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Bernie Sanders and the troubling interview with NY Daily News
mrussel1
Posts: 28,631
Bernie was seeking the endorsement of the Daily News and sat down on April 1 for an interview with the editorial board. Pretty standard stuff. But what came out of it is the crystallization of what some here on the AMT have been saying... Bernie's proposals are great, but how the hell do you do that?? And that's pretty much how it went for his bread and butter issues. I'm usually quite averse to posting someone else's editorial, but after reading the transcript, I thought this was a good summation.
Article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/bernie-sanderss-rough-ride-with-the-daily-news/476919/
Transcript: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306
There’s little doubting Bernie Sanders’s core political convictions—he’s been saying the same things for decades, with remarkable consistency. But turning convictions into policy is the challenge, and the Vermont senator’s interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News raises some questions about his policy chops.
Throughout his interview, Sanders seemed taken aback when he was pressed on policy—and not just on the matters that are peripheral to his approach, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or interrogation of detainees, but even on bread-and-butter matters like breaking up the big banks, the Democratic presidential hopeful came across as tentative, unprepared, or unaware.
It’s striking that there hasn’t been more coverage of Sanders’s policy ideas so far during the campaign, even at this late date, with most of the primary season concluded. He’s even acquired a reputation as something of a wonk, the kind of guy who eschews soaring rhetoric for dry nuts and bolts on the stump—and gets people to love him anyway. The gaps uncovered by the Daily News are not just about pragmatism. (There have, of course, been plenty of accusations, not least from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that Sanders is offering a deeply unrealistic program. He tends to answer that they fail to grasp that he is building a political revolution.) The question here is not how Sanders would enact policies, but what those policies would be. If the Sanders campaign has shied away from deep dives into policy, this interview might be why: The candidate reveals himself as a far defter diagnostician than clinician.
The most glaring example came early in the encounter, during a discussion of the problem of “too big to fail” banks. There is disagreement among economists on the left over how important, if at all, it is to break up large financial institutions. The board granted Sanders’s argument and asked him how he’d do it, producing an excruciating cat-and-mouse game:
Daily News: Okay. Well, let's assume that you're correct on that point. How do you go about doing it?
Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.
Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?
Sanders: Well, I don't know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.
Daily News: How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, "Now you must do X, Y and Z?"
Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.
Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?
Sanders: Yeah. Well, I believe you do.
The conversation detoured sideways a bit, as the board asked about what would happen to employees and investors in big banks and Sanders said, not unfairly, that it wasn’t his problem. But then it was back to how to break up the banks, and Sanders still couldn’t offer a coherent answer:
Daily News: Well, it does depend on how you do it, I believe. And, I'm a little bit confused because just a few minutes ago you said the U.S. President would have authority to order...
Sanders: No, I did not say we would order. I did not say that we would order. The President is not a dictator.
Daily News: Okay. You would then leave it to JPMorgan Chase or the others to figure out how to break it, themselves up. I'm not quite...
Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.
Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?
Sanders: It's something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.
The interview is full of vague comments like that one. For example, Sanders complains that executives implicated in the financial crisis haven’t been prosecuted. A board member asked him whether there are actually laws that could have nailed them. “I suspect that there are. Yes,” Sanders answered.
Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?
Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don't. But if I would...yeah, that's what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that's illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.
Daily News: I'm only pressing because you've made it such a central part of your campaign. And I wanted to know what the mechanism would be to accomplish it.
Rather than learning the mechanism, the questioner earned a lecture about how Wall Street is built on fraud, since Sanders is comfortable talking about why he doesn’t approve of Wall Street’s M.O.
Sanders is the candidate of first principles. That’s a phenomenon that’s been on display repeatedly during the Democratic debates, especially on matters of foreign policy. On the one hand, there’s Hillary Clinton, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East, but also backed the war in Iraq, thus botching the most important foreign-policy decision since Vietnam. On the other hand, there’s Sanders, whose answers about the Middle East are often opaque—see his call for a “Muslim army” to defeat ISIS—but whose gut led him to the correct decision on Iraq. Democratic voters may have to choose whether they prefer Clinton’s poor judgment or Sanders’s ignorance.
The latter was on display at the Daily News during an exchange about the peace process. Could he describe the pullback of Israeli settlements in the West Bank he has encouraged? No: “I'm not going to run the Israeli government. I've got enough problems trying to be a United States senator or maybe President of the United States.”
A moment later, he was asked why he didn’t support Palestinians using the International Criminal Court to try to prosecute Israeli leaders. “Look, why don't I support a million things in the world? I'm just telling you that I happen to believe,” the exasperated senator replied.
That’s just the problem, though. It’s important for leaders to know what they believe in, and Sanders has been unusually consistent and forthright about that. But Sanders isn’t running for chief ideologue—he’s running for chief executive, and so it’s also important for him to know what policies he would use to turn those beliefs into practice.
