to prevent another crisis followed by another "too-big-to-fail" bailout.
Which brings us back to Bernie and Hillary. Hillary Clinton doesn't want to break up the big banks or resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act, as Bernie does
Instead, she'd charge the big banks a bit more for carrying lots of debt and to oversee them more carefully. She'd also give bank regulators more power to break up any particular bank that theyconsider too risky. And she wants more oversight of so-called "shadow banks" such as hedge funds and insurance companies like the infamous AIG.
In a world where the giant Wall Street banks didn't have huge political power, these measures might be enough. But, if you hadn't noticed, Wall Street wields extraordinary power.
Which helps explain why no Wall Street executive has been indicted for the fraudulent behavior that led up to the 2008 crash. Or for the criminal price-fixing scheme settled last May. And why even the fines imposed on the banks have been only a fraction of the banks' gains.
And also why Dodd-Frank is being watered down into vapidity. For example, the law requires major banks to prepare "living wills" describing how they'd unwind their operations if they get into serious trouble. But no big bank has come up with one that passes muster. Federal investigators have found them all "unrealistic."
Most of Hillary's proposals could already have been put into effect by the Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission, but they haven't been -- presumably because of the Street's muscle.
As a practical matter, then, her proposals are invitations to more dilution and finagle.
The only way to contain the Street's excesses is by taking on its economic and political power directly -- with reforms so big, bold, and public they can't be watered down. Starting with busting up the biggest banks, as Bernie Sanders proposes.
More than a century ago, Teddy Roosevelt broke up the Standard Oil Trust because it posed a danger to the U.S. economy. Today, Wall Street's biggest banks pose an even greater danger. They're far larger than they were before the crash of 2008.
Unless they're broken up and Glass-Steagall resurrected, we face substantial risk of another near-meltdown -- once again threatening the incomes, jobs, savings, and homes of millions of Americans.
To paraphrase philosopher George Santayana, those who cannot remember they were screwed by Wall Street are condemned to be screwed again.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
Monday, January 11, 2016
Bernie's Versus Establishment Hillary's Economies
The Democratic presidential campaign -- unlike the Republican circus -- has actually produced a debate in which each candidate's economic agenda has gotten better and more populist. But as you can see at candidatescorecard.net/, there are also big differences.
Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders agree that America's long period of declining wages and growing inequality has been due to chronic slow growth and high unemployment. In Hillary's words "getting closer to full employment is crucial to raising wages."
Both are committed to some amount of increased public spending on infrastructure and investments in "green industries." But the difference between the two candidates on public investment is a matter of scale.
Hillary Clinton wants $275 billion more in infrastructure investment in the next five years.
Bernie Sanders would increase by $1 trillion our public investments in jobs-creating infrastructure over the same five year period - creating one million new jobs, while helping to retool the US economy to reduce carbon emissions.
One explanation for the difference in size of their spending plans may be found in Bernie Sanders' willingness to tax the wealthy and corporations. While Hillary has outlined some plans for higher capital gains taxes, she still has not rolled out detailed plans that would show us whether she would ask corporations to pay a larger share of taxes to pay for growth-producing public investments -- or whether her corporate tax plans would be "revenue-neutral." Clinton's reluctance to raise taxes on corporations limits her ambitions on public investment.
Secretary Clinton has also drawn a line that is limiting her ability to help create programs to support the incomes of middle-class and poor Americans. She has declared she will not raise taxes on anyone making under $250,000 per year. Other Democrats have locked themselves into similar pledges -- notably Barack Obama in 2008 -- but Hillary has now pivoted to attacks on Bernie that are more typical of Republicans than Democrats.
This is unfortunate. If Democrats of earlier eras had adopted the Clinton approach there would be no Medicare or Social Security -- and no publicly-funded elementary schools or high schools.
Here's how the debate has turned ugly: Secretary Clinton is attacking Bernie Sanders' Medicare For All proposal because she says it will raise taxes on the middle class. What she doesn't say is that the Sanders plan would allow Americans to stop paying health insurance premiums, that their deductibles and copayments would be dramatically reduced, and that insurance executives would no longer interfere with their care.
The Sanders Medicare For All proposal would save the average family more than $5,000 per year. It also would increase, not lower, incomes for 95 percent of Americans, according to Professor Gerald Friedman, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Professor Friedman writes that if Medicare for All was enacted "we would, as a country, save nearly $5 trillion over ten years in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by lowering the rate of medical inflation."
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes that
Bernie's proposals would cost less than what we'd spend without them. Most of the "cost" ... would pay for opening Medicare to everyone. This would be cheaper than relying on our current system of for-profit private health insurers that charge you and me huge administrative costs, advertising, marketing, bloated executive salaries, and high pharmaceutical prices.Paul Waldman recently wrote in the Washington Post that "Every single-payer system in the world, and there are many of them of varying flavors, is cheaper than the American health care system.
