WASHINGTON (AP) — Bernie Sanders’ commanding Nevada caucus victory made him a top target for his Democratic rivals and a growing source of anxiety for establishment Democrats worried that the nomination of a self-avowed democratic socialist could cost the party the White House.
Sanders’ win solidified his front-runner status in the crowded field as the race turns to Saturday’s presidential primary in South Carolina, where his moderate opponents will scramble to try to blunt the Vermont senator’s momentum. Just three days later after that contest, 14 states vote on Super Tuesday, March 3, when one-third of the delegates are awarded. A strong showing in those states could put Sanders on a glide path to the nomination against Republican President Donald Trump.
That prospect has amplified concerns for Democrats who believe Sanders’ liberal policies will drive away moderate and independent voters in the general election in November. South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, the top-ranking black leader in Congress, warned of added risk for Democrats if Sanders was the nominee.
“I think it would be a real burden for us in these states or congressional districts that we have to do well in,” Clyburn told “This Week” on ABC.
He noted that congressional districts that helped Democrats win back the House are moderate and conservative. “In those districts, it’s going to be tough to hold on to these jobs if you have to make the case for accepting a self-proclaimed democratic socialist,” Clyburn said.
Sanders’ campaign argue the candidate will bring in new voters — largely progressives, young people and voters of color — who have been alienated by politics.
He successfully relied on that coalition Saturday to dominate his Democratic rivals in Nevada, pulling far ahead of second-place finisher former Vice President Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who came in third. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren landed in fourth, while Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer were still in a close race for fifth on Sunday.
“We are bringing our people together,” Sanders said Saturday night. “In Nevada we have just brought together a multigenerational, multiracial coalition which is not only going to win in Nevada, it’s going to sweep this country.”
Sanders’ new status was clear as both Buttigieg and Biden went after him harder than they have before.
In his speech to supporters in Las Vegas, Buttigieg denounced Sanders in his sharpest terms yet, changing that the senator was calling for an “inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats.”
“Not to mention most Americans,” Buttigieg said.
He said Sanders has shown a “willingness to ignore or dismiss, or even attack the very Democrats that we absolutely must send to Capitol Hill.”
Biden, whose struggling campaign got only a slight boost in Nevada, took an indirect swipe both billionaire candidate Mike Bloomberg and Sanders, who is an independent and not a member of the party he’s seeking to represent in November.
“I ain’t a socialist. I’m not a plutocrat. I’m a Democrat,” Biden told supporters.
But some Democrats are worried that the new focus on Sanders may be too little, too late. Democratic strategist James Carville bemoaned the fact that until recently, most of Sanders’ opponents have largely failed to attack Sanders or draw scrutiny to his record.
“We gotta hope that some of these candidates develop political skills quickly,” he said.
If Sanders is the nominee, Carville said, “the risk in losing the election is deep and profound.” He added: “We just gotta pray.”
Indeed, Trump gloated on social media, continuing his weekslong push to sow discord between Sanders and his Democratic rivals.
“Looks like Crazy Bernie is doing well in the Great State of Nevada. Biden & the rest look weak,” Trump tweeted. “Congratulations Bernie, & don’t let them take it away from you!”
All the Democratic candidates are pledging to stay in the race through South Carolina, and some candidates were already campaigning Sunday in Super Tuesday states.
Nevada’s caucuses were the first chance for White House hopefuls to demonstrate appeal to a diverse group of voters in a state far more representative of the country as a whole than Iowa and New Hampshire. Sanders won by rallying his fiercely loyal base and tapping into support from the state’s large Latino community.
In a show of confidence, Sanders left Nevada on Saturday for Texas, which offers one of the biggest delegate troves in just 10 days on Super Tuesday.
Saturday’s win built on his victory earlier this month in the New Hampshire primary. He essentially tied for first place in the Iowa caucuses with Buttigieg, who has sought to position himself as an ideological counter to Sanders’ unabashedly progressive politics.
But for all the energy and attention devoted to the first three states, they award only a tiny fraction of the delegates needed to capture the nomination. After South Carolina, the contest becomes national in scope, putting a premium on candidates who have the resources to compete in states as large as California and Texas.
That when Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who dominated the political conversation this week after a poor debate-stage debut, intends to become a factor after skipping the first four contests.
The stakes were high for Nevada Democrats to avoid a repeat of the chaos in the still-unresolved Iowa caucuses, and it appeared Saturday’s contest was largely successful.
Nevada Democrats sought to minimize problems by creating multiple redundancies in their reporting system, relying on results called in by phone, a paper worksheet filled out by caucus organizers, a photo of that worksheet sent in by text message and electronic results captured with a Google form.
