The DNC vs Bernie Sanders
Has anyone noticed what is taking place in the final moments before tonight's voting? Major candidates have dropped out of the race, both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have dropped out and are set to endorse Joe Biden. Obama surrogate Susan Rice (the unmasker) has endorsed Biden. Harry Reid is set to endorse Biden.
Strangely, Liz Warren who draws on the same type of voters as Sanders is staying in the race. That should hurt sanders. All of this as Super Tuesday unfolds!
Were they in time?
Can they get this senile old man past the finish line?
Something tells me they can't pull it off. Fear not, If not tonight, they still have the Convention and those Super delegates. Buttigieg has 25 delegates and they will have to accommodate him. The DNC has many ways to put a stop to Bernie. It will be an interesting night.
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Good luck Bernie
The DNC likes Biden. Biden is not a Leader he'll be a Puppet, the DNC will have him appoint his own Handlers.
Can you see the same TDS sufferers defending Biden gaffs? their hypocrisy is already overwhelming now as it is.
He was an acquired taste. They've kind of adopted him.
They did an amazing job of clearing the field for him, pushing out Biden's rivals while keeping Warren, who is more of a rival for Sander's votes, in the race. They must have made some nice promises to get Amy and Pete to drop out hours before Super Tuesday. Unfortunately for Biden, Bloomberg is rich enough to do his own thing and is not a party puppet like the other two.
Bernie supporters will take this as a personal attack against Bernie by Democrats. Buttigieg was doing a lot better than Warren, Why didn't she get persuaded to drop out?
I think they will do the same thing they did in 2016, not vote if they don't get their chosen one.
I think she suddenly found Super Pac money to keep her in. Funny how that happens! Many strange things happen in the democratic primary.
Yeah, Warren who promised she wouldn't take Superpac money, suddenly starts taking it when she's the last democrat in the race who can take votes from Sanders.
Biden's probably promised her more than the other two to keep her in the race.
He will do whatever he's told. The democratic party wants to get back into power. They need candidates who don't have mind's of their own. Joe lost his mind completely. He is the perfect proxy. He would be to the Presidency what Mueller was to the Mueller investigation - a figure head - an empty vessel!
Sean,
Did you think this maniacal the last election about the RNC? Can you imagine the horror when they got Trump as their guy.
I think there was a far more homogenous following after trump than any of the right wing candidates he was up against. Trump brought in a truly unique crowd. People who mostly like making their own money above all else. That's the problem I have with Sander or warren or most democrats. They want to take away my ability to provide for myself. I don't want their handouts!!!!
Oh poppycocks. I know loads of Dems who have worked hard and made their own money. I put Sanders and Warren in a category of their own.
And that is why this election is so volatile. It's the difference between two different concepts for the party.
And that didn't answer my question. Do you think that the RNC wanted Trump?
Sure I think the RNC did everything they could to thin the field, but numerous candidates stayed through Super Tuesday. The DNC is not making the mistake the RNC did, they are clearing the field early and giving their candidate, Biden, the best possible chance they can to win.
There's no rational explanation for those two to drop out at this point, other then trying to help Biden. Why spend years running for President only to drop out hours before the first large batch of delegates is selected?
The projections were abysmal. If you know you have no chance at the presidency (and your campaign donations will thus be drying up), what is the point of going through the motions? Much better to drop out and work on a career in the hypothetical new administration (or VP).
I would agree with you if it was Warren, but Mayor Pete is still green behind the ears and I think that Klobuchar numbers were just too low and she realized that. Maybe she got an offer, like Veep, but then again, who knows?
Very reasonable answer, Tig.
Yes, that was my point. That's the quo to get them to drop out.
Fortunately they seldom bother to vote!
You do realize that Sanders has a strong NA following, right?
I'm sure that your meme isn't directed at them.
I'm not ashamed to admit it. That's funny.
But this one is a smidge funnier.
"Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Monday announced he was endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden in his bid for the White House.
Reid lauded Biden as the candidate best fit to assemble the largest coalition to defeat President Trump and “lead our country following the trauma of Trump’s presidency.”
He's "best fit?"
Voting is only hours away.
The only man with idea's (although they're bad ones) is set to take the undisputed lead in the democratic primary!
