2/8 News Roundup & Open Thread – Bernie Sanders Is Ready to Rumble & More

Bernie Sanders Is Ready to Rumble

Bernie Sanders has seen himself on a mission since he started running for office in the 1970s, and he sees no reason to stop now. He’s thinks he’s dramatically changed the conversation over the past three years, and he feels he’s close to achieving his ultimate goal.

Plus, there’s Donald Trump.

When the president used his State of the Union speech on Tuesday to preview his own re-election campaign and warned against creeping socialism—Sanders was only encouraged. He’d love to take on Trump directly, and people around him think he’ll be able to use Trump’s threat to coalesce support in the primaries.

“Nothing unifies Democrats like being made a villain by Trump,” said one Sanders ally.

The Vermont senator has been huddling with staff in meetings and phone calls over the last few weeks, chewing over plans. Barring a surprise last minute change of heart, he will jump in for the 2020 race, convinced he can win, according to people familiar with his plans. His spokeswoman, Arianna Jones, did not return a request for comment on Sanders’s plans.

Last time, he didn’t get in until the end of April 2015. This time, the launch will be in February. He sees advantage in a much more crowded 2020 field. The left-leaning politics he campaigned on in 2016 have been broadly embraced in a progressive surge among Democrats, and Sanders has succeeded in diminishing the nominating power of so-called super delegates, the elected officials and party elders who help consolidate establishment power within the Democratic National Committee.

Sanders will likely announce an exploratory committee in the coming weeks, followed by a rally. One major early focus will be finding a campaign manager and other top-level staffers who are not white, and preferably not male, in light of his problems appealing to minority voters in 2016, and recent revelations of sexual harassment by lower level staffers in the 2016 campaign. Staff interviews have been quietly underway.

But a core team of advisers will return from 2016, spearheaded by his wife and closest adviser, Jane O’Meara Sanders.

..

Sanders has heard the argument that his stature would be diminished by running again if it doesn’t end with his winning the nomination. He’s heard the argument that he might split the progressive vote and allow a more moderate candidate to win, but that hasn’t moved him either. That’s not how Sanders thinks, people who know him point out.

“He understands what happens in the streets is what prompts actions in Washington,” said Vincent Fort, a former Georgia state senator who supported the last campaign and has been in touch with Sanders’ team about this campaign.

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LieparDestin

Tips, Comments, Complaints, Etc!

LieparDestin

Happy Friday friends! Headed out the door for work but I have a few more links saved on my phone that I’ll post shortly.

PS: Im easily confused and thought the Nina lunch was this Sunday, when it is next Sunday, the 17th. Thankfully JD follows up on these kind of things.

PSS: If you work for Bernie and you are reading this.. hire me :D. But seriously.. if anyone knows who to contact, etc, etc.. please pass that info on.

polarbear4

If you work for Bernie, all of us here (lurkers, too) will tell that LD is smart, funny, works hard and long hours, and know his politics!!! You would truly be lucky to nab him.

And he is a true Berner!

polarbear4

Ditto. 🔥🔥🔥

phatkhat

I’d just take the bull by the horns and send him my resume. You have a good one.

wi60

Go ahead and do that LD you have nothing to lose by doing that.

LieparDestin

A Green New Deal can give us the freedoms to allow humanity to flourish

One of the biggest challenges of climate politics is that the solutions seem scarier than the problem. We worry that to truly decarbonize, we’d need an authoritarian government or endless austerity. But a big and bold enough Green New Deal could finally make us truly free.

The principles that animated the New Deal are often associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposed (but never fully enacted) Economic Bill of Rights. These included rights to employment, medical care, housing, education, and social security. Those goals are tragically unrealized for many Americans, and any just version of the Green New Deal must start there. They’re familiar goals for the left, ones we’ve been fighting over for decades. But we also need to rework another New Deal-era statement of principles – FDR’s Four Freedoms.

In the twilight hours of 1941, as New Deal progress stalled in the face of white southern resistance to federal power, and the war against Hitler intensified in Europe, FDR sought to describe freedom in new terms. He was struggling to bolster support for his faltering domestic agenda and anticipated foreign one; the Four Freedoms were eventually mythologized and sentimentalized in paintings by none other than Norman Rockwell.

