The March of Foolish Things

The conservative sage on the decline of intellectual debate, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and what the welfare state has done to black America.

Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?

“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.”

The paradox is that serious economic discussion enjoys a wider platform than ever before. One of the great bounties of the Internet is the trove of archival news and debate footage that has been dumped onto YouTube and other websites. Anyone with a modem can now watch F.A. Hayek discussing, in a soft and dignified German accent, the rule of law with Robert Bork in 1978. Or Milton Friedman at Cornell the same year, arguing matter-of-factly about colonialism with a young man in a beard, sunglasses and floppy sideways hat.

There is plenty of old footage of Mr. Sowell floating through the ether, too, and if one watches a few clips—say, his appearance on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line” in 1981—two things stand out. The first is how little Mr. Sowell has changed. The octogenarian who sits before me in an office at the Hoover Institution, where Mr. Sowell has been a senior fellow since 1980, has a bit of gray hair and a different set of glasses, but the self-assurance and the baritone voice are the same.

The second thing that strikes is how little the political debate has changed. Maybe economics isn’t merely a dismal science, but a futile one.

Take the minimum wage. In 1981, a year in which the federally mandated hourly pay rose to $3.35 from $3.10 (in today’s dollars that would be to $8.79 from $8.14), Mr. Sowell argued on “Firing Line” that the minimum wage increases unemployment by pricing unskilled workers—young minorities in particular—out of the job market. It’s the same point he makes today, as activists call for a minimum wage of $10.10, or even $15.

“When looking back over my life, I think of the lucky things that happened to me. And one of the luckiest ones, I just realized recently, is that when I left home as a 17-year-old high-school dropout, the unemployment rate among black 17-year-old males was in single digits,” Mr. Sowell says. “In 1948, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was 10 years old and it hadn’t been changed. And there was huge inflation, and so it was as if there was no minimum wage.” He got a series of jobs—delivering Western Union telegrams, working in a machine shop—that put him on the right path.

Which is not to say that life was easy: In his 2002 memoir, “A Personal Odyssey,” Mr. Sowell describes how he once pawned a suit of clothes to buy food—a knish and an orange soda at a little restaurant on the Lower East Side in New York City. “Since then I’ve eaten at the Waldorf Astoria, I’ve eaten in Parisian restaurants and in the White House,” he tells me. “But no meal has ever topped that knish and orange soda.”

Or take “disparate impact,” the idea that different outcomes among different groups—say, that there are more male CEOs than female—is ipso facto evidence of discrimination. The Obama administration has used disparate impact to charge racism in housing, employment and other matters. In the absence of discrimination, the theory goes, people naturally would be dispersed more or less at random. Nonsense, Mr. Sowell says. “In various books I’ve given lists of all the great disparities all over the world, and I recently saw a column by Walter Williams in which he added that men are bitten by sharks several times as often as women.”

Differences in outcome is a matter that Mr. Sowell takes up in his new book, “Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective,” out Sept. 8. Its theme, he says, is that “in a sense, there was never any rational reason to believe that there would be this evenness that they presuppose.” Some continents have more navigable rivers and deep water harbors than others. Some cultures value education highly, and some don’t. Underwhelming as the conclusion might sound to those with the urge to reorder society, many disparities arise simply because people are different, and because they make different choices.

Another problem is that the “disparate impact” assumption misidentifies where group differences originate. He sets up an example: “If you have people in various groups in the country, and their kids are all raised differently, they all behave differently in school, they do differently in school. And now they’re grown up and they go to an employer, and you’re surprised to find that they’re not distributed randomly by income.” It’s “just madness,” he says, to assume “that because you collected the statistics there, that’s where the unfairness originated.”

Via: Wall Street Journal

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[COMMENTARY] Restoring American Exceptionalism

By 

DICK CHENEY And

 

LIZ CHENEY

Aug. 28, 2015 6:32 p.m. ET

In 1983, as the U.S. confronted the threat posed by the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan explained America’s unique responsibility. “It is up to us in our time,” he said, “to choose, and choose wisely, between the hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom, and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.” It was up to us then—as it is now—because we are the exceptional nation. America has guaranteed freedom, security and peace for a larger share of humanity than any other nation in all of history. There is no other like us. There never has been.

