Rand Paul - populist?

[boneyard bill]

Democrats constantly want to paint the Republican Party as the party of the rich, but when it comes to raising money, they don't have a lot of reservations about accepting Wall Street money.

Now we have this report from Politico that suggests that Wall Street money, as well as money from other big businesses would head heavily toward Hillary Clinton if it came down to a choice between her and Rand Paul.

The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation.

“If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that and either outcome would be fine,” one top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer said over lunch in midtown Manhattan last week. “We could live with either one. Jeb versus Joe Biden would also be fine. It’s Rand Paul or Ted Cruz versus someone like Elizabeth Warren that would be everybody’s worst nightmare.”

So it turns out that the two candidates most overtly in support of free market "capitalism" are anathema to the capitalists. Indeed, they are viewed as being just as big a threat as the leftist choice of Elizabeth Warren who has expressed her disdain for the free market.

Of course, it isn't the first time that Wall Street abandoned the Republicans.

That kind of talk leaves some rich people contemplating the notion of supporting Clinton in what would amount to a reversion to 2008, when Wall Street money went nearly 2 to 1 for then-Sen. Barack Obama over Sen. John McCain. Even those who could never back her don’t see her as a huge threat to the business community.

Of course, it's a little difficult to see why Wall Street didn't like McCain since he rolled over for them every bit as much as Obama did, but Obama did play a big role in turning the House around on its TARP bail-out vote whereas McCain was pretty helpless. So maybe the Wall Street dough was the appropriate pay-off.

At any rate, it seems a strange irony that candidates promoting "free market capitalism" would be viewed to be as threatening to the Wall Street as an overt anti-business candidate. But is it really so ironic? Is it not simply more evidence that a free market is the last thing the modern crony capitalist really wants? Big business doesn't want competition. They want protection.

So here's the what these radical right-wingers are saying:

This line of thinking is a direct response to fiery rhetoric from people like Rand Paul, who used the 2013 CPAC conference in Washington to rip the financial industry, saying “there is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street.”

Cruz fired up an activist gathering in New Hampshire earlier this month with the kind of provocative populist message that makes bankers very nervous. “The rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power, are getting fat and happy,” Cruz thundered. At the same event, Paul argued that the GOP “cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people and Wall Street.”

Radical stuff there. The government should not do business favors. What demagogues?

But the really important point is that these guys DO favor Hillary? So what does that mean? It means that they expect that Hillary WILL do favors for business. And these are many of the same people who lined up behind Obama.

A Cruz nomination, of course, is unlikely because he has veered too far to the right and adopted too uncompromising a position. But Rand Paul has positioned himself in the center-right and just might create a base broad enough to win it. And that scares the hell out of Wall Street.

But it should also be obvious that all that anti-business rhetoric that the Democrats hurl at Republicans is rhetoric and nothing more, and it is clear that Wall Street understands that a whole lot better than Main Street does.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=9A8719BC-0553-4D46-926E-893AD6698616

 

[laughing dog]

Must hand it to them - Paul groupies never ever give up. Everything is a positive sign that their ideal will get the nomination for POTUS or win the the Presidency.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

New Paul is an even odder version of crazy than Old Paul. I imagine that most people would prefer to support a "not that guy" over him.

Also, Hillary's been Wall Street's whore for decades alongside her husband. The two of them keep giving them good service, so of course they're going to keep getting paid the hourly rates.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Democrats constantly want to paint the Republican Party as the party of the rich, but when it comes to raising money, they don't have a lot of reservations about accepting Wall Street money.

Usually, when i hear someone call the Republican Party, "the party of the rich" i don't assume that the GOP are the only people in politics with money.
I tend to hear that as an accusation that the party is devoted to protecting the interests of the rich.

It's not about who has the money or where they get the money, it's who they're spending the money on. And it's certainly not on Romney's 47%....