Article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/bernie-sanderss-rough-ride-with-the-daily-news/476919/
Transcript: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306
There’s little doubting Bernie Sanders’s core political convictions—he’s been saying the same things for decades, with remarkable consistency. But turning convictions into policy is the challenge, and the Vermont senator’s interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News raises some questions about his policy chops.
Throughout his interview, Sanders seemed taken aback when he was pressed on policy—and not just on the matters that are peripheral to his approach, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or interrogation of detainees, but even on bread-and-butter matters like breaking up the big banks, the Democratic presidential hopeful came across as tentative, unprepared, or unaware.
It’s striking that there hasn’t been more coverage of Sanders’s policy ideas so far during the campaign, even at this late date, with most of the primary season concluded. He’s even acquired a reputation as something of a wonk, the kind of guy who eschews soaring rhetoric for dry nuts and bolts on the stump—and gets people to love him anyway. The gaps uncovered by the Daily News are not just about pragmatism. (There have, of course, been plenty of accusations, not least from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that Sanders is offering a deeply unrealistic program. He tends to answer that they fail to grasp that he is building a political revolution.) The question here is not how Sanders would enact policies, but what those policies would be. If the Sanders campaign has shied away from deep dives into policy, this interview might be why: The candidate reveals himself as a far defter diagnostician than clinician.
The most glaring example came early in the encounter, during a discussion of the problem of “too big to fail” banks. There is disagreement among economists on the left over how important, if at all, it is to break up large financial institutions. The board granted Sanders’s argument and asked him how he’d do it, producing an excruciating cat-and-mouse game:
Daily News: Okay. Well, let's assume that you're correct on that point. How do you go about doing it?
Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.
Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?
Sanders: Well, I don't know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.
Daily News: How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, "Now you must do X, Y and Z?"
Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.
Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?
Sanders: Yeah. Well, I believe you do.
The conversation detoured sideways a bit, as the board asked about what would happen to employees and investors in big banks and Sanders said, not unfairly, that it wasn’t his problem. But then it was back to how to break up the banks, and Sanders still couldn’t offer a coherent answer:
Daily News: Well, it does depend on how you do it, I believe. And, I'm a little bit confused because just a few minutes ago you said the U.S. President would have authority to order...
Sanders: No, I did not say we would order. I did not say that we would order. The President is not a dictator.
Daily News: Okay. You would then leave it to JPMorgan Chase or the others to figure out how to break it, themselves up. I'm not quite...
Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.
Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?
Sanders: It's something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.
The interview is full of vague comments like that one. For example, Sanders complains that executives implicated in the financial crisis haven’t been prosecuted. A board member asked him whether there are actually laws that could have nailed them. “I suspect that there are. Yes,” Sanders answered.
Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?
Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don't. But if I would...yeah, that's what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that's illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.
Daily News: I'm only pressing because you've made it such a central part of your campaign. And I wanted to know what the mechanism would be to accomplish it.
Rather than learning the mechanism, the questioner earned a lecture about how Wall Street is built on fraud, since Sanders is comfortable talking about why he doesn’t approve of Wall Street’s M.O.
Sanders is the candidate of first principles. That’s a phenomenon that’s been on display repeatedly during the Democratic debates, especially on matters of foreign policy. On the one hand, there’s Hillary Clinton, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East, but also backed the war in Iraq, thus botching the most important foreign-policy decision since Vietnam. On the other hand, there’s Sanders, whose answers about the Middle East are often opaque—see his call for a “Muslim army” to defeat ISIS—but whose gut led him to the correct decision on Iraq. Democratic voters may have to choose whether they prefer Clinton’s poor judgment or Sanders’s ignorance.
The latter was on display at the Daily News during an exchange about the peace process. Could he describe the pullback of Israeli settlements in the West Bank he has encouraged? No: “I'm not going to run the Israeli government. I've got enough problems trying to be a United States senator or maybe President of the United States.”
A moment later, he was asked why he didn’t support Palestinians using the International Criminal Court to try to prosecute Israeli leaders. “Look, why don't I support a million things in the world? I'm just telling you that I happen to believe,” the exasperated senator replied.
That’s just the problem, though. It’s important for leaders to know what they believe in, and Sanders has been unusually consistent and forthright about that. But Sanders isn’t running for chief ideologue—he’s running for chief executive, and so it’s also important for him to know what policies he would use to turn those beliefs into practice.
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Comments
(Hey, I wanna hear some laughs for that "Bono" thing
How do you rail about putting executives in jail when you don't know if there is a statute to support it? That's pretty fundamental.
How do you say 'break up the banks' in one breath, and then in the next say "I would not order it".
I think there's some cognitive disconnect here between a speech and available action.
