Wall Street Is Terrified of President Bernie Sanders. Good.
By Derrick Crowe
January 29, 2019
Wall Street is terrified, and they told Politico about it yesterday.
After mentioning Bloomberg, Wall Street executives who want Trump out list a consistent roster of appealing nominees that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California. Others meriting mention: former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, though fewally know his positions.
Bankers’ biggest fear: The nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Sanders. “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,” said the CEO of another giant bank. “It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.”
In case you missed it:
“Everybody just wants to win,” a second senior executive who has worked in Democratic politics at the presidential level said. “It’s as wide open as I’ve ever seen it. There is no gravitational force that everyone is sort of running towards. Everyone has their candidate. Frankly, if people believed Warren would win, they’d jump on board. And everyone in the top tier not named Bernie Sanders could probably win.”
If Wall Street’s position is literally “anyone but Bernie Sanders,” count me in for Bernie Sanders.
This story came out on the same day as Howard Schultz announced that he is running for president as an independent, grabbing for exactly that centrist label. He calls himself socially liberal and fiscally conservative. That’s what Wall Street wants. Here’s the problem. That position, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, is the bottom right quadrant on this graph from a recent Democracy Fun Voter Study Group survey.
See the problem? That’s not at all where voters are. At all. Meanwhile, Medicare For All, free college, a federal jobs guarantee–all of those thing are extremely popular with voters.
Meanwhile, the things that the Wall Street people love about Trump–namely, the GOP tax scam passed at the end of 2017–is unpopular with voters and was shown yesterday to have had no major impact on job creation.
You want to know the kind of society that kind of tax cut creates? One in which a very few rich people are buying super yachts, like Redskins owner Dan Snyder just did, complete with an IMAX theater, while only 40 percent of U.S. adults can pay a surprise expense of $1,000 or more, 62 percent of employed Americans can’t cover three months of basic expenses if they lost their job, and only 36 percent can cover basic expenses for one month if they lost their job.
This country has had for two years a president who viciously attacked 99 percent of the population while feeding high-fructose racism to hungry people. He and his allies’ outright greed and bigotry is so extreme that they have destabilized the country and shut down the government twice before even facing a check on their power in the form of divided government. People know they were lied to about the tax scam. Almost a million of them lost their paychecks for almost a month, and the president just threatened to do it again. We’ve had scandal after lies after outrage. If you replace that with a democratic socialist administration executing a Green New Deal and single-payer healthcare, and the Democratic Party gets on board, that party will dominate politics for a generation.
More than that–we will save the dignity and lives of tens of millions of people. Do the right thing.