We’re not trying to reclaim American patriotism or generate support for a coming world war. But the task of reimagining freedom is critical. In 1941, the Four Freedoms idea was a bridge between the New Deal’s unprecedented federal activism, pressed forward by a huge wave of labor and community militancy, and the wartime mobilization that followed, whose speed and scale now inspire the vision of a Green New Deal.

The right has claimed the language of freedom for decades. But their vision of freedom as your right as an individual to do whatever you want – so long as you can pay for it – is a recipe for disaster in the 21st century, when it’s clearer than ever that all our fates are bound up together. Freedom has to mean something more than the capitalist’s freedom to invest or the consumer’s freedom to buy.

Here, we modestly upstage FDR with five freedoms that can orient us to an uncertain future.

Don midwest

Climate change in Tasmania, an island state of Australia

Does this sound like a war zone?

What has become clear over these last four weeks across this vast, beautiful land of Australia is that a way of life is on the edge of vanishing. Australian summers, once a time of innocent pleasure, now are to be feared, to be anticipated not with joy but with dread, a time of discomfort, distress and, for some, fear that lasts not a day or a night but weeks and months. Power grids collapse, dying rivers vomit huge fish kills, while in the north, in Townsville, there are unprecedented floods, and in the south heat so extreme it pushes at the very edge of liveability has become everyday.

And the future in which the people of Tasmania now find themselves, in the evacuation centres, camped in friends’ and family homes, fighting fires day after week after month, isn’t just frightening. It’s terrifying. While Morrison, now the prime minister, rushes around the country trying to scare the people about franking credits, he seems blithely unaware that the people are already scared – about climate change.

Climate change isn’t just happening. It’s happening far quicker than has been predicted. Each careful scientific prediction is rapidly overtaken by the horror of profound natural changes that seem to be accelerating, with old predictions routinely outdone by the worsening reality – hotter, colder, wetter, drier, windier, wilder, and ever more destructive.

Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us

I mentioned “war zone” above for a reason.

The legal and political scholar, Carl Schmidt, defines a war to be an existential threat. Since WWII our military efforts have been police actions, not threats to our land. They were not wars.

Gaia is a threat.

Bruno Latour imagines a war between the earthbound and the people of Nature, those people who held that Nature was a stage for human actions.

Facing Gaia involves facing war. Gaia is an existential threat.

How soon, months, years, decades, how soon will it be clear that even the Green New Deal is just a very small step?

Have we been living in a utopia that like all utopia did not take into account all the other beings necessary for subsistence?

***
My sister has lived in Tasmania for 35 years. Her son, with a first name Forest, took my wife and I into a primitive rain forest. They live in Hobart and in that part of the island there is so much water that it is available to homes at no cost. The fires are in a different part of the island.

Benny

With the Green New Deal, Democrats Present a Radical Proposition for Combatting Climate Change

The Green New Deal has always been far more than a climate plan. There are planks on strengthening antitrust policy, protecting the right of workers to organize, and providing every American with “high-quality health care” and “affordable, safe, and adequate housing.” Perhaps most ambitiously, the resolution calls for a green federal job guarantee—every American, it suggests, will have a job opportunity tied to the project of transitioning America to clean and sustainable energy. All will be paid for primarily, an F.A.Q. offered by Ocasio-Cortez’s team implies, with debt spending.

The fact that five of the Party’s leading Presidential contenders and sixty Congressional Democrats have signed onto legislation containing these proposals is remarkable. It is an even clearer sign than growing Democratic support for single-payer health care that the era of Clintonian triangulation is over—that the question leading Democrats are asking is not whether the Party should move left but how far left it should go.

The resolution is also in keeping with the Democratic Party’s longstanding strategy on climate—the Party has long assumed, probably correctly, that major climate action is unlikely unless addressing the crisis is woven securely into the Party’s economic agenda. A job guarantee, as radical as it seems, is an extension of the same logic that led that led the Obama Administration to tout the creation of green jobs. The resolution also ties climate action to the advancement of a variety of demographic groups, including many clearly important to the Party’s political future. There is much in the text about “frontline and vulnerable communities,” defined as “indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth,” for whom the Green New Deal will also “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression.”