Buttigieg’s campaign is raising questions about the results, citing more than 200 reports of problems allocating votes. It wants the state party to disclose more details of the votes and address concerns before releasing final results. But the party said it was not planning to offer a more detailed voting breakdown and appeared to be inviting the campaign to follow recount rules if it wanted to challenge the results.
NO ENTITY HAS WORKED HARDER TO DESTROY AMERICA’S MIDDLE CLASS MORE THAN THE GLOBAIST DEMOCRAT PARTY AND THEIR WELFARE SUCKING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES AND “CHEAP” LABOR DEM VOTING ILLEGALS!
The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract . Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
T oward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
THE GRIFTERS:
HILLARY CLINTON AND HER SERIAL RAPIST HUSBAND
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
The basic components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
Why Hillary and Her Wall Street Donors Don’t Want Trump’s Wall…
NO BILLIONAIRE WANTS TO PAY LIVING WAGES TO ANY LEGALS!
"Hillary and her party supporters desperately need illegal immigrants: Hillary is bought and paid for." Michael Bargo, Jr.
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
THE GRIFTERS: HILLARY, BILLARY and CHELSEA… global looters!
"But there is no doubt in my mind that the Clintons, thoroughly practiced
grifters that they are, as well as their increasingly shady daughter, will not
hesitate to use such classified information as they may be able to access for
personal and political enrichment. They've been doing it for decades, and
they're not about to stop now." RUSS VAUGHN
CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
GEORGE SOROS AND THE CLINTON GLOBALIST AGENDA FOR BANKSTERS AND WIDE-OPEN BORDERS
NEW YORK — Demand Justice, an organization founded by former members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and associated with a “social welfare organization” financed by billionaire activist
George Soros, is raising money for an eventual court fight against what the group describes as President Trump’s proposed “racist, unnecessary wall.”
“Obama would declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”
“Hillary was always small potatoes, a placeholder as it were. Her health was always suspect. And do you think the plotters would have let a doofus like Tim Kaine take office in the event that Hillary became disabled?”
THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION CHARITY slush fund
“There is no controlling Bill Clinton . He does whatever he wants and runs up incredible expenses with foundation funds,” states a separate interview memo attached to the submission.
“Bill Clinton mixes and matches his personal business with that of the foundation. Many people within the foundation have tried to caution him about this but he does not listen, and there really is no talking to him,” the memo added.
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office: the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
Sanders called JPMorgan’s CEO
America’s "biggest corporate socialist" — here’s why he has a point
Sen.
Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the “biggest corporate socialist
in America today” in recent ad
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
He may have a point
— beyond what he intended.
With his Dimon ad, Sanders is
referring specifically to the bailouts JPMorgan and
other banks took from the government during the 2008 financial crisis. But
accepting government bailouts and corporate welfare is not the only way I believe
American companies behave like closet socialists despite their professed love
of free markets.
In reality, most big
U.S. companies operate internally in ways
Karl Marx would applaud as remarkably close to socialist-style central
planning. Not only that, corporate America has arguably become a laboratory of
innovation in socialist governance, as I show in my own research .
Closet socialists
In public, CEOs like Dimon attack socialist
planning while defending free markets.
But inside JPMorgan and most
other big corporations, market competition is subordinated to planning. These
big companies often contain dozens of business units and sometimes thousands.
Instead of letting these units compete among themselves, CEOs typically direct
a strategic planning process to
ensure they cooperate to achieve the best outcomes for the corporation as a whole .
This is just how a socialist
economy is intended to operate. The government would conduct economy-wide
planning and set goals for each industry and enterprise, aiming to achieve the
best outcome for society as a whole.
And just as companies rely
internally on planned cooperation to meet goals and overcome challenges, the
U.S. economy could use this harmony to overcome the existential crisis of our
age — climate change. It's a challenge so massive and urgent that it will
require every part of the economy to
work together with government in order to address it.
Overcoming socialism's past
problems
But, of course, socialism
doesn't have a good track record.
One of the reasons socialist
planning failed in the old Soviet Union, for example, was that it was so top-down that it lacked the
kind of popular legitimacy that democracy grants a government. As a result,
bureaucrats overseeing the planning process could not get reliable information
about the real opportunities and challenges experienced by enterprises or
citizens.
Moreover, enterprises had
little incentive to strive to meet their assigned objectives, especially when
they had so little involvement in formulating them.
A second reason the USSR
didn't survive was that its authoritarian system failed to motivate either
workers or entrepreneurs. As a result, even though the government funded basic
science generously, Soviet industry was a laggard in innovation .
Ironically, corporations
— those singular products of capitalism — are showing how these and
other problems of socialist planning can be surmounted.