Born of the revolutionary ideal that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,” we were, first, an example to the world of freedom’s possibilities. During World War II, we became freedom’s defender, at the end of the Cold War, the world’s sole superpower. We did not seek the position. It is ours because of our ideals and our power, and the power of our ideals. As British historian Andrew Roberts has observed, “In the debate over whether America was born great, achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon her, the only possible conclusion must be: all three.”

No other nation, international body or “community of nations” can do what we do. It isn’t just our involvement in world events that has been essential for the triumph of freedom. It is our leadership. For the better part of a century, security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s military, economic, political and diplomatic might. For the most part, until the administration of Barack Obama, we delivered.

Since Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed us the “Arsenal of Democracy” in 1940, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have understood the indispensable nature of American power. Presidents from Truman to Nixon, from Kennedy to Reagan, knew that America’s strength had to be safeguarded, her supremacy maintained. In the 1940s American leadership was essential to victory in World War II, and the liberation of millions from the grip of fascism. In the Cold War American leadership guaranteed the survival of freedom, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the defeat of Soviet totalitarianism. In this century it will be essential for the defeat of militant Islam.

Yet despite the explosive spread of terrorist ideology and organizations, the establishment of an Islamic State caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and increasing threats from Iran, China, North Korea and Russia, President Obama has departed from this 75-year, largely bipartisan tradition of ensuring America’s pre-eminence and strength.

He has abandoned Iraq, leaving a vacuum that is being tragically and ominously filled by our enemies. He is on course to forsake Afghanistan as well.

He has made dangerous cuts to America’s military. Combined with the sequestration mandated in the Budget Control Act of 2011, these cuts have, according to former Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, left the Army as unready as it has been at any other time in its history. Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert has testified that “naval readiness is at its lowest point in many years.” According to Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh, the current aircraft fleet is “now the smallest and oldest in the history of our service.”

For seven decades, both Republican and Democratic presidents have understood the importance of ensuring the supremacy of America’s nuclear arsenal. President Obama seems not to. He has advocated cutting our nuclear force in the naïve hope that this will persuade rogue regimes to do the same. He has imposed limits on our ability to modernize and maintain nuclear weapons. He has reduced the nation’s missile-defense capabilities.

He says that he is committed to preventing nuclear proliferation. For more than 45 years, presidents of both parties have recognized that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is vital in this effort. Signed by 190 countries, including Iran, the NPT has been arguably the single most effective multilateral arms-control agreement in history. President Obama stands ready to gut it. Among the many dangerous deficiencies in his nuclear deal with Iran is the irreversible damage it will do to the international nonproliferation regime contained in the NPT.

Allowing the Iranians to continue to enrich uranium and agreeing to the removal of all restraints on their nuclear program in a few short years virtually guarantees that they will become a nuclear-weapons state, thus undermining the fundamental agreement at the heart of the NPT. President Obama is unraveling this international structure as part of an agreement that provides a pathway for the world’s worst state-sponsor of terror to acquire nuclear weapons.

Nearly everything the president has told us about his Iranian agreement is false. He has said it will prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it will actually facilitate and legitimize an Iranian nuclear arsenal. He has said this deal will stop nuclear proliferation, but it will actually accelerate it, as nations across the Middle East work to acquire their own weapons in response to America’s unwillingness to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

President Obama told us he would never accept a deal based on trust. Members of his administration, including his secretary of energy and deputy national-security adviser, said the nuclear deal would be verifiable with “anywhere, anytime” inspections. Instead, the Obama deal provides the Iranians with months to delay inspections and fails to address past clandestine work at military sites. Inspections at these sites are covered in secret deals, which is historic, though not in the way the president claims. Under the reported provisions of the secret deals, the Iranians get to inspect themselves for these past infractions. Inevitably these provisions will be cited by the Iranians as a precedent when they are caught cheating in the future.

The president has tried to sell this bad deal by claiming that there is no alternative, save war. In fact, this agreement makes war more, not less, likely. In addition to accelerating the spread of nuclear weapons across the Middle East, it will provide the Iranians with hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, which even the Obama administration admits likely will be used to fund terror. The deal also removes restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program; lifts the ban on conventional weapons sales; and lifts sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, on the Quds Force, and on Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. Under Mr. Soleimani’s leadership, the Quds Force sows violence and supports terror across the Middle East and has been responsible for the deaths of American service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A vote for the Obama nuclear deal is not a vote for peace or security. It is a vote for an agreement that facilitates Tehran’s deadly objectives with potentially catastrophic consequences for the United States and our allies.