 

[doubtingt]

Just because the individuals currently in the top .01% do not want Paul for POTUS doesn't mean he is a champion of the bottom 90%. In fact, if Paul is likely to cause enough changes would make things much worse for the bottom 90% (as he is), then he is likely a threat to the individuals who happen to be at the top .01% at the moment. Extreme wealth depends upon extreme good fortune, both in the form of random luck going your way and benefiting from systematic advantages.
IF you are in the top .01% right now, it is because the narrow and fragile set of partly random circumstances that would allow you to get there came together. There is little room for your standing to go up. So major changes to the current circumstances would likely cause your standing to fall. That is true even if those changes tend to make the rich richer and fuck the middle and lower classes, and especially if those changes destabilize society and harm economic health.
For example, Paul changes are likely to lead to more $ being taken from the lower and middle classes and given to the top 10%, turning some of them that are merely multi-millionaires into billionaires. That would be bad for the people who are already billionaires. It would be a threat to their level of economic and political power in their self interests. There are a number of ways in which the rich have shared interests and these are very often at odds with the interests of everyone else. However, each individual rich person has their own unique interests that are at odds with other rich people, and each billionaire wants to be the only billionaire and does not want rich people with less then them to get more.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Democrats constantly want to paint the Republican Party as the party of the rich...

Off the rails in record time. They were the party of the rich 10 years ago. Now they are the party of the criminally insane. The Democrats are the party of the Business Establishment now.

 

[boneyard bill]

Democrats constantly want to paint the Republican Party as the party of the rich, but when it comes to raising money, they don't have a lot of reservations about accepting Wall Street money.

Usually, when i hear someone call the Republican Party, "the party of the rich" i don't assume that the GOP are the only people in politics with money.
I tend to hear that as an accusation that the party is devoted to protecting the interests of the rich.

It's not about who has the money or where they get the money, it's who they're spending the money on. And it's certainly not on Romney's 47%....

But clearly the rich aren't at all happy with the conservative elements in the GOP. That's the point. What? You think that the Dems want to help the poor by throwing them a few crumbs while they throw trillions at Wall Street?

It just supports what I've been saying for a long time. Liberals are in denial. Their Democrat heroes are scumbags, and those "moderate" Republicans who are closest to the Democrats are playing the same game. The system is completely corrupt, and it's corrupt precisely because we have all these "social programs" and regulations on capitalism that give incentives to the rich to subvert the power brokers who are known as politicians.

 

[boneyard bill]

doubting writes:

Just because the individuals currently in the top .01% do not want Paul for POTUS doesn't mean he is a champion of the bottom 90%. In fact, if Paul is likely to cause enough changes would make things much worse for the bottom 90% (as he is), then he is likely a threat to the individuals who happen to be at the top .01% at the moment. Extreme wealth depends upon extreme good fortune, both in the form of random luck going your way and benefiting from systematic advantages.
IF you are in the top .01% right now, it is because the narrow and fragile set of partly random circumstances that would allow you to get there came together. There is little room for your standing to go up. So major changes to the current circumstances would likely cause your standing to fall. That is true even if those changes tend to make the rich richer and fuck the middle and lower classes, and especially if those changes destabilize society and harm economic health.
For example, Paul changes are likely to lead to more $ being taken from the lower and middle classes and given to the top 10%, turning some of them that are merely multi-millionaires into billionaires. That would be bad for the people who are already billionaires. It would be a threat to their level of economic and political power in their self interests. There are a number of ways in which the rich have shared interests and these are very often at odds with the interests of everyone else. However, each individual rich person has their own unique interests that are at odds with other rich people, and each billionaire wants to be the only billionaire and does not want rich people with less then them to get more.

I would suggest that your hypothesis falls short of being plausible. If billionaires can rich off poor people certainly they can get rich off multi-millionaires as well. The obvious motive for these fund-raisers and bundlers is that they are currently getting trillions of dollars thrown their way by the Obama Administration and they are exempt from criminal prosecution by the Obama Administration, and they expect that to continue under Hillary.

The first item on a Rand Paul agenda would be to dump the current Fed Chairman and that's where most of the hand-outs to rich is currently coming from. The second item on his agenda would probably be to end corporate welfare that comes directly out of the budget. The third item would probably be cuts in defense spending.

