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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Sat Apr 02, 2016 2:27 am 
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I have trouble believing supposed Sanders supporters who say such things. Remember the PUMA (People United Means Action (it originally meant Party Unity My Ass)) party? They were supposed Clinton supporters who said they would vote Republican if she wasn't the nominee in 2008. The organizers were actually lifelong registered Republicans.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2016 2:25 am 
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I have encountered one or two people out in the wilds of the internet who said that, but I think they're outliers.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2016 10:30 am 
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Let's not count Bernie out yet, but it does seem likely that Hillary will be the nominee.

Sanders needs some knockout wins in the remaining big states like NY in order to pull it off, and the Dem establishment doesn't care for Bernie nearly as much as Hillary, so the idea of taking it at a contested convention seems terribly unlikely.

I am terribly impressed, however, at the senator's stance on SuperPACs etc... I wouldn't have believed he could get this far without big donor money. Which is why the establishment part of the Dems hates him, because access to big piles of dark money is where lots of their power lies.

As for "I'd vote for Trump if I can't have Bernie", that sounds like something you'd say when you're in March but when you get into the booth, you hold your nose and vote for the less odious option (Hillary), especially when the choice is so stark.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2016 6:27 pm 
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Depends on what aspect of Bernie is important for which supporter and how much of each type there actually are.

Sure Bernie is sane for a protest candidate. And there are good reasons to assume, that he will attempt to achieve his goal without unnecessarily rocking the boat.

But i suppose he also appeals to voters who feel screwed by the system and thus want to screw the system back, without a coherent political agenda. To them Trump might look like the second choice.

There is a phenomenon somewhat like that in Austria. The Austrian communist party is mostly for practical purposes irrelevant. They definitely are in national elections, if they make 1% it's a great win for them. (And the entry boundary for the parliament is 4%) But they have a stronghold in Styria, where they make something in the general area of 5% and in Graz, the capitol of Styria, they IIRC made something like 20%. And obviously there are people, who vote communist in state and local elections, and something else in national elections. And according to statistical wizardry that politicologist use, a substantial part of them votes Freedom party in national elections. And between those parties there really is not much common ground other then that they both are often treated as pariahs, that they both promise to work for the "small man" (bit if you look closely their definition of the small man is not that similiar) and that they promise to take wealth back from those who have taken it in an immoral fashion (again once you try to actually define those terms, the ground stops being common).

Granted based on the Styrian communist example they most likely are a single digit percentage of the voters. But they are potential swing voters, who can be won or alienated by as it seems all political camps.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Wed Apr 06, 2016 3:38 pm 
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For one, I'd be pretty happy with either Bernie or Hillary. I'd LOVE Bernie if he were a bit better at relearning what the problems black people face are, that aren't the economic problems. He's had a lot of chances to pick that up, and keeps missing - like, in one of the debates he began talking about ghettos. Dude. Duuuuuude. No.

Shrug. Whatchagonnado.

But even if he had nailed that to perfection and lost anyway, I'd be happy with Hillary.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2016 12:36 am 
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Bernie thinks everything is an economic problem. And for all that he's talked about Wall Street, he didn't do much to support the Dodd-Frank bill, possibly because he thought it was a pointless half-measure. Barney Frank is notably unimpressed.

He obviously has his own reputation to protect as the co-author of the Dodd-Frank bill, but he thinks Sanders is more interested in moralistically railing at the system than in fixing it.
Quote:
Interviewer: I think that part of the argument that people like Sanders would make is that, the financial system is corrupt fundamentally and that we don’t want to merely make it slightly more stable—

Barney Frank: Well if that’s the case it’s even dumber than I thought. The financial system is people lending money to other people so they can do things. I do think that he overstates it when he says, “they’re all corrupt.” It’s simply not true. And by the way, when it comes to specifics, the only specific I have heard is Glass-Steagall, which makes very little change in the finance system.

I think he gets a pass from the media. Other than Glass-Steagall, what did he propose in 2009 and 2010 when he was a senator when we were dealing with this? The answer is nothing. Why haven’t you looked at his record?

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2016 12:45 am 
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Kea wrote:
Barney Frank is notably unimpressed.

Frank is simply acting as an attack dog for Clinton. A different take on the interview.
Quote:
As he has so many times in recent months, Barney Frank had some harsh things to say about Bernie Sanders — this time in a recent interview with Slate.com. Frank has endorsed Hillary Clinton (a fact neither he nor Slate interviewer Isaac Chotiner saw fit to mention), and has written several nasty, petty, and personal attacks on Bernie Sanders in his capacity as a Clinton surrogate.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Sat Apr 09, 2016 12:26 pm 
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I'm actually quite disappointed by Barney Frank in this particular election.

Normally speaking I'll listen if the Frank in Dodd-Frank is talking, but I haven't liked what he's been spewing for Hillary lately.