Bloomberg is currently reaching out to a broader audience at a Fox News Town Hall.
Biden simply reaches out!
He’s trying to extract her life energy.
Why does Pete have to be the one to drop out? Make Dracula drop out!
Trump will destroy Biden. Besides Bernie that is the worst candidate they could bring forward. No diversity points. No charisma. No past accomplishments to run on. Caught up in the swamp. Bloomberg is the only threat and that is because he is not a democrat at all and most democrats cant stand him lol. Man you gotta love politics. Trump 2020 for the win. No problem man
Yea, they gotta get moving on Haley's 2028 reelection.
the Comet ?
cleanser is making a comeback so soon ?
Biden just told Anderson Cooper that it would cost "$60 billion" for the Sanders Health Plan. Obviously Joe meant $60 Trillion.
Don't forget Joe on "Super Thursday."
When the Democrats really start supporting "Alzheimer Joe", you know Bernie "Is NOT their guy" !
Much better than Deranged Donnie, the Snowflake In Chief.
Biden isn't much older than Trump - and even with the age difference, I'm pretty sure he understands things like how viruses and vaccinations work much better than Deranged Donnie.
Joe doesn't even know if Thursday is actually Tuesday, or Tuesday is actually Thursday !
You go and vote for "Joe".
"SUPPORT ALZHIMERS DESEASE" !
Your a "Good" person for supporting the "Mentally Ill" .
And that medical genius was appointed to oversee the search for a cancer cure.
And on top of that, a lawyer in charge of the Ebola "crisis".
you're knot
No.... I am..... "It Is Me" !
not sure i'd be going round admitting that
Why ?
Not one running for President" anyway !
I'm not speaking for It Is Me, but for the group.....There were no personal references. Please don't make it so.
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Truth is Hurtful ?
Think about my answer before
When you do that, you are altering the context of what was said. It was used to show that candidate Biden had become a human gaffe machine, not to somehow denigrate those afflicted with Alzheimer's and certainly not any one you know personally. That's my perspective, anyway.
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That would be "Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals" ……. No. 13 ..... being over USED ….. Again.
.
I'm glad you understand. I didn't want to do it. If we all stay on topic there will be a lot less emotion.
( 15.1.13 r.t..b… "The problem isn't in making it personal")
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We can't do that!
Stick with the topic!
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"The DNC has many ways to put a stop to Bernie."
Hllary v. Bernie all over again.
The DNC IS "Sticking together" against the DS in the lead.
If they go to a brokered convention, the super delegates are in play again. This time it will be hard because it will be so obvious. That is why Donna Brazille lost her temper on Fox News!
For sure !
Even Ed Henry was shocked at Donna's comments, and he's pretty laid back.
Did you notice that Brazille called them "Russian talking points?"
Oh ya !
The "Russian DNC Playbook" is back on the podium......AGAIN !
It just keeps going, doesn't it. The Clinton Campaign created that and it still marches on. There is no stake through the heart or silver bullet to kill it!
Is Donna (I got your answers) Brazile gonna sneak Joey the questions to the next debate too ?
She just told Ronna McDowell to "go to hell."
Then she ended it all with "Amen...Amen."
What a POS!
I saw that !
Donna should stay out of anything to do with the DNC or anything "Political" for that matter. She makes them look more Moron-ish than they already do !
She got away with a pile of it when she was DNC Chairwoman & CNN analyst last time around!
When CNN can't even take her....."Houston, there IS a problem" !
CNN had little choice...Brazille got the questions to be asked at a town hall from somebody at CNN and relayed them to candidate Hillary Clinton. She got caught!
Brazille acts like she's too cool for school, but she's really dumb.
She tells someone to "go to hell" then ends it off like the little church lady!
I saw her this morning, and she reminded me of Biden making the sign of the cross on his chest right after making a disgusting comment. People who pull the "religion card" are as disgusting as those who pull the race card every chance they get.
Usually the same people!
Well, "The Five" did let her tag along on their "Wildhorse Saloon" Trip.
She had waaaaaay too much "John Rich Redneck Riviera Whiskey" apparently. It's lingered waaaaaay to long in her system for sure.
What surprises me is how little attention Mike Bloomberg is receiving. Bloomberg has a more robust organization and more money than Biden. But then Sanders beats Biden with organization and money, too.