Take the problem of
democratic legitimacy. Some companies, such as General Electric , Kaiser Permanente and General Motors , have
developed innovative ways to avoid the dysfunctions of autocratic planning by
using techniques that enable
lower-level personnel to participate actively in the strategy process.
Although profit pressures
often force top managers to short-circuit the promised participation, when
successfully integrated it not only provides top management with more reliable
bottom-up input for strategic planning
but also makes all employees more reliable
partners in carrying it out.
So here we have
centralization — not in the more familiar, autocratic model, but rather in
a form I call "participative centralization." In a socialist system,
this approach could be adopted, adapted and scaled up to support economy-wide
planning, ensuring that it was both democratic and effective.
As for motivating innovation,
America's big businesses face a challenge similar to that of socialism. They
need employees to be collectivist, so they willingly comply with policies and
procedures. But they need them to be simultaneously individualistic, to fuel
divergent thinking and creativity.
One common solution in much
of corporate America, as in the old Soviet Union, is to specialize
those roles , with most people relegated
to routine tasks while the privileged few work on innovation tasks. That
approach, however, overlooks the creative capacities of the vast majority
and leads to widespread
employee disengagement and sub-par business performance.
While socialists have often recoiled against
the idea individual performance-based rewards, these more sophisticated
policies could be scaled up to the entire economy to help meet socialism's
innovation and motivation challenge.
Big problems require big
government
The idea of such a socialist
transformation in the U.S. may seem remote today.
But this can change,
particularly as more Americans, especially young ones, embrace socialism . One reason
they are doing so is because the current capitalist system has so manifestly
failed to deal with climate change.
Looking inside these
companies suggests a better way forward — and hope for society's ability
to avert catastrophe.
This article is republished
from The
Conversation under a Creative
Commons license.
Billionaire JP Morgan chief attacks socialism as 'a
disaster'
This article is more
than 10 months old
·
Jamie Dimon: socialism leads to ‘corruption and favouritism’
·
America’s top banker, paid $31m last year, defends capitalism
Thu 4 Apr 2019 12.45 EDT Last
modified on Sun 7 Apr 2019 20.55 EDT
·
·
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Jamie Dimon said
capitalism was ‘the most successful economic system the world has ever seen’.
Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The world’s most powerful banker has attacked socialism, saying
it produces “stagnation, corruption and often worse”.
Jamie Dimon, spare us your
crocodile tears about inequality
Robert Reich
Read more
JP Morgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, took aim at socialism
in his annual letter to shareholders, and warned it would be “a disaster for our country” .
Dimon, who was paid $31m last year as the head of America’s largest
bank and who is estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.3bn,
took his swipe as a new wave of left politics has emerged in the US.
Democratic socialism has been embraced by a new generation of
politicians, including New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , and supporters of Bernie
Sanders, a longtime socialist now making a second bid for the presidency.
Dimon’s attack also comes as many leftwing Democrats, including
Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, have called for the breakup of big
businesses and greater regulation of banking in particular.
In his letter, Dimon wrote: “When governments control companies,
economic assets (companies, lenders and so on) over time are used to further
political interests – leading to inefficient companies and markets, enormous
favoritism and corruption.”
He went on: “Socialism inevitably produces stagnation,
corruption and often worse – such as authoritarian government officials who
often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and
individual lives – which they frequently do to maintain power. This would be as
much a disaster for our country as it has been in the other places it’s been
tried.”
Socialism is set to be one of the
key issues of the 2020 election cycle. Donald Trump has already begun
campaigning against socialism and used his State of the Union address to
declare that “America will never be a socialist country.”
Business Today: sign up for a
morning shot of financial news
Read more
“It is absolutely obvious that a big chunk of [people] have been
left behind,” Dimon said last month. “Forty percent of Americans make less than
$15 an hour. Forty percent of Americans can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s
medical or fixing their car. Fifteen percent of Americans make minimum wages,
70,000 die from opioids [annually].”
In his letter, Dimon acknowledged capitalism’s “flaws” but
praised it as “the most successful economic system the world has ever seen”.
He wrote: “This is not to say that capitalism does not have
flaws, that it isn’t leaving people behind and that it shouldn’t be improved.
It’s essential to have a strong social safety net – and all countries should be
striving for continuous improvement in regulations as well as social and
welfare conditions.”
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon takes on socialism, says it will lead to
an ‘eroding society’
PUBLISHED WED, JAN 22 20207:58 AM ESTUPDATED
WED, JAN 22 20208:57 AM EST
KEY POINTS
·
J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon criticized socialism, saying
it leads to an “eroding society.”
·
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Dimon told CNBC
that capitalism is not perfect but is capable of fixing the problems of today.