Every single one. So ... you can't say (Sanders' proposal) represents some kind of profligate, free-spending idea that would cost us all terrible amounts of money."
But rather than argue the case on its merits, Secretary Clinton has chosen to use the anti-government framing of the right by pledging that she will never "raise taxes" on the middle class (a group which, by her definition, includes people making $250,000 per year.)
Social Security would never have been created if Democrats had taken this position in the 1930s, since it is funded by payroll taxes. But that funding is one of its sources of political and fiscal strength, since it is forbidden by law from contributing to the federal deficit.
And if Democrats had taken Secretary Clinton's tax position in the 1960s we wouldn't have Medicare today, since that program is also partially funded through a payroll tax. Both Social Security and Medicare have provided enormous benefits and savings for the middle class. They provide better service than private corporations could provide, at a much lower cost. Medicare For All would do the same.
Sen. Sanders has proposed to increase Social Security benefits for all recipients, a move which would increase the income of a typical senior by roughly $1,300 per year. He would fund his proposal by having the wealthiest 1.5 percent of Americans pay into the program at the same rate as everyone else.
That happens to conform to Secretary Clinton's pledge not to raise taxes for households with less than $250,000 in income.
Nevertheless, she has refused to support the Sanders proposal and has not ruled out a Social Security benefit cut.
Then there's college education. Sen. Sanders proposed to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, as many were in the past (and has they are in a number of other countries today). Vice President Biden supports this concept. But Secretary Clinton opposes it, even though it would save middle-class families more than $9,400 on average for each child they send to public college.
Sanders would pay for his college tuition plan with a tax on Wall Street speculation, so there's no middle-class tax involved. But Hillary Clinton has rejected it for a much more limited plan that would cost middle-class families much more. She says she is "not in favor of making college free for Donald Trump's kids." But how likely are billionaires' children to attend a public college? And you could use that logic to oppose free high schools or elementary schools, too.
In reality, it won't be Donald Trump's kids who lose out if Sanders' plan is blocked. The sons and daughters of the middle class will pay the price instead.
What about the minimum wage? Bernie Sanders has called for a gradual increase to $15 per hour by 2020. For her part, Secretary Clinton has called for a $12 per hour minimum wage. Under the Sanders plan, full-time minimum wage workers would receive an additional $6,240 more per year than under Clinton's proposal.
Together these wage and jobs proposals would help the middle class by increasing demand for workers while at the same time raising the floor on their income. By contrast, Secretary Clinton has offered a weaker minimum wage proposal and not proposed a major jobs plan.
The middle class bore the brunt of the 2008 financial crisis, which cost the US economy at least $6 trillion. Sen. Sanders predicted that Wall Street deregulation could lead to a taxpayer bailout and a financial crisis, and he has a plan for preventing the next one - by reinstating the Glass-Steagall rule and breaking up commercial banks, investments banks, hedge funds and insurance companies which now threaten the global economy. Hillary Clinton opposes both measures.
Secretary Clinton's use of anti-government, anti-tax rhetoric is counterproductive at best. It prevents her from supporting excellent proposals like Sen. Kristin Gillibrand's FAMILY Act, which Sen. Sanders supports. It would provide American families with at least 3 months of paid leave to care for a newborn baby or seriously ill or injured family members. This would particularly benefit working women, and it would only cost the average worker just $1.61 per week.
What's more important - another Grover Norquist "no taxes" pledge, or a comprehensive plan for caregivers which costs less per week than a cup of coffee?
A framing like Secretary Clinton's paints government as inherently bad, even when it can deliver urgently needed programs more fairly and cost-effectively than the private sector. It closes the door on important proposals like the FAMILY Act and Medicare For All, and it undermines successful programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Here's the bottom line: The middle class is in crisis, and Secretary Clinton's proposals merely tinker at the margins of that crisis. They would not shift the fundamental direction of an economy that is growing more unequal every day. Nor would they offer greater security for the millions of Americans who live in fear of the future and wonder how they'll make it through today.
What's more, Secretary Clinton's agenda has been presented with a framing that threatens to undermine her own party's greatest achievements and make future advances for the middle class more difficult to achieve. The leader of the Democratic Party should fight for better government, not reinforce the anti-government tropes of the right. That sort of talk may have had an audience in the 1990s, but it is politically unwise today.
Bernie Sanders offers the best economic plan for the middle class. And he has shown that he is willing to challenge the Republican Party's rhetoric, rather than offer a pale reflection of it.
Follow Roger Hickey on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rogerhickey
link to HP Article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-hickey/sanders-economic-plan-bes_b_8906166.html
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