It is also likely that Rand Paul would not select an attorney-general who has close ties to the current political elites. That could open up many of them to criminal prosecution. So the stakes are high for these guys, and they have every reason to spend very big to keep Paul out of the White House. Cruz' agenda would probably vary somewhat from Paul's, but if he's going to keep promises about balancing the budget and returning to the constitution, it would have to follow a similar trajectory.

 

[boneyard bill]

Democrats constantly want to paint the Republican Party as the party of the rich...

Off the rails in record time. They were the party of the rich 10 years ago. Now they are the party of the criminally insane. The Democrats are the party of the Business Establishment now.

Are you kidding? The Democrats have been the party of the rich since FDR. Remember, FDR was a Wall Street lawyer. Wall Street also took over the so-call liberal wing of the Republican Party as well. But Main Street Republicans have consistently opposed those policies. They have not, however, been able to choose the GOP nominee most of the time. So Wall Street has controlled both parties.

Those "criminally insane" Republicans have opposed those policies that have gotten us where we are now, and if they manage to take over, it will be because the system is imploding and the elites won't have the power they have now because they will lose all their money. It should have imploded in '08 but, of course, the elites had the power to get themselves bailed out. Unfortunately, the bail-outs have had to be on-going, and they have just made the problem worse. It probably won't be possible to bail them out when the system implodes again.

 

[doubtingt]

I would suggest that your hypothesis falls short of being plausible. If billionaires can rich off poor people certainly they can get rich off multi-millionaires as well.

IT isn't a simple matter of absolute amount of wealth. It is relative wealth that matters for power over politics and over markets. The people at the top want as few other people at the top with them. Also, it isn't about "the rich" in the abstract. IT is about the very specific people at the top wanting to remain the very specific people at the top. They don't want other rich people getting the benefits of corporatism. Any major changes in any direction are likely to have unknown consequences that alter markets and alter which of the very rich have the upper hand. Paul's and Cruz's changes will give the rich as a group more of an upper hand over everyone else, but at the same time the relative power and earnings potential among the rich will change with any change, even if there is no intention to produce such changes.

 

[lpetrich]

Democrats constantly want to paint the Republican Party as the party of the rich,

The truth hurts, doesn't it?

but when it comes to raising money, they don't have a lot of reservations about accepting Wall Street money.

The Democrats are not much better than the Republicans at this, it must be conceded.

Now we have this report from Politico that suggests that Wall Street money, as well as money from other big businesses would head heavily toward Hillary Clinton if it came down to a choice between her and Rand Paul.

Because Rand Paul has different big donors, I'm sure.

So here's the what these radical right-wingers are saying:

This line of thinking is a direct response to fiery rhetoric from people like Rand Paul, who used the 2013 CPAC conference in Washington to rip the financial industry, saying “there is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street.”

What policy would you have preferred? Especially if these bank failures dragged down the rest of the economy.

Cruz fired up an activist gathering in New Hampshire earlier this month with the kind of provocative populist message that makes bankers very nervous. “The rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power, are getting fat and happy,” Cruz thundered. At the same event, Paul argued that the GOP “cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people and Wall Street.”

Something the right wing would consider "class hatred" and "Marxism" if anyone but a certified right-winger said it.

 

[Keith&Co.]

But clearly the rich aren't at all happy with the conservative elements in the GOP. That's the point.

Because they're trying to get votes, which requires not being SEEN as the party of the rich.
This pisses off the rich because they consider the GOP to have been bought and paid for.

What? You think that the Dems want to help the poor by throwing them a few crumbs while they throw trillions at Wall Street?

No, i think the Dems want to throw the rich conservatives to the poor. While they make millions on Wall Street.

 

[boneyard bill]

I would suggest that your hypothesis falls short of being plausible. If billionaires can rich off poor people certainly they can get rich off multi-millionaires as well.