Joe Biden is not going to be a third term for Barack Obama. By the time the general election rolls around that will become apparent. Biden will need to formulate a clear message for his agenda or he won't make it. And it's becoming apparent that Biden will do the stupid thing and alienate Sanders' grassroots base. Biden won't unify the party.
The only sane thing to do at this point is to put Biden and Sanders on the same ticket. The real fight should be over which will be President and which will be Vice President.
I think the killer for Bloomberg was his dismissive attitude during the earlier debates. He should have responded to Warren's pointed attacks. Plus the fact that I'm sure most democrats regard him as a "Conservative" type democrat. Had he come out of the debates well I think the DNC might have backed him, if only to try and beat this outstanding President.
Bloomberg ads have been playing here in Minnesota. Bloomberg leans heavily on his experience and achievements in New York City. The ads I've seen only highlight that New York City isn't on the same planet as most of the country. What works in New York won't work in Small Town USA.
That may be true, but remember, the good job done by Bloomberg as Mayor is now being apologized for. Do you believe him?
Every which way you look!
Bloomberg really can cite accomplishments as mayor of New York. But Duluth isn't going to be attacked by terrorists. Insurance doesn't have the same value when rural areas can't attract doctors. The size of entire rural schools are smaller than a single class in New York. And multinational corporations aren't trying to locate their headquarters in Winona.
The ads I've seen highlight that Mike Bloomberg doesn't live on the same planet I do. Mike Bloomberg has demonstrated he is quite capable of being mayor of a large city but the United States isn't a large city. Trying to govern that way will only make things worse.
You may be right on all of that plus he is a bit of an elitist. That being said, if it had to be one of the democrats, I'd take him as the lessor of many evils.
Keep in mind that touting supply-side economics from the viewpoint of a monetary economist is an elitist attitude. The monetarists are the technocratic elite. The money supply (the supply-side) may be an easy and efficient way to centrally plan an economy but that approach chases fool's gold.
A little Keynesian industrial production now and then would be a good thing. The monetary elite's credit card economy isn't working.
Keynesian economics was designed for the bad times. I think if John Maynard Keynes were alive today, he would be astonished to see how the old fashioned liberals wanted to use his ideas virtually all the time.
Weren't those 'bad times' the result of industrial production collapsing? I don't believe Keynes intended his economic ideas to be applied for monetary policy. Keynes seemed to place greater emphasis on the marketplace than the monetary printing press. Monetary policy was a tool to protect industrial creation of wealth; the money supply did not create wealth.
Industrial economics doesn't work well for managing the money supply. But monetary economics doesn't work that well for managing the marketplace. Too much of either throws a baby out with the bath water.
The elitist attitude is about shaping reality to fit theory and twisting the outcome to declare victory. The elite don't live in the real world.
Only on certain occasions. The Great Depression had more to do with FED policy than anything else.
The elitist attitude is about shaping reality to fit theory and twisting the outcome to declare victory.
Well said.
The elite don't live in the real world.
They wouldn't understand it.
The Federal Reserve manages the money supply. The only way the FED can stimulate the economy is to create consumer debt which increases the money supply. That's the J. Wellington Wimpy approach to stimulus; "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." That short term boost in consumer spending carries a long term cost of less consumption overall. Manipulating the money supply can't create sustainable growth because it is based upon consumer debt. Monetary policy (supply-side economics) requires believing in perpetual motion.
The Treasury stimulates the economy with spending which increases consumer income and directly influences industrial activity. Government debt doesn't rely on fractional banking practices and doesn't increase the money supply. Government debt is bought from the existing money supply.
The Great Depression was the result of too much consumer debt and not enough consumer income. Lower interest rates to increase the money supply with more consumer debt would only exacerbate the problem in the long term. What was needed was deficit spending by the Treasury. The problem was that with the large amount of consumer debt, stimulative spending would have been used to retire debt rather than boost short term consumption. Banking practices at the time meant that debt defaults wiped out consumer savings so what was needed was more income and not more access to credit.