The Obama nuclear agreement with Iran is tragically reminiscent of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement in 1938. Each was negotiated from a position of weakness by a leader willing to concede nearly everything to appease an ideological dictator. Hitler got Czechoslovakia. The mullahs in Tehran get billions of dollars and a pathway to a nuclear arsenal. Munich led to World War II. The Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East and, more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The U.S. Congress should reject this deal and reimpose the sanctions that brought Iran to the table in the first place. It is possible to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon, but only if the U.S. negotiates from a position of strength, refuses to concede fundamental points and recognizes that the use of military force will be required if diplomacy fails to convince Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons.

As America faces a world of rising security threats, we must resolve to take action and shouldn’t lose hope. Just as one president has left a path of destruction in his wake, one president can rescue us. The right person in the Oval Office can restore America’s strength and alliances, defeat our enemies, and keep us safe. It won’t be easy. There is a path forward, but there are difficult decisions to be made and very little time.

We are living in what columnist Charles Krauthammer has called “a hinge point of history.” It will take a president equal to this moment to lead us through. America needs a president who recognizes that everything the nation must do requires having a U.S. military with capabilities that are second to none—on land, in the air, at sea, in space and in cyberspace. The peace and security of the world and the survival of our freedom depend on it. We must choose wisely.

Via: Wall Street Journal

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NYT Leaves Out Democratic Ties Behind Planned Parenthood's Publicity Stunt

 York Times reporter Jackie Calmes has been playing aggressive defense for Planned Parenthood ever since damning undercover videos were released showing staffers using dehumanizing terms to describe aborted babies, and engaging in possibly illegal activity. On Thursday she took dictation from the abortion provider about its supposed exoneration. In a public relations move that may be designed to neutralize the final undercover videos to be released by David Daleiden's Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood commissioned its own report accusing the CMP of selective editing. Calmes treated the stunt as news. But she left out vital information from Planned Parenthood's supposed exoneration -- that it came courtesy of a firm that engaged in pro-Obama opposition research against conservatives. 

Planned Parenthood on Thursday gave congressional leaders and a committee that is investigating allegations of criminality at its clinics an analysis it commissioned concluding that “manipulation” of undercover videos by abortion opponents make those recordings unreliable for any official inquiry.

“A thorough review of these videos in consultation with qualified experts found that they do not present a complete or accurate record of the events they purport to depict,” the analysis of a private research company said.

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The analysis was by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research and corporate intelligence company, and its co-founder Glenn Simpson, a former investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

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According to the investigation, the reviewers could not determine “the extent to which C.M.P.’s undisclosed edits and cuts distort the meaning of the encounters the videos purport to document.”

But, it said, “the manipulation of the videos does mean they have no evidentiary value in a legal context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries” unless C.M.P. provides investigators with its original material, and that material is independently authenticated as unaltered.

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The analysis also supported Planned Parenthood’s objection to two allegations that have elicited some of the most outrage from anti-abortion forces, disputing that Planned Parenthood staffers at one point say of fetal remains, “It’s a baby,” and in a second instance, “Another boy.”

But Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard focused on what Calmes skipped over: "Politico & NYT Fail to Mention Report Exonerating Planned Parenthood Produced By Democratic Opposition Research Firm."

Hemingway asked: "Just who, exactly, is behind Fusion GPS? Turns out it's an opposition research firm with ties to the Democratic party and has a history of harassing socially conservative Republican donors, possibly on behalf of the Obama campaign."

He quoted a Wall Street Journal editorial:

As [Kim] Strassel has reported in recent columns, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot has become the target of a smear campaign since it was disclosed earlier this year that he had donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Romney. President Obama's campaign website teed him up in April as one of eight "less than reputable" Romney donors and a "bitter foe of the gay rights movement." One sin: His wife donated to an anti-gay-marriage campaign, of the kind that have passed in 30 or so states.

Now we learn that little more than a week after that Presidential posting, a former Democratic Senate staffer called the courthouse in Mr. VanderSloot's home town of Idaho Falls seeking his divorce records. Ms. Strassel traced the operative, Michael Wolf, to a Washington, D.C. outfit called Fusion GPS that says it is "a commercial research firm."

Fusion GPS is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wouldn't say who is paying him for this high-minded slumming but said in an email that Mr. VanderSloot was a "legitimate" target because of "his record on gay issues."

Politico was slightly more balanced than the Times.