IT isn't a simple matter of absolute amount of wealth. It is relative wealth that matters for power over politics and over markets. The people at the top want as few other people at the top with them. Also, it isn't about "the rich" in the abstract. IT is about the very specific people at the top wanting to remain the very specific people at the top. They don't want other rich people getting the benefits of corporatism. Any major changes in any direction are likely to have unknown consequences that alter markets and alter which of the very rich have the upper hand. Paul's and Cruz's changes will give the rich as a group more of an upper hand over everyone else, but at the same time the relative power and earnings potential among the rich will change with any change, even if there is no intention to produce such changes.

What Paul and Cruz have in common is that they are advocating a balanced budget. Wow! What radicalism. But in fact, when you are borrowing over 1/3 of the budget, that does require some radical changes. It would require cuts in corporate welfare, it would require cuts in defense spending. So that alienates a major part of big corporate America right there. But then you get to the Wall Street banks. They are totally dependent on the Fed creating money that they get for free and can then lend to the Treasury Department. But in the process they leverage this money in many ways.

Of course, leverage is very risky, and there's the problem. They now expect Uncle Sam to assume that risk and Ben Bernanke and now Janet Yellen have been accommodating them very nicely. In the meantime, ordinary Americans have seen their incomes fall, and good-paying jobs are disappearing even for college graduates with technical training.

 

[boneyard bill]

The truth hurts, doesn't it?

but when it comes to raising money, they don't have a lot of reservations about accepting Wall Street money.

The Democrats are not much better than the Republicans at this, it must be conceded.

Now we have this report from Politico that suggests that Wall Street money, as well as money from other big businesses would head heavily toward Hillary Clinton if it came down to a choice between her and Rand Paul.

Because Rand Paul has different big donors, I'm sure.

So here's the what these radical right-wingers are saying:

This line of thinking is a direct response to fiery rhetoric from people like Rand Paul, who used the 2013 CPAC conference in Washington to rip the financial industry, saying “there is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street.”

What policy would you have preferred? Especially if these bank failures dragged down the rest of the economy.

Cruz fired up an activist gathering in New Hampshire earlier this month with the kind of provocative populist message that makes bankers very nervous. “The rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power, are getting fat and happy,” Cruz thundered. At the same event, Paul argued that the GOP “cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people and Wall Street.”

Something the right wing would consider "class hatred" and "Marxism" if anyone but a certified right-winger said it.

So far I haven't seen any evidence that Rand Paul has had much success at tapping corporate America for big money contributions. He has raised more money than any other GOP presidential prospect so far except for Marco Rubio, but that money has come mostly from the kind of small contributors that financed his father's campaign. Even then, it only come to a couple of million dollars which chump change if you're trying to run for president.

There are some rich libertarians who are trying to help him raise money, but it's early, and we have a long way to go. He's hoping to raise contributions from Silicon Valley because a lot of people there are libertarian-leaning. We'll see if it is successful.

Undoubtedly, the failure of some of the major Wall Street banks probably would have created an even bigger downturn than we had, but it would have been short-lived. When you create a bubble by ginning up the money supply, you get bankruptcies and defaults and money supply falls back to its previous level. This causes dislocations and disruptions. But once the dust settles, people and businesses are out of debt, and that sets the stage for a robust recovery. Our policies have been deliberated orchestrated to prevent that correction by keeping housing prices high, and by keeping the money supply inflated so people do not get out of debt and then don't want to spend money. And businesses, especially banks, are more reluctant to lend because they need lots of liquidity because they are insolvent. So we have $1.5 trillion in excess reserves at the Fed when normally excess reserves are negligible.

 

[laughing dog]

So far I haven't seen any evidence that Rand Paul has had much success at tapping corporate America for big money contributions. He has raised more money than any other GOP presidential prospect so far except for Marco Rubio, but that money has come mostly from the kind of small contributors that financed his father's campaign. Even then, it only come to a couple of million dollars which chump change if you're trying to run for president.

According to this site (https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00030836#cont 44% come from large contributors and 43% come from small contributors.

 

[boneyard bill]

So far I haven't seen any evidence that Rand Paul has had much success at tapping corporate America for big money contributions. He has raised more money than any other GOP presidential prospect so far except for Marco Rubio, but that money has come mostly from the kind of small contributors that financed his father's campaign. Even then, it only come to a couple of million dollars which chump change if you're trying to run for president.