I would have hoped that now that he's retired he would be above acting as an attack dog for Hillary...

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2016 11:42 pm 
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He may be an obvious Clinton supporter while also making a valid point about financial reform. Sanders keeps going on about the "too big to fail" part of banking reform but in this he may be barking up the wrong tree. The financial crisis was started by small dodgy subprime lenders and spread around the world by not especially large investment outfits like Lehman Brothers. Breaking up the biggest banks wouldn't have helped. Glass-Steagall, which Sanders is focused on resurrecting, would not have prevented this because that law mandated the separation between conventional banks and investment banks, but pure investment outfits did plenty to wreck the financial system all on their own. Dodd-Frank went at it from a different angle by limiting the amount of risk that lenders are allowed to take so that if their loans go bad, they won't completely crash and burn. It gets crap from both the left and the right - the right says it's a job-killing nightmare, while the left thinks it's nothing more than window dressing. Neither of those things is true. After this many months of campaigning, it looks like Sanders just isn't that interested in practical policy detail, because he should know this by now. Or if he does know it, he's not saying it, because he'd rather focus on the bits that sound good.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2016 11:53 am 
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The new regulations basically run under "trust us, that with theese rules the problem will not happen again".

But the previous rules based on ratings did look sound too, they just did not work and even experts seem to have found out why only in hindsight. So it's quite understandable, why a lot of people are not trusting them.

And since the incentives for all the involved players remain the same, i would expect something similiar to happen again eventually, when someone comes up with an other trick to dress up financial risks nicely. And shareholders of big banks still can trust that they are not risking to loose all their investments, if the bank acts too risky, so why should they hire a timid risk awerse management.

I do not have a comprehensive plan to address that issue. I am not sure if Sanders ideas would help there. But he seems to at least go into that general direction, which is something more mainstream centrists don't do.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2016 12:21 am 
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I disagree. The new regulations aren't just "carry on, it's fine, nothing to see here". If they were, the banks wouldn't be so hellbent on weakening them. The new regulations require financial institutions to keep significantly more cash reserves so that if their loans go bad they can pay their debts. They can't keep $1 in the bank, borrow $10, and try to spin it into $100 anymore. The other thing you can do (but which hasn't been done yet) is to impose a tax on financial transactions. If every time they move money around, the government skims a bit off the top, this would deter them from engaging in high speed financial shenanigans. Sanders's single-minded focus on breaking up the banks may be more radical than what the centrists want to do, but that doesn't mean it will be more effective. The excessive size of banks is only one of many factors which contributed to the crisis, and addressing that alone would not fix the problem. The system could still be taken down by a series of small, highly-interlinked banks, which is what happened in the 80s with the Savings and Loan crash. Sanders is selling the thing that sounds good, not the things that would actually work. Because the latter would be pretty boring.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2016 3:12 am 
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Sanders supports the very thing you are saying. From the Reforming Wall Street of his Issues page:
Quote:
Has proposed a financial transaction tax which will reduce risky and unproductive high-speed trading and other forms of Wall Street speculation; proceeds would be used to provide debt-free public college education.

This notion that he hasn't given more detailed plans then just "breaking up the banks" is just not true.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 11:07 am 
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To make an analogy in IT security:

So your accounts have been hacked by using SQL injection. You can add fixes that make further attacks by SQL injection impossible and thoose changes can annoy the programmers because they make some debugging options more diffucult. But you have improved security a lot.

But still SQL injection is not the only possible security problem. So it is a good idea to think about, what data you really need to have online and in general how you can limit the damage that one or a couple of hacked accounts can do.

Dodd-Frank seems to me the equivalent of preventing SQL injection. Yes it improves things a lot. But i still think we need a coherent plan for the next crisis, that does not allow the "privatize profits, sozialize losses" pattern to happen again in the same way. Regardless how exatly the next crisis happens.

I am not really sold to any spezific plan to get there, and i lack the qualifications, to understand if a plan would really work. But i am somewhat miffed, that nobody in the establishment seems to seriously talk about such plans.

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:49 pm 
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So... that Democratic email leak seems to have strengthened the resolve of Bernie-or-Busters. The fact that high ranking Democratic party officials were against Sanders is reinforcing the perception that Sanders's own campaign pushed, that the vote was rigged. In the end, how many people do you think are going to defect to the Green Party, and will it be enough to counter-balance the number of Republicans thinking of voting Libertarian?

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 Post subject: Re: Feeling the Bern?
 Post Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2016 1:53 am 
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Well according to electoral-vote.com* Johnson is polling between 5-9% while Stein only got 0.36% of the vote in 2012 and consequently won't be included in their analysis. So it seems like the Johnson voters far out weigh the Stein voters.

*They just started their daily electoral map updates today, which makes me happy.

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