Nerm, This has become my accepted view of the causes of the Great Depression:
In the 1950s, Friedman and Anna Schwartz began compiling historical data on monetary variables without any particular agenda or intention of overturning the dominant explanation of the Great Depression. But it became obvious that the data were at odds with the standard Keynesian explanation. So in their 1963 book, A Monetary History of the United States , 1867–1960, they presented the empirical evidence that led them to a completely different explanation.
As a result of examining more closely the key years between 1929 and 1933, Friedman and Schwartz first concluded that the Great Depression was not the necessary and direct result of the stock-market crash of October 1929, which they attribute to a speculative investment bubble. (The popping of the “bubble” may have been instigated by the Federal Reserve’s raising of the discount rate—the interest rate the Fed charges on loans to commercial banks—in August 1929. The cause of the speculative bubble that led to the crash is a somewhat controversial topic. Whereas Friedman and Schwartz accepted that the bubble was caused by investors, seemingly endorsing—at least partly—the Keynesian “animal spirits” explanation, Austrian economists have argued otherwise.) In fact, they believed that the economy could have recovered rather rapidly if only the Fed—the central bank of the United States —had not engaged in a series of disastrous policies in the aftermath of the crash.
The Fed had only been in existence for 15 years at the time of the crash, having opened its doors in 1914. The United States had two central banks before the Fed (the Bank of United States, 1792–1812; and the Second Bank of the United States, 1816–1836), but had been without a central bank of any sort for over 75 years until the creation of the Fed. It was created primarily to act as a “lender of last resort” from which private banks could borrow money in times of crisis. The need for a lender of last resort in the U.S. banking system was due to a systemic weakness caused unintentionally by state and federal banking regulations. (Canada, with a freer banking system, had no such systemic weakness and no need for a lender of last resort.) Weak banks are subject to crisis when their depositors are no longer confident that their bank holds sufficient reserves to satisfy all withdrawal demands at a certain time. This can trigger a “bank run,” where depositors attempt to get to the bank before the other depositors in order to withdraw their money before the bank’s limited reserves run out. A run on a bank can easily generate other bank runs as depositors become worried about the financial health of their own similarly weak banks.
The problem with bank runs is that when depositors withdraw money and stuff it under their mattresses rather than trust it to other banks, the money supply shrinks. To understand this phenomenon, we have to explain how we measure the money supply. The simplest measures include not only currency but also checking deposits, since they are commonly used to make payments. What complicates things is that fractional-reserve banking leads to a multiple expansion of deposits. When someone puts money in a bank his checking account reflects the deposit, but the bank does not keep all the money on hand—it’s not a warehouse. Instead, it keeps only a fraction as “reserves” and lends the rest to a borrower, who in turn buys goods or services. The seller then deposits her new income in a bank, where she gets a checking account. The money supply increases by the amount of the new deposit. This process will continue, though in ever-decreasing amounts since banks have to keep some part of the new deposits as reserves. Yet each cycle will increase the money supply by increasing the overall amount of deposits held at banks.
This process works in reverse too. When banks lose reserves due to bank runs, the economy experiences a multiple contraction of deposits. The deposits that are removed from the economy greatly exceed the additional currency that the public now holds, so the money supply decreases.
The stock-market crash of October 1929 made it more difficult for many businesses to repay their loans to the banks, and many banks found their balance sheets impaired as a result. But the most important cause of the bank runs that began in October 1930 was bad times in the farm belt, where the banks were especially weak and poorly diversified. The number of bank runs increased exponentially in December 1930—in that single month 352 banks failed. Most of the failing banks were in the Midwest , their failures caused by farmers who defaulted on their loans because they were hit hard by the economic downturn. No sooner did the first wave of bank runs subside than another got underway in the spring of 1931, creating what Friedman and Schwartz described as a “contagion of fear” among bank depositors. Bank crises continued to come in waves until the spring of 1933.
Roosevelt Comes In
FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, and two days later he declared a “bank holiday,” allowing banks legally to refuse withdrawals by depositors; it lasted ten days. With his famous phrase, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he intended to dissuade depositors from running on their banks, but by then it was far too late. In 1929 there were a total of 25,000 banks in the United States. As the bank holiday ended, only 12,000 banks were operating (though another 3,000 were to reopen eventually). The effect on the money supply was equally dramatic. From 1929 to 1933 it fell by 27 percent—for every $3 in circulation in 1929 (whether in currency or deposits), only $2 was left in 1933. Such a drastic fall in the money supply inevitably led to a massive decrease in aggregate demand. People’s savings were wiped out so their natural response was to save more to compensate, leading to plummeting consumption spending. Naturally, total economic output also fell dramatically: GDP was 29 percent lower in 1933 than in 1929. And the unemployment rate hit its historic high of 25 percent in 1933.
