The Widdershins

Blood, Sweat & Tears released Spinning Wheel in 1969.  Bernie Sanders climbed up on his painted pony last night and reprised the hit in a stunning redux of BS sans the T.

Have you seen Bernie?

Bernie forgets that “revolution” also means spinning round and round in circles.  If, like BS&T, you have the benefit of proper psychedelic assistance, spinning becomes a beautiful thing.  In politics it’s not.

Radical revolution means tipping off your axis – creating havoc, losing your way, falling out of sync with your orbit.  With a well-meaning heart and eyes fully scrunched shut as he dreams of another day, radical spinning seems to be Bernie’s goal.

Bernie’s curmudgeonly naiveté seems hell-bent on destroying the Democratic Party for a generation, but why should he care – he only signed up three minutes ago.  After more than 20 campaigns where he deigned the Democrat label as somehow impugning his credibility, Bernie searched his soul, screwed up his courage, and bravely checked boxes on forms at the Federal Election Commission.  Voila he’s a Democrat.

This conjures several observations:

(1) Is Bernie a progressive or just a pragmatist borrowing a label for the sake of expediency?

(2) Could the pragmatism of checking the “Democrat boxes” on the F.E.C. forms have something to do with access to the DNC voter and contributor rolls for fundraising?

(3) Bernie Sanders’ behavior in demanding debates, their locations, and criticizing the DNC is like inviting a guest to dinner and having that guest criticize the timing, the food, and the place setting?  That is not a guest – that is the dinner party scene from Beetlejuice with someone who is possessed by something other than clear-headed thinking.

Funny, he looked like Larry David…

When it comes to the banking fubar, here are a few thoughts.  Bernie’s banking proposal is 4 pages long – a whole three pages more than one page.  Those four pages represent little more than a call for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.  Great – that’s something anyone who has read a newspaper in the last seven years can smugly proclaim at a dinner party.

Would Glass-Steagall have stopped the 2008 crash?  No, not in the least.

Without going into detail, the 2008 crash was occasioned by the shadow banks – the money-market funds, hedge funds, private equity funds, and broker-dealers – that are one self-fulfilling panic away from causing another run on the banks.  Bernie’s call for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall has not a thing to do with shadow banking.  Hillary’s plan, as endorsed by Paul Krugman and other reform-minded economists, does – it reins them in.

A few thoughts tangentially related to the banks regarding speaking fees.  First, hundreds of thousands of dollars for a speech is hard to fathom for those of us who regularly go “change diving” in our sofa cushions.  Second, the egos of Wall Street CEOs, which happen to be slightly larger than Montana, require an ever-escalating competition with one another to land the biggest talking fish for paid speeches.  Don’t ask me why, but it is a weird zipper-less competition of my “speaker” is bigger than yours.

Why is the competition so fierce?  Because the competition doesn’t cost them a thing courtesy of tax loopholes allowing them to deduct every last cent of the fees.

And one more thing I want to make crystalline:  I don’t care if I ever again hear Mrs. Alan Greenspan feign breathless, stunned stupefaction about speaking fees.  Someone, I don’t know who it will be, needs to call Andrea Mitchell out on the fact her husband has wallowed at the trough of speaking fees, even grunting and snorting for the shadow bank precipitating the 2008 crash:

Alan Greenspan, $250,000 per speech: Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has been able to bring in the bucks since retiring through giving speeches. Only a week after his retirement, Greenspan spoke at a Lehman Brothers dinner, earning himself $250,000.

Andrea Mitchell – suck it!  Since you drag Bill into every Hillary story as fair game, take your bileful Clinton hate and go crawl into bed with your quarter-million dollar talking prune who, by the way, repeatedly ignored the ever-increasing signs of the 2008 crash during his tenure.

One last thought about last night:  Bernie and his day-care tenders, a Tad Deviant (Tad Devine) and Jeff Weevil (Jeff Weaver) are strategically betting primary voters won’t care about foreign policy and the role of Commander-in-Chief.  No one knows who, or even if, Bernie has talked to anyone about foreign policy.  Even those who are supposedly Bernie’s advisors don’t know how their names got there.

“Apparently I had a conversation with him last August,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a Brookings Institution Middle East scholar, after checking her calendar upon hearing that her name was on a list of people the Sanders campaign said he had consulted in recent months. “My vague recollection is that it was about [the Islamic State] but I don’t really remember any of the details.” Wittes added that she backs Clinton.

“I don’t know how I got on Bernie Sanders’ list,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who says he spoke to Sanders once or twice about the Iran nuclear deal at Sanders’ request in mid-2015.

This is something of which I’m sure – Karl Rove, the Brothers Koch, and dozens of other billionaires funding the Right’s vampire squid of dark-monied creations do care about foreign policy.  Have no doubt; they are paying close attention to this primary.

Last night wasn’t about revolution.  It was about spinning the wheels deeper and deeper into the mud of political gridlock. Bernie’s angry outbursts will feed the dark-monied vampire squid through the fall election.  Be assured, we will hear his outbursts again.  But why would Bernie care – he won’t have to defend against them.  Hillary will.

Have a great Friday.  Feel free to take this conversation in any direction you might deem appropriate.  And if appropriateness doesn’t do it for you, just have fun.