A report commissioned by Planned Parenthood has found that the sting videos targeting its tissue donation practices contain intentionally deceptive edits, missing footage and inaccurately transcribed conversations. But there is no evidence that the anti-abortion group behind the attack made up dialogue. ...

But the firm also wrote that it is impossible to characterize the extent to which the edits and cuts distort the meaning of the conversations depicted and that there was no “widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.”

Via: Newsbusters

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A Minimum-Wage Bungle in New York

New York's Fast Food Wage Board, a panel appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has recommended increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour from $8.75 for quick-service restaurant businesses with 30 or more locations. The target, according to Mr. Cuomo, is “large, national companies which have been making extraordinary profits” while “underpaying their workers,” who are supported by public-welfare programs such as Medicaid.

But the higher labor costs that the New York state labor commissioner is expected to approve will not hit large companies. That’s because small business owners own and operate all of New York’s Burger King restaurants, and about 95% of its McDonald’srestaurants, as franchisees. These business owners set the compensation for the workers they employ. Burger King and McDonald’s, on the other hand, are paid a percentage (generally a 3% to 5% royalty fee) of the restaurant’s gross sales, regardless of the franchisees’ profits.

There are 7,303 franchised restaurants in New York operating under agreements with 116 brands, and like other restaurant owners, many pay some of their employees the starting wage of $8.75 an hour. Yet the owner of even a single franchised restaurant would automatically have to pay a minimum $15 an hour, simply because of his affiliation with a brand that has more than 30 restaurants nationwide. That’s not fair.

Could these restaurant owners cope with such a huge increase in operating costs by reducing their profits? Quick-service restaurant franchises operate on slim profit margins—on average 2 to 4 cents on the dollar according to an Employment Policies Institute study. And to the extent they make lower profits, these business owners will be less likely to open new restaurants. Restaurateurs who own more than 30 non-franchise quick-service establishments also will be put at a disadvantage with competitors not subject to the higher minimum wage.

To manage increased costs, franchisees instead may be forced to reduce their current staff or reduce their hours. They might even seek to automate some of their processes by implementing kiosks or mobile platforms for ordering food. The result would be fewer job opportunities for unskilled young men and women, who rely on these entry-level jobs to learn important work and life skills and to move up the employment ladder.

What about increasing prices? Certainly, consumers’ willingness to pay more for fast food would help offset the franchisees’ increased labor costs. However, increasing prices may result in losing customers who will seek lower-priced options. Two levels—one for franchises and another for other restaurant owners—will force some franchises to close.

State or local governments that raise the minimum wage across the board will help the lowest-wage workers who manage to keep their jobs. But the solution to the lack of quality jobs is not a massive minimum-wage increase for a subset of one industry, in an attempt to turn low-skilled entry-level jobs into middle-income jobs. The real culprit is six years of ineffective progressive economic policies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 8.3 million Americans still unemployed and another seven million “marginally” employed, often working two or three part-time jobs to make ends meet. There are more than 550,000 fewer full-time jobs today than there were in December 2007, before the recession began.

The answer to the current drought in jobs with a good salary isn’t another well-intended but misguided government fix. Instead, it is economic growth that will create the kind of jobs that will permanently lift people out of poverty. A vibrant free-enterprise system is the only way to generate that kind of economic growth, not blatantly discriminatory social experiments conceived by union bosses.

Mr. Caldeira is the president and CEO of the International Franchise Association in Washington, D.C.

Via: Wall Street Journal

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Uber Valued at More Than $50 Billion

ENLARGE

Uber’s fast rise to $50 billion reflects its aggressive global expansion into more than 300 cities and growing popularity ferrying millions of riders daily. PHOTO: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Uber Technologies Inc. has completed a new round of funding that values the five-year-old ride-hailing company at close to $51 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, equaling Facebook Inc.’s record for a private, venture-backed startup.

Uber raised close to $1 billion in the round, one of the people said, bringing the San Francisco company’s total funding to more than $5 billion. Uber had briefed investors on a plan to raise between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in the round, The Wall Street Journal reported in May.

Via: Wall Street Journal

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Swiss bank's donations to Clinton Foundation increased after Hillary intervention in IRS dispute

Donations to the Clinton Foundation by Swiss bank UBS increased tenfold after Hillary Clinton intervened to settle a dispute with the IRS early in her tenure as secretary of state, according to a published report.