Friedman and Schwartz argued that all this was due to the Fed’s failure to carry out its assigned role as the lender of last resort. Rather than providing liquidity through loans, the Fed just watched as banks dropped like flies, seemingly oblivious to the effect this would have on the money supply. The Fed could have offset the decrease created by bank failures by engaging in bond purchases, but it did not. As Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in Free to Choose:
The [Federal Reserve] System could have provided a far better solution by engaging in large-scale open market purchases of government bonds. That would have provided banks with additional cash to meet the demands of their depositors. That would have ended—or at least sharply reduced—the stream of bank failures and have prevented the public’s attempted conversion of deposits into currency from reducing the quantity of money. Unfortunately, the Fed’s actions were hesitant and small. In the main, it stood idly by and let the crisis take its course—a pattern of behavior that was to be repeated again and again during the next two years.
According to Friedman and Schwartz, this was a complete abdication of the Fed’s core responsibilities—responsibilities it had taken away from the commercial bank clearinghouses that had acted to mitigate panics before 1914—and was the primary cause of the Great Depression.
The obvious question is: Why didn’t the Fed act? We don’t know for sure, but Friedman and Schwartz proposed several possible explanations: 1) the Fed officials did not fully understand the disastrous consequences of letting so many banks go under. Friedman and Schwartz wrote that Fed officials may have “tended to regard bank failures as regrettable consequences of bank management or bad banking practices, or as inevitable reactions to prior speculative excesses, or as a consequence but hardly a cause of the financial and economic collapse in process”; 2) Fed officials may have been acting out of their own self-interest since many of them were affiliated with large Northeastern banks. Bank failures, at least in the early stages, “were concentrated among smaller banks and since the most influential figures in the system were big-city bankers who deplored the existence of smaller banks, their disappearance may have been viewed with complacency”; 3) The inactivity may have been caused by political infighting between the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., and regional Fed banks, in particular the New York district bank, which was the most important part of the system at that time. But we may never know the real reason.
Dangers of Centralized Power
There is an important lesson to be learned from this episode: When we centralize great responsibility and power in one institution, its failure will have far-reaching and terrible consequences. The Fed was instituted to act decisively in the exact circumstances that occurred in 1930–33. Friedman and Schwartz pointed out that the Fed’s failure was all the more serious and difficult to understand given how easily it could have been avoided:
At all times throughout the 1929–1933 contraction, alternative policies were available to the system by which it could have kept the stock of money from falling, and indeed could have increased it at almost any desired rate. Those policies did not involve radical innovations. They involved measures of a kind the system had taken in earlier years, of a kind explicitly contemplated by the founders of the system to meet precisely the kind of banking crisis that developed in late 1930 and persisted thereafter. They involved measures that were actually proposed and very likely would have been adopted under a slightly different bureaucratic structure or distribution of power, or even if the men in power had had somewhat different personalities.
This is the most worrisome fact. The institution failed because of the people within it. And given the immense power and influence it had over the economy, its failure was disastrous. It is important to understand that the Great Depression could have been avoided if the Fed had not so badly botched its monetary policy. In fact, Friedman and Schwartz claimed that the depression would not have been a Great Depression if there had been no Federal Reserve in the first place: “[I]f the pre-1914 banking system rather than the Federal Reserve System had been in existence in 1929, the money stock almost certainly would not have undergone a decline comparable to the one that occurred.”
That point was effectively elaborated by Milton and Rose Friedman in Free to Choose:
Had the Federal Reserve System never been established, and had a similar series of runs started, there is little doubt that the same measures would have been taken as in 1907—a restriction of payments. That would have been more drastic than what actually occurred in the final months of 1930. However, by preventing the draining of reserves from good banks, restriction would almost certainly have prevented the subsequent series of bank failures in 1931, 1932, and 1933, just as restriction in 1907 quickly ended bank failures then. . . . The panic over, confidence restored, economic recovery would very likely have begun in early 1931, just as it had in early 1908.