As the resolution begins moving through both chambers, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Markey, and other supporters will be drafting the legislation that the Green New Deal outlines. A source close to Senator Bernie old me on Thursday that he will unveil a Green New Deal bill within the next several months. “Obviously the Green New Deal is an expansive policy,” O’Hanlon says. “It’s going to need to be multiple bills and long bills, so they’re working on that.” Of course, no bill they propose will be taken up unless Democrats win the White House in 2020, unseating a President who has claimed repeatedly that climate change is a hoax. In 2010, Democrats, who held the Presidency, the House, and the Senate, elected not to advance an ambitious cap-and-trade bill co-authored by Senator Markey, because they failed to secure the sixty Senate votes necessary to break a Republican filibuster. But the majority Party in the Senate can eliminate the filibuster unilaterally, provided it has fifty-one votes for doing so—a tactic used in recent years to eliminate the filibuster for executive and judicial nominees. At Thursday’s conference, I asked Markey whether, the next time Democrats hold Congress and the Presidency, they should eliminate the Senate filibuster to pass the Green New Deal. “That would be a good problem to have!” he said. “My own feeling is that this is going to be such a powerful issue in the 2020 election cycle that we’re going to have the Republican support, all across the country, to pass it with sixty votes and a supermajority in the House as well.

Benny

pic.twitter.com/HKkfITgcyK

— Jenny Sant'Anna (@TWA2Jenny) February 8, 2019

polarbear4

I would have liked to see judicial filibusters. If the public could see what some of those judges’ backgrounds are, they wouldn’t be there

LieparDestin

Somewhere in this video (it was on in the background so I dont have a timestamp) its suggested that Bezos thinks a gov agency was used to obtain his texts:

On the other hand Theres a lot of reaching and likely wishful thinking coming from these pundits. All said and done though.. Bezos will own the NE before its all over.

jcitybone

Looks like the source could be Sanchez’s brother who has ties to Roger Stone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/08/hes-studied-thousands-threatening-letters-now-hes-center-bezoss-blackmail-claims-against-tabloid/?utm_term=.f547d3ba7e8f

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon.com’s founder, published emails Thursday that appear to show the National Enquirer threatening to publish intimate photos unless he ends de Becker’s probe into how the tabloid acquired private texts showing his relationship with former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The source of the tabloid’s fury, according to the emails, were reports about de Becker’s view that the Enquirer’s story was politically motivated and linked to associates of President Trump.

The case brings new scrutiny on de Becker, who has spent decades investigating those trying to intimidate his clients in Hollywood and the business world — and tussling in the past with the National Enquirer when those interests collided. Described by Bezos as “one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know,” de Becker emerged from a violent childhood to essentially create a new industry of threat prediction.

That investigation, as The Post reported on Tuesday, led de Becker to point the finger at Michael Sanchez, Lauren’s brother. Michael Sanchez is a “pro-Trump Hollywood talent manager,” The Post reported, who is acquaintances with Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime ally who was recently indicted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and former Trump adviser Carter Page. De Becker told the Daily Beast that “strong leads point to political motives” behind the Enquirer story.

jcitybone

We were warned explicitly by insiders that AMI had hired private investigators to dig into backgrounds of @AP journalists looking into the tabloid’s efforts on behalf of Trump. Never saw evidence of this either way, and it didn’t stop our reporting.

