Bad move, Kirsten

So...every woman who wants to be the VP choice is going to have to do this, right?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dipshit Don

Just say no to AIPAC

The liberal group MoveOn is calling on Democratic presidential candidates to skip this year’s AIPAC policy conference, citing the pro-Israel group’s links to the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu and charging that AIPAC has flirted with Islamophobia.

The move underscores a growing willingness on the left to criticize Israel and its staunchest Washington supporters, particularly since freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) bashed supporters of Israel in terms widely condemned as anti-Semitic.

“It’s no secret that that AIPAC has worked to hinder diplomatic efforts like the Iran deal, is undermining Palestinian self-determination, and inviting figures actively involved in human rights violations to its stage,” Iram Ali, campaign director at MoveOn Political Action, said in a statement provided first to Politico. Ali said the move should “give a clear insight to 2020 candidates on where their base stands instead of prioritizing lobbying groups and policy people who rarely step outside of D.C.”

MoveOn’s move may be largely symbolic, as there is no evidence candidates planned to attend this year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, which begins Sunday. In past political cycles, presidential candidates have tended to appear at the annual conference during election years rather than off years.

  Politico

But their declaration not to attend does carry consequences with voters. Any bets on Booker and Gillibrand?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Nice one, Kirsten

[Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand will hold] a campaign kickoff rally in front of Trump International Tower in New York next week.

[...]

Gillibrand, who was first appointed to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate in 2009, has enjoyed national attention in recent years, largely due to her activism in the #MeToo movement. She has long been an advocate for victims of sexual assault and harassment in the military, the workplace and on Capitol Hill.

[...]

Gillibrand also calls for universal health care, paid family leave, ending gun violence, a Green New Deal and getting money out of politics, and points to activists like striking public school teachers and Women's March participants.

[...]

Gillibrand faced some criticism from other Democrats when she became the first Democratic senator to call for the resignation of then-Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) over allegations of sexual misconduct. Her office also came under scrutiny this month due to a report that a former female staffer resigned over the alleged mishandling of her sexual harassment complaint.

  The Hill

What about Kirsten Gillibrand?

Another challenge to Gillibrand in a Democratic primary is her record. Her political career began in 2007 in the House, where she served an upstate congressional district. Gillibrand’s political positions at the time were much more conservative, and she was among the least liberal members of the Democratic caucus in the House, ranking 209th out of 241 during her 2007-09 term. She held an “A” rating from the NRA and was against protections for sanctuary cities. When Gillibrand was appointed to Clinton’s Senate seat, some on the left were outraged. But she made a quick switch in her ideology, embracing a range of liberal policies and seeing her NRA rating downgraded to an “F.” As of December 2017, she was the seventh-most liberal member of the 46-person Democratic caucus. There could be some worry that her voting history — or her hasty disavowal of it — could be used against her by primary opponents battling to prove their liberal bona fides.

  FiveThirtyEight

Today, nearly a year after Gillibrand led the charge in calling for [Senator Al] Franken’s resignation, the anger is fresh on the minds of major donors across the country.

[...]

The anger is at least in part a testament to donors’ fondness for Franken, a comedian who rose to fame as a “Saturday Night Live” cast member and remains in the eyes of his supporters one the Senate’s greatest champions for women — even after his resignation.

[...]

Gillibrand has defended her approach by insisting she placed deeply held personal values over party loyalty. But the still-burning resentment among the donor class now confronts Gillibrand as she explores a presidential bid, cutting her off from influential and deep-pocketed contributors and their networks at a time when an expansive 2020 field will compete for their dollars.

[...]

On its face, the revolt against Gillibrand seems counterintuitive. At a key moment in the “#MeToo” movement, Gillibrand stood up to a revered colleague in her own party. She led the call for Franken’s resignation after he was accused of groping or trying to forcibly kiss more than half a dozen women. A chorus of senators quickly followed her. It raised Gillibrand’s national profile, almost immediately branding her as a fierce female leader who told the establishment that when it comes to sexual harassment, “enough is enough.”