According to this site (https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00030836#cont 44% come from large contributors and 43% come from small contributors.

Perhaps, but we're talking about individual contributions. So even a "large" contributor can only donate a maximum of $2500.

The really big money goes into PACs, and I haven't heard of any PACs that are accumulating any significant amount of money on Rand's behalf. Of course, it's early and Rand is definitely seeking larger contributors in more aggressive ways than his father did. Whether he will be able to raise the kind of money Obama or Romney did, however, seems to me to be doubtful. At least not for a primary.

I suspect that he will have plenty of money for the small early contests like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. The question is will he have enough to be competitive in the larger states like Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where Romney came from behind by outspending his opponents by 5 and 6 to 1. You can't just hand-shake your way through states that large and expect to win.

He's probably not going to get much money from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, or organized labor and those are the biggest contributors. So they're tying to tap people who have not contributed in the past. That includes a lot of wealthy libertarians.

 

[Bullmoose Too]

All politicians are populists; the difference between each politician is who they consider to be a part of the exploitive, privileged elite. Of course the politicians do not view themselves as a part of the privileged elite. Stating otherwise is just silly.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

It seems to me that Paulites tend to be a lot more underwhelmed by Rand Paul than they were by his father. They were vehement supporters of the old guy, but the defences of the new guy remind me more of Star Wars fans trying to argue that The Phantom Menace was a brilliant work that was on par with the original series. They didn't believe it and nobody believed them when they said it, but they kind of felt obligated to be fans of it and fooled themselves with their arguments more than they did anyone else. After a while, they got around to admitting that it sucked shit and were more against the prequels than anyone else and they all managed to forget about sitting in a bar with you arguing about how Lucas's great vision was finally displaying its true brilliance now that it wasn't hampered by some bureaucratic desk jockey at the movie studio.

I think that's where we're going to find Paulites in regards to Rand in a few years.

 

[boneyard bill]

It seems to me that Paulites tend to be a lot more underwhelmed by Rand Paul than they were by his father. They were vehement supporters of the old guy, but the defences of the new guy remind me more of Star Wars fans trying to argue that The Phantom Menace was a brilliant work that was on par with the original series. They didn't believe it and nobody believed them when they said it, but they kind of felt obligated to be fans of it and fooled themselves with their arguments more than they did anyone else. After a while, they got around to admitting that it sucked shit and were more against the prequels than anyone else and they all managed to forget about sitting in a bar with you arguing about how Lucas's great vision was finally displaying its true brilliance now that it wasn't hampered by some bureaucratic desk jockey at the movie studio.

I think that's where we're going to find Paulites in regards to Rand in a few years.

There are definitely some Ron Paul people out there who don't like Rand as well because he doesn't take his father's pure, ideological line on policy. They are suspicious of him because they fear is too compromising.

On the other hand, there we also many people in the Ron Paul camp in the 2012 campaign who were very frustrated with Ron Paul's insistence on stubbornly adhering to his own dogmas when a few changes in wording could have made his positions more salable. These people are enthusiastic about Rand because they think he has a much better chance to win and events so far are bearing that out.

So you may be right about where some Ron Paul people will be in a few years. But, if Rand doesn't win, there are still a lot of people out there who will be looking for someone like Mike Lee or Justin Amash to pick up the standard and run with it.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

On the other hand, there we also many people in the Ron Paul camp in the 2012 campaign who were very frustrated with Ron Paul's insistence on stubbornly adhering to his own dogmas when a few changes in wording could have made his positions more salable. These people are enthusiastic about Rand because they think he has a much better chance to win and events so far are bearing that out.

Ya ... he doesn't actually have a chance to win anything. I remember during the last GOP primaries, various Paulites were going on about how a "proper" interpretation of the primary results showed the strong and dominating position that Paul v1.0 as in and how he was totally going to emerge either as the candidate or a king maker at the convention and all that. It was wishful thinking which was totally divorced from reality and delusions about v2.0's rising star are about the same.