In 2015 -2016 Bernie Sanders consistently maintained that he didn’t want to run for President, that his run had “no personal ambition attached to it”. In fact, the only reason he changed his mind and ran was because Elizabeth Warren declined to run.
That’s right. Bernie ran last time because he claimed he had to step into the breech because Warren was not running.
Now Liz is running, so why is Bernie still hanging around? I mean I knew he was lying last time, because no one runs for President without personal ambition being a huge part of it, but the reason he claimed in 2015 is not valid anymore. She’s in, and she has all the plans. Elizabeth Warren just can’t stop releasing fantastic policy ideas.
In 2013, Elizabeth Warren’s VERY FIRST hearing as a brand-new member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, she asked a succession of creepy federal bank regulators WHY their agencies weren’t taking big banks to trial when they commit crimes, WHY? Warren kept asking when the last time was that a bank had been taken to trial for defrauding people, and the regulators proudly replied trials weren’t needed, because fines and settlements were plenty.
In 2011, Elizabeth Warren mansplained how the economy really works, and how nobody ever got rich all on their own, and it’s perfectly fine to expect the goddamned social contract to involve those who benefit the most paying something back. In 2016, Elizabeth Warren yelled at Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf about his bank’smind-boggling fraud, where Wells Fargo created extra accounts for customers without their permission, so the bank could collect fees on those accounts nobody asked to have. But maybe you prefer Bernie’s tweets and finger wagging while be spouts platitudes.
Remember Elizabeth Warren giving that monster Steve Mnuchin hell about the big banks in 2017? Mnuchin said he just LOVES the idea of updating the Glass-Steagall Act (a bill Warren actually introduced), just as long as it wouldn’t break up the big banks’ investment and commercial functions — which is kind of what Glass-Steagall is all about. As Warren pointed out, that makes no fucking sense AT ALL
Remember way back in 2016 when Bernie kept ranting, over and over that we needed to scrap “too big to fail” banks. People asked him ”how big” that was. He had no fucking idea.
Hillary, not being a fucking moron like Bernie, said that “too big to fail” was misdiagnosing the problem, because the problem was risk. So her solution was to require all banks above a certain size (I forget what it was, but she specified one) to put a certain amount of funds (again I forget the amount, but she specified one) into a pool, and banks that engaged in high-risk behaviors had to put in more. The pool would be used to mitigate problems that risky behaviors led to, and would have pushed big banks in one of two directions: either knock off the risky behaviors or break themselves down into smaller organizations so that they wouldn’t have to put money in. That’s what a smart person who cares about the country came up with.
Bernie, though … ? The guy couldn’t be bothered. Vague, hand-wavey non-solutions won’t solve a single thing. If that’s all we required, there are probably 100 million Twitter users who could make for fine presidents. But the good presidents were at least somewhat engaged in the details, while the failure presidents (Reagan, W, and Trump) were not.
Three years ago, Bernie’s utter lack of substance was considered a selling point among a certain type of Leftie. And if we said (quite correctly) that Bernie was clearly not serious about change if he couldn’t answer basic questions, apparently we were being too hard on that tousle-haired lad.
Anyone who still backed him after that, is too stupid to participate meaningfully in democracy.