It’s unclear whether or to what extent a donor backlash could debilitate Gillibrand’s possible 2020 campaign.

[...]

From 2013 through this year, Gillibrand’s campaign committee raised nearly $18 million for her 2018 reelection bid. Almost 60 percent of that amount came from high-dollar donors, but Gillibrand also raised nearly $6.5 million, or about 30 percent of her total, from small-dollar donors who gave less than $200.

[...]

If Gillibrand is unpopular with a certain subset of the Democratic donor class, it didn’t hurt her in her most recent reelection bid in New York in November, when she won roughly two-thirds of the vote against her Republican opponent and garnered 3.73 million votes — the most for any candidate in New York in this election cycle.

  Politico

Fair point, but that was running against a Republican at a time when they are losing a lot of voter confidence. She first has to run against fellow Democrats before she can run against a Republican in 2020.

She earned almost 400,000 more votes than Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is sometimes mentioned as a possible 2020 Democratic contender himself. In 2012, when she was running for her first full Senate term, she garnered 350,000 more votes than President Barack Obama, who led the Democratic ticket, received in New York.

Well, there is that.

Gillibrand was the youngest member of the Senate when she was appointed to fill the seat vacated by Hillary Clinton in 2009. Now, she is the top Democrat on the Armed Services personnel subcommittee. She is a mom of two, a fierce softball pitcher and hitter, and conversant in Mandarin Chinese. Here is what Kirsten Gillibrand believes on some key issues in the 2020 campaign.

Campaign finance: Overturn Citizens United. Refuse corporate PAC donations.

[...]

Climate change: Create a cap-and-trade commodity market [to limit] carbon emissions. Ban new drilling on federal lands.

[...]

Education and child care: Make public higher education debt free. Make childcare more affordable and accessible.

[...]

Guns: Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Make background checks universal [...] including closing the "gun show loophole."

[...]

Sexual assault and harassment: Reform handling of sexual assault in the military and on college campus.

[...]

Health care: Move to a universal, government-run health care system within four years.

[...]

Immigration and border security: Eliminate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Reform immigration to include a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

[...]

Social issues: Expand abortion access. Gay, lesbian and transgender Americans should be allowed to serve in the military and marry whomever they chose.

[...]

Afghanistan and Syria: Withdraw from Afghanistan. Do not arm Syrian rebels.

[...]

Saudi Arabia: End U.S. support of action in Yemen.

This next article was written before she entered the 2020 contest.

Gillibrand has personally been working the phones and calling senior executives at Wall Street firms in recent weeks to see whether they would back her campaign if she jumps into the race, according to two senior business leaders who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Donors in the financial community helped back Gillibrand's successful re-election bid last year. Her effort to connect with business leaders this time comes as she contemplates entering what will likely be an expensive and protracted Democratic primary.

Gillibrand has gotten a mixed response from the executives, however. Some have enthusiastically kept the door open to helping her finance her possible 2020 operation while others are hesitant to return her calls.

  CNBC

I know it takes a lot of money to run a campaign, but I still don't like the idea of candidates taking Wall Street money. And some don't. But those seem to be candidates who have a lot of name recognition already. Not sure where Gillibrand falls in that category, but probably well behind Bernie, Beto and Elizabeth Warren.

Even though Gillibrand has received donations from Wall Street, she has pushed for tightening regulations in the financial industry. She voted in support of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and then voted against a bill in 2018 that rolled back some bank regulations put in place in 2010. As a member of the House of Representatives, she voted against the bank bailout during the 2008 financial crisis.

Glen Caplin, a spokesman for Gillibrand, insisted that if the lawmaker from New York ran for president she would build her operation off of grassroots fundraising and would not confirm or the deny her efforts to reach out to Wall Street leaders.

"If Senator Gillibrand decides to run, she will run a campaign that takes no corporate PAC money and is powered by grassroots donations, and based on her values of standing up to those in power and returning our democracy to the people where it belongs," Caplin said in a statement to CNBC.