WATCH NOW
VIDEO 01:59
Jamie
Dimon: ‘I don’t think people understand what socialism is’
Socialism
has failed where it’s been tried and ultimately leads to an “eroding
society,” J.P.
Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Wednesday.
With
democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders among the leaders in the Democratic
presidential race and other candidates espousing similar-sounding ideas, the
head of the nation’s biggest bank by assets said the idea of socialist control
of the means of production would be detrimental to the U.S.
“I
honestly don’t think they understand what socialism is,” Dimo n told
CNBC during a “ Squawk
Box ” interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
referring to a question about millennials.
WATCH
NOW
VIDEO 19:31
Watch
CNBC’s full Davos interview with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon
“Most
state-owned enterprises don’t do a particularly good job,” he added. “You look
around the world and they become corrupt over time. That doesn’t mean that
capitalism is perfect. That doesn’t mean that every public company is perfect.
No, there are flaws.”
Sanders
has been the
most out front of the candidates in backing socialism,
though many of his opponents in the Democratic race also back universal health
care, increased business taxes and greater government control over private
enterprise.
Dimon
said he did not want to address any specific candidates. But he said that
socialist governments traditionally have done a poor job allocating capital and
end up backing politically popular endeavors and “bridge to nowhere” projects.
“Once
you do that, you will have an eroding society,” he said.
“They
do need to fix inner-city schools, infrastructure, health care,” Dimon added.
“We can fix all of those in a capitalist society.”
Bernie Sanders Slams Jamie Dimon On
Socialism – They’re Both Wrong
Bernie
Sanders has hit back against Jamie Dimon's comments about socialism, but
they're both missing the point on Wall Street greed.
Bernie Sanders is looking to school Wall Street giant Jamie Dimon
on socialism but does the Senator really know better? | Source: Getty Images
/AFP/REUTERS/Edited by CCN
·
Bernie Sanders went after Jamie Dimon on Twitter
calling him a hypocrite for his comments on socialism.
·
Senator Sanders is not telling the whole truth
when it comes to Wall Street bailouts.
·
Jamie Dimon is also wrong as corporate welfare is
rampant, and creating a dangerous imbalance in U.S. society.
Bernie Sanders Stretches The Truth To Slam Jamie Dimon
While the above tweet will no doubt get Bernie Bros feeling the
Bern and pumping their fists, a note of caution. JPMorgan Chase did pay back
their bailout money, and Bernie Sanders must be referring to Wall Street as a
whole, not specifically Jamie Dimon’s bank, which only received $25 billion.
The JPMorgan Chase CEO Owes A Lot Of
His Considerable Wealth To Socialism
So Sanders is not telling it precisely as it is here. The point he
is really making paraphrases as “don’t insult the concept of receiving aid from
the government when your corporation went broke and used Wall Street food
stamps.” The senator has a point.
What truly
irks the everyday American is not that some people rise to the top of the
corporate ladder on Wall Street and earn billions. What annoys them is when
those CEO’s mess up, get everything wrong, screw over the working man and crash
the housing market, and still walk away with their vast compensation packages .
Yes, the taxpayer technically got most of it back, but a large
contingent of those people didn’t get the jobs or houses back that they lost in
the recession.
Fed Interventions Are Enabling Wall Street Recklessness, Again
Long considered somewhat of a conspiracy theory, more and more
market voices are speaking up against the Fed’s interventions in financial
markets. Scott Minerd, the CIO of Guggenheim Partners, is about as mainstream a
figure as you can get in the hedge fund world, and he called the stock market a
“Ponzi scheme” in Davos.
You Can’t Cherry-Pick What Is
Socialism & What’s “Necessary”
So Bernie Sanders is absolutely right. Taxpayer funds were used to
make the rich richer but looks to be wrong that these were not a good
investment from perspective of taxpayer funds.
A person who
is down and out in society is no different from a bankrupt Wall Street firm
when it comes to needing a handout. Whatever the result, or the amount in
question, they are all part of the same system.
Bernie Sanders
is right to tell you not to listen to people like Jamie Dimon, who criticize
socialism when they don’t need it, yet are first in line and full of excuses
when they do. Secondly, please don’t believe word for word everything Bernie
Sanders says about Wall Street, because he is often exaggerating to make his point .
Finally, it’s impossible to have an article about socialism and
not give former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the last word.
This article was edited
by Samburaj Das .
Last modified: January 23, 2020 9:29 AM UTC
Financial speculator & author living in the hills in
Los Angeles. J.D. but very much not a lawyer. Favorite trading books are
anything written by Jack Schwager. Email: bullishtulips@gmail.com,
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