According to the Wall Street Journal, total donations by UBS to the foundation grew from less than $60,000 at the end of 2008 to approximately $600,000 by the end of 2014. The Journal reports that the bank also lent $32 million through entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs it launched in association with the foundation, while paying former President Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of corporate question-and-answer sessions with UBS Chief Executive Bob McCann.

Though there is no evidence of wrongdoing, ties between the Clinton Foundation, major corporations and foreign governments have come under increasing scrutiny as Hillary Clinton begins her presidential campaign. The UBS case is unusual in that it shows a top U.S. diplomat intervening on behalf of a major overseas bank in a situation where federal prosecutors and the Justice Department had been the lead entity. 

Clinton's campaign acknowledged to Fox News that she did intervene, but maintained that was only because the Swiss -- at the ministerial level -- raised this issue with the secretary of state. 

"Secretary Clinton is proud of her time at the State Department, and about the work she did and the decisions she made for the betterment of our security and our prosperity," campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said. "Any suggestion that she was driven by anything but what's in America's best interest would be false. Period." 

UBS' legal battles with the U.S. government date from 2007, when a whistleblower told the Justice Department that UBS had helped thousands of Americans open secret accounts to avoid U.S. taxes. In 2009, the bank paid a $780 million fine and turned over the names of 250 account holders to U.S. authorities as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement. 

However, that same year, the IRS requested that UBS turn over the names of U.S. citizens who owned 52,000 secret accounts worth an estimated $18 billion. The bank maintained that doing so would be a violation of Swiss privacy laws. The Journal reports that UBS enlisted the Swiss government to settle the matter. Clinton, recently sworn in as secretary of state, first met with her Swiss counterpart, Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, in March of 2009. 

Over the next three months, the Journal reports, the U.S. and Switzerland engaged in a series of complex negotiations. Citing diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks as well as people involved in the case, the Journal reports that the U.S. pressed Switzerland to work for the release of American journalist Roxana Saberi, who was being held by Iran. Another issue Clinton brought up was alleged violations of international sanctions by a Swiss energy-consulting company thought to be providing civilian nuclear technology to Iran. The Swiss embassy represented U.S. interests in Iran, which has not had formal diplomatic relations with Washington since 1979. 

After Saberi's release that May, the shutting down of the Swiss energy company's Iran operations that July, and the expressed willingness the Swiss government to accept some low-level detainees from Guantanamo Bay, the Journal reports settlement talks intensified. 

Under the terms of the deal, which was announced by Clinton and Calmy-Rey July 31, UBS would turn over information about 4,450 account-holders, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.

The deal was criticized by members of Clinton's own party in Congress. Then-Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. called the agreement "disappointing." 

In recent weeks, Clinton's corporate ties have been harped on by Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has made some gains on her in polls of early-voting states. 

Via: Fox News

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After Five Years, Dodd-Frank Is a Failure

by VERONIQUE DE RUGY July 20, 2015 2:13 PM 

When the Dodd-Frank Act took effect on July 21, 2010, critics were fast to predict that the 2,300 page-long legislation, which passed the House without a single Republican vote and received only three GOP votes in the Senate would fail. Tomorrow will mark the five-year anniversary of Dodd-Frank and its unfortunate distorting effects. Just as when it was passed, the legislation remains unable to address the problems it was intended to. 

  The legislation has overwhelmed the regulatory system, stifled the financial industry, impaired economic growth, and done nothing to correct the pernicious effects of “too big to fail.” But that’s only the beginning: Many more of its regulations still need to be written, some several years down the road, all of which injects massive uncertainty into the financial industry. Here is a round-up of interesting articles to read before this sad anniversary. First, we have a great piece by Chairman Hensarling in the Wall Street Journal (“After Five Years, Dodd-Frank is a Failure.”). Thankfully for us, the chairman is as committed to getting rid of Dodd-Frank as he was to getting rid of the Ex-Im Bank. I wish him the same success and more. The whole thing is worth a read, but here are a few paragraphs: Dodd-Frank was supposedly aimed at Wall Street, but it hit Main Street hard. 