So, either the report of her reaching out is false, or maybe she's just checking to see how much active resistance they'd be giving her.

Later Gillibrand responded to this story in a tweet, noting her voting record on financial regulations. She did not deny having conversations with Wall Street executives about a possible 2020 run. The post was later deleted from her Twitter account.

Welp. On the whole, with all this information, I think more positively of her than negatively.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

How about a corporate financial transaction tax?

That $6.3 trillion debt bomb upon which corporate America is sitting is now bigger than any in history, eclipsing even pre-2008 levels. The national “economic miracle” Trump keeps lauding is – like his own financial empire – resting on a bed of borrowed cash.

[...]

The problem is, the current administration – and a bipartisan group of Senators – are determined to go the other way, having just rolled back more provisions of the already-weak Dodd-Frank Act. Returning to Glass-Steagall, which was designed to prevent banks from over-creating bad loans and pumping them into the economy via investment banking operations, seems like a distant fantasy.

[...]

A new approach to reining in speculation is needed, which is why the tiny glimmer of good news from late last week was so welcome.

On June 27th, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) became the first co-sponsor to S. 805, the “Inclusive Prosperity Act of 2017,” originally introduced by Bernie Sanders.

  Matt Taibbi

Gasp! Socialism!

The bill is the American version of a Financial Transactions Tax, a plan to raise revenue and curb speculation by attaching micro-taxes to financial transactions. The E.U. moved toward an FTT plan for 11 Eurozone countries in 2013.

The Sanders camp trumpets the plan as a money-raiser – a way to pay for big-ticket social programming like free college tuition. But it also has a huge safety component.

[...]

[E]ven the tiniest financial transactions surcharge could help rein in greed orgies just enough to keep the economy from exploding. In the past, these micro-taxes have been envisioned as a way to pay for the inevitable bailouts in our increasingly deregulated economy.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

The idea is that greedy Wall Street players holding stock they want to sell call several brokers with buy orders to drive up the stock price - known as spoofing.

In a computer-dominated trading environment, the aim isn’t just to move the stock with your own purchase power. The idea is also to trick other algorithmic traders into mass-dumping or buying their holdings.

Using this technique, a single slick operator can generate huge volumes of transactions often without having much or even any skin in the game.

All of this activity has no real economic purpose, other than to move the “tape” for an instant or two and make some over-moussed Wall Street parasite a bunch of unearned money.

A secondary problem is that even in the rare case that authorities get around to identifying and outlawing things like this, they tend not to be able to really do much in the way of enforcement.

[...]

There are countless other schemes HFT experts have cooked up over the years, from “order anticipation” to “layering” to modern variants on the old “wire” con from The Sting, in which traders use computers to take advantage of infinitesimal time differences in the reporting of price changes.

An eye-opening book to read on that last game - high frequency trading - is Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short. Netflix has just purchased the rights to it for a movie. Should be good.

High-frequency trades currently make up between 50 and 60 percent of all stock transactions in the U.S., which isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not necessarily a positive thing, either. For sure, there’s a ton of economically useless activity buried in that percentage. A financial transactions tax kills three birds with one stone. It raises money, provides a major disincentive to socially useless volume-based trading and decreases dangerous speculative volatility.

[...]

A financial transactions tax might help incentivize Wall Street to once again emphasize true long-term investment, as opposed to spending all day moving piles of money around. As with Medicare-for-all, it might take a while for Americans to accept an idea already embraced in Europe.

Still, a senator from New York signing on to an idea so universally despised by Wall Street is worth raising an eyebrow or two. Hopefully it leads to something more, perhaps even before it’s too late.

If it isn't already.

Nasty, over the top nasty

This man must be censured. This is the most disgusting yet. And not surprising, about a woman.

Disgusting human trash.  And I'm not talking about Senator Gillibrand.

Trump singled out Gillibrand while ignoring the male senators who have called on him to step down: Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, New Jersey senator Cory Booker and Oregon senator Jeff Merkley.

  Guardian

Gillibrand's cool response.