I just have to go with what I see as the more forthright and honest person. I don't want a crank for president. And besides, the system needs some shaking up. You can't support the big money guys forever and not expect the base to crumble. And ever more importantly, we need someone who is very and sincerely concerned about the planet. No planet, no president, no you, no me. Bernis is more focused that way.
Just sayin.
EVEN if Sanders is a lame duck president - maybe his election can start the dominioes falling in the direction they should be ... ??
Regarding HRC, I think she is offering a continuation of Obama's agenda. That's a progressive, incremental agenda that allows change without massive disruption (read stock crashes, high unemployment, inflation, etc.). For me, that is much more desirable than the sexy 'revolution'.
And neither would be good for the country.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned by anyone is the debt. That's still a growing and gathering threat to our economy, particularly if we are going to start a trade war with China (which both Trump and Sanders both implicitly advocate). They own a lot of our debt.
sanders problems are what mrussel1 said ... it's basically a system that doesn't allow for changes because it is already rigged to be controlled by special interests and corporations ... a far cry from trump who basically just rants ...
so, you are ok with continued war profiteering? foreign policies that disrupt sovereign nations? the continued spending of 50% of discretionary spending on the military?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/upshot/yes-bernie-sanders-knows-something-about-breaking-up-banks.html?rref=upshot&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=The Upshot&pgtype=Multimedia
I always wonder if people are prepared to pay the massive price increases on consumer goods (iphones, TVs, appliances, etc.) were we really to rebuild mass manufacturing in this country.
Secondarily they could raise capital requirements to force a break up. I guess that's somewhat true although the Banks have voluntarily (under Fed approval and support) operated under Basel requirements (now basel iii). Raising them to the point to force a breakup (well above Basel) would 1. Make US banks highly uncompetitive world wide, damaging US investors greatly and 2. actually dissolve banks, not break them up. If you can't meet the requirements (as a % of outstandings) in totality, how in the world will the new entities meet them?
I can't really tell if this writer is defending Bernie, doing his research for him, or what. But either way, it really doesn't change the concern. It's his policies. Why does the NYT write a follow up to his flub?
And this Daily News was thrown out there the day after Bernie won yet another state, attempting to undermine him.
Did FDR have every detail of how the New Deal would work when he was elected? Did Obama have every detail of Obamacare worked out when he was elected (in fact his plan while campaigning was quite different than the eventual bill, which included some ideas from Hillary's proposal and Romneycare).
The thing is, sometimes landmark elections do change the course of politics in the country.
The interview exposes as much about the media as it does about Bernie Sanders.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-daily-news_us_5704779ce4b0a506064d8df5?
Bernie Sanders gets slammed over Sandy Hook gun lawsuit comments
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/conn-sen-murphy-burns-bernie-sanders-gun-lawsuit-stand-article-1.2589519?cid=bitly
Second, it takes about two seconds to pull apart his bias: Here's a quote from the writer: "Sanders said that if the Treasury Department deemed it necessary to do so, the bank would go about unwinding itself as it best saw fit to get to a size that the administration considered no longer a systemic risk to the economy. Sanders said this could be done with new legislation, or through administrative authority under Dodd-Frank." Sanders said no such thing. He never said anything close to "systemic risk" to the economy. He only even agreed maybe a new law when the board pointed out that Treasury doesn't have the authority. He ended up agreeing with that point by the board and said "The President is not a dictator". So...which is it? Is the authority granted to Treasury (part of the Exec branch) or not?
And then the author tries to make his point about the fact that the CEO's could not prosecuted under current statutes by saying "But, quickly, without searching Google, can you name the particular statute that outlaws murder?". What a dumb argument. Just because we can't name the statute number under, say NY law, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It does. If you're running for DA, you better be damn sure that you know there's a statute for murder. If you're campaigning on prosecuting CEO's, you better be sure there's a law to support it.
So first the NY Daily News. I hope you understand that it's basically a tabloid. It's the counterpart of the Post. They thrive on running blaring, obnoxious headlines. Now before you get on your media horse, take a look below at the cover from the day before. Think they are picking sides?
Second. Sanders. I don't care what grade the NRA gives him. He voted against the liability bill in 2005 THE DAY AFTER HE VOTED FOR HOLDING FAST FOOD RESTAURANTS LIABLE FOR HEALTH ISSUES (the cheeseburger bill). I'm sorry, hypocrisy anyone? Second, he voted against the Brady Bill five times. FIVE times. So his record on guns sucks. So for the love of God, since you are a liberal I assume, admit that he's wrong on this issue.
It's Bernie for me. We'll see how it goes. I'm probably done with election threads.
Last one in the pool...
Hillary Clinton Is Pro Gun Control, But She’s Also Big on Arms Deals