Letter to Senator Durbin

Here is a letter that outlines my political thoughts at the moment. I sent it to Senator Durbin this morning.

Mr Durbin:

I was a supporter of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

I am retired now but was a market analyst and money manager for many years in Chicago.

This year I have been and still am a supporter of Bernie Sanders. My thinking is simply:

1) Hillary’s economic direction is just more of the same and would continue the current instability created by the FED, the Administration, and Congressional Fiscal inaction.
2) At the moment there are two prominent Democratic party economic thinkers dealing with the inequality that US economic policies create. Those two people are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, neither of which hold Hillary’s economic policies in high esteem.
3) The strongest economist in the country who analyzes and writes about the issues that drive Warren and Sanders is Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winner.
4) Obama’s economic policies have been a mixed bag, supporting the biggest manufacturing sector in the U.S., the autos during the great recession, was probably his biggest plus. On the other hand his naming of Timothy Geithner to be Treasury Secretary was a huge mistake for many reasons which are already public. Supporting a follower of Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, was his second big mistake. If one’s goal is long term economic growth, Yellen has to go and a FED chair who believes in normal economic interest rates and a end to artificial rates needs to replace her. Cheap rates only work for short periods of economic instability, less than two years.
5. Getting back to Hillary, she has stated that she will lean on Bill for economic input. That is a non-starter, Bill and his friend Robert Rubin, both of who were involved in the shutdown of Glass-Steagall, along with Ronald Reagan earlier beliefs are the founders of the inequality forces crushing the U.S. consumer.
6. And lastly, Hillary’s closeness to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs is a huge negative.
7. So what is the answer, the only way I would support Hillary is if she would announce that she would follow the Sanders / Warren Economic Direction and name that policy verbatim in her platform and then follow up with appointments to her election committee that espouse that policy. Just to be sure, she needs to also say publicly that Bill and Bob will not be part of her economic team.

Thanks,

 

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