Community financial institutions, which make the bulk of small business loans, are overwhelmed by the law’s complexity. Government figures indicate that the country is losing on average one community bank or credit union a day. Before Dodd-Frank, 75% of banks offered free checking. Two years after it passed, only 39% did so—a trend various scholars have attributed to Dodd-Frank’s “Durbin amendment,” which imposed price controls on the fee paid by retailers when consumers use a debit card. Bank fees have also increased due to Dodd-Frank, leading to a rise of the unbanked and underbanked among low- and moderate-income Americans. Has Dodd-Frank nevertheless made the financial system more secure? Many of the threats to financial stability identified in thelatest report of Dodd-Frank’s Financial Stability Oversight Council are primarily the result of the law itself, along with other government policies. There’s also a new report by John Berlau at CEI that shows how Dodd-Frank has stifled competition among the banks even more so than before the financial crisis.

 A failure to approve new banks, for instance, means that those “too big to fail” banks are now more entrenched than ever. In the last five years, regulators have approved only one new bank, as opposed to an average of 170 new banks per year before 2010. As Berlau notes: “This lack of new bank competitors is one important reason why a large bank failure could severely curtail the supply of credit and availability of financial services. That in turn sets the stage for a continuing cycle of bailouts.”  The New York Times has an interesting piece (“Fannie and Freddie are Back, Bigger and Badder Than Ever“) by Bethany McLean. It’s must read recap of the promises of what Freddie and Fannie would achieve vs. actually happened, along with the failure to reform two agencies in the aftermath of the financial crisis.    The proposed solutions for this mess? Among other things,

 Senator Warren believes it’s time to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act, a law that would require big banks to divide commercial and investment banking. Most economists and Federal Reserve policymakers disagree that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had anything to do with the financial crisis but, Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders Martin O’Malley support the idea nonetheless. Hillary Clinton hasn’t said yet what she thinks of the proposal. However, according to Kevin Cirilli at The Hill, the White House is distancing itself from this push: The White House wants to keep its distance from a liberal push to re-implement legislation that would break up big banks… “At this point, we believe that the kind of implementation of Wall Street reform is the most effective way to protect our economy and middle-class taxpayers,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at a press briefing Friday when asked whether President Obama supports it. … Earnest said the administration is still focused on implementing the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law.   “Wall Street reform has been incredibly effective at reforming our financial system in a way that looks our for the interests of middle-class families and taxpayers,” Earnest said.

Via: National Review

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CALIFORNIA: Asset Forfeiture Reform Sees Bipartisan Support

Amid growing national concern over the practice of so-called civil asset forfeiture, bipartisan support has swelled in California to reform the practice, with a new bill poised to add Assembly to Senate approval.

An emerging consensus

Asset forfeiture, wherein law enforcement retains property or cash seized in the course of an arrest, has come under broad criticism from the political Left and Right.

Predictably, libertarians have trained their political and legal fire on the practice. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Institute for Justice attorney Robert Everett Johnson warned that asset forfeiture had short-circuited due process. “People around the country are having their money taken, based on the barest suspicion that they might be involved in some sort of drug offense without ever bringing the case before a jury or convicting them of a crime,” he said. The California ACLU has recently thrown its weight behind legislation reforming asset forfeiture.

But liberals have also attacked its role in civil rights abuses, while conservatives have bridled at its dismissive approach toward property rights — and its increasing use as a source of government funding. At the national level, conservative justice reform groups, such as Right on Crime, have singled out asset forfeiture as a rule of law problem. “Our Constitution is meant to be a shield against this sort of arbitrary and capricious over-extension of government power, but to this point, most states — and the federal government — have very lackluster protections in place,” two Right on Crime supporters editorialized in the Washington Examiner. West Coast conservatives raised the alarm when, in recent months, several California cities were accused of cashing on through asset forfeiture — “at a time of dwindling police budgets, potentially creating pressure on cops to make more seizures,” as the Los Angeles Times reported this spring.

Via: California Political Review

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Sanders Battles Boehner on Min. Wage: ‘Who’s Out of the Mainstream?’

2016 Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders responded on Face the Nation Sunday morning to criticism from House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) that he was “out of the mainstream” with his desire to raise taxes to pay for his policies.

“Well, let me respond to that issue by issue, and you determine who’s out of the mainstream,” Sanders said.

“I want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. A recent Wall Street Journal poll said majority of the American people want to do that. John Boehner is not going to bring up any legislation in the house to raise minimum wage. Many want to get rid of the concept of minimum wage.”

Sanders repeated the formula with Social Security and infrastructure.

“In terms of who’s out of touch with the American people, I’d say Republican party is,” he concluded. “They want to give tax breaks to billionaires, not help the middle class.”

Via: Mediaite

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