The existence of the Reserve System prevented the drastic therapeutic measure: directly, by reducing the concern of the stronger banks, who, mistakenly as it turned out, were confident that borrowing from the System offered them a reliable escape mechanism in case of difficulty; indirectly, by lulling the community as a whole, and the banking system in particular, into the belief that such drastic measures were no longer necessary now that the System was there to take care of such matters.
In the February 15, 2007, New York Review of Books economist and columnist Paul Krugman charged Friedman with “intellectual dishonesty” because Friedman repeatedly called for a significant reduction of the Fed’s power or even its outright abolition as a result of his work on the Great Depression. Krugman, however, concluded that the real lesson to be learned from Friedman’s explanation is that government institutions should be more active, not less. Krugman believes his conclusion to be so obvious that he is convinced that Friedman’s contrary recommendation must be driven by an ideological agenda and thus is an example of intellectual dishonesty. However, Krugman is clearly missing the point.
Friedman’s conclusion was perfectly logical given his belief that had the Fed not been created, the downturn of 1929 would not have become a major depression. Friedman claims in the paragraph above that without the Fed “the same measures would have been taken [in 1930] as in 1907—a restriction of payments,” which he believes would have prevented the crisis from spreading to “stronger banks,” those not guilty of overextending themselves through over-risky loans. Monetary economist Lawrence H. White of the University of Missouri-St. Louis filled in the blanks in Friedman’s “institutional counter-factual” on the Division of Labour blog (March 12, 2007):
Friedman understood . . . that before the Federal Reserve Act financial panics in the US were mitigated by the actions of private commercial bank clearinghouses. Friedman and Schwartz’s view of the 1930′s was that the Fed, having nationalized the roles of the clearinghouse associations [CHAs], particularly the lender-of-last-resort role, did less to mitigate the panic than the CHAs had done in earlier panics like 1907 and 1893. In that sense, the economy would have been better off if the Fed had not been created. This position is perfectly consistent with the position that, provided we take the Fed’s nationalization of the clearinghouse roles for granted, the Fed was guilty of not doing its job.
Thus the Fed’s failure in the early ’30s shows the dangers of excessive centralization of important market functions that were previously dispersed among multiple private institutions. Friedman’s bottom line remains intact: The Fed caused the Great Depression.
The Perfect Storm
In the decades following Friedman and Schwartz’s work economists started examining other government-policy failures in the aftermath of the crash. They have found an abundant supply of them. Here are several key examples of these bad policies: 1) In response to a sharp decrease in tax revenues in 1930 and 1931 (caused by a slowdown of economic activities), the federal government passed the largest peacetime tax increase in the history of the United States, which clearly applied the brakes on any recovery that could have taken place; 2) the federal government also passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, substantially increasing tariffs and leading to retaliatory restrictions by trading partners, which resulted in a considerable decrease in demand for U.S. exports and a further slowdown in production (not to mention a loss of mutually advantageous division of labor); 3) the federal government also instituted all sorts of “public works” programs, beginning under Herbert Hoover and increasing dramatically under FDR; the programs removed hundreds of thousands of people from the labor market and engaged them in economically wasteful activities, such as carving faces of dead presidents into the sides of a mountain, preventing or delaying necessary labor-market adjustments; 4) another federal policy that prevented (labor and other) market adjustments was the price and wage controls enacted under the National Recovery Administration and in effect from 1933 until 1935 (when ruled unconstitutional); this policy massively distorted relative market prices, impairing their ability to function as guides to entrepreneurs; 5) the Fed was not blameless after 1933 either. It increased bank-reserve requirements in three steps in 1936 and 1937, leading to another significant decrease in the money supply. The result was the 1937–38 recession within the Depression, adding insult to injury.
Collectively, they're like 300 years old.
[deleted]
picking on Chinese children is wrong
Wha?
233, but I won't quibble.
Each of them would be over 80 in the first term and each has a medical history of cardio/vascular disease.
One of the perpetrators of the Russia hoax just endorsed Joe Biden
And the Biden Campaign says "No thanks."