— Ted Bridis (@tbridis) February 8, 2019

phatkhat

Well, the Trump organization has wide roots. NE is one of his bastions of support, and we all know Trump hates Bezos. Out of jealousy, I expect. Not that I have any love for Bezos, but he IS a better businessman than Dumpie.

jcitybone

Yeah I’m going to trust an article that uses Dean as the prime source for what progressives will do especially the so very hard hardcore ones. That being said, the article does have some interesting insights into where certain progressives and groups will fall. My take is that once Liz or Bernie are out, progressives will gravitate around the other.

https://news.yahoo.com/sanders-risks-getting-crowded-2020-090000577.html?bcmt=1

Bernie Sanders’ army of fervent progressives will be up for grabs in 2020 even if the Vermont independent makes another bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders may find himself a victim of his own success in driving the party to the left with his 2016 run. The field of Democratic presidential hopefuls includes at least a half-dozen candidates who’ve adopted in whole or in part the platform that helped Sanders build a loyal following of young voters and liberals: Medicare for all, a $15 an hour minimum wage and debt-free college education.

“There will be hardcore, hard left progressives who will have nobody but Bernie, but there won’t be many,” said Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate and past Democratic National Committee chairman.

LieparDestin

Warren has been running for ages (if youtube ads are a basis for such things) and even with her launch, etc… I dont know a single person in real life that is supporting her. Maybe things will change with time but Im far from certain.

jcitybone

Yeah I think she’s more popular up here in the NE. In any case, I don’t think progressive politicians like Jayapal or AOC are going to endorse Bernie until Warren is out of the race.

polarbear4

Oh Howie, stay complacent about how few of us there are, please. Trying to push the popularity. We see you.

LieparDestin

Benny

Key West Bans Some Sunscreens to Protect Coral Reefs

The Key West city commission voted 6-1 on Tuesday to ban the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate within the island city, which is part of the Florida Keys archipelago found off the southern tip of the state.

The vote followed a public meeting where marine biologists and conservations decried harmful sunscreens, pointing to research that suggests the chemicals alter corals’ DNA and weaken their immunity to disease. The ban will start in 2021.

“We have one reef, and we have to do one small thing to protect that,” said Teri Johnston, mayor of Key West. “It’s our obligation.”

Last year, both Hawaii and the Pacific nation of Palau prohibited the sale of certain sunscreens, citing the impact on their own declining coral reefs.

Some doctors have opposed banning the sunscreens, arguing the move would increase the risk of skin cancers. Scientists, too, have been divided. In response to a push in Australia to ban sunscreens, the prominent coral reef expert Terry Hughes said: “People make a long list of bad things that human beings do to coral reefs—I would place sunscreen at number 200.”

Even if sunscreens are banned, coral reefs around the world face being virtually wiped out on current global warming trends. Corals get stressed and can die in high ocean temperatures, with localized pollution and clumsy tourists also degrading reefs that are vital to a host of marine creatures.

Florida has the world’s third largest barrier reef, with nearly 1,400 species of plants and animals and 500 species of fish, but the reef is vanishing fast. Research has found that roughly half of the reef has disappeared over the past 250 years. Coverage of acropora, the primary genus of reef-building corals, has plummeted 97 percent.

Seems to me we need better labeling, and there’s an opportunity to make sunscreen lotions/sprays with more organic ingredients. The labeling, however, won’t happen under this Administration.

Don midwest

what is a person?

the trillions of microbes without which we would be dead in an instant?

and now this

Our Plastics, Our Selves

the article focuses on plastics in the seas but it has other stuff

One major mystery within that dilemma: what all these bits of plastic might be doing to us. For every tidbit of understanding we gain about the health consequences of chemicals released by plastics, there remains a Gyre-sized quantity of unknowns. But a growing body of evidence suggests some chemicals commonly found in many plastics are associated with everything from breast and prostate cancer, to underdeveloped genitalia and low sperm count in men, to obesity.

You’ve probably already heard about compounds like bisphenol A, which seeps into food and drinks from plastic bottles and canned-food liners — and has been tentatively linked to breast cancer and prostate cancer. That’s just one. There are many others. Some are merely suspected to be bad for human health; others are known to be dangerous.

They are scattered all around us — and even within us.

“So often when we talk about environmental problems we hear about things that are happening somewhere else, to somebody else, at some point in the future,” Penn wrote in the U.N. Chronicle magazine in 2014. “You and I already have a body burden, a chemical footprint that we will never get rid of.”

In particular, some of the substances that stick to plastics, seep out of them, or are released when they decay are endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), meaning that they interfere with the normal function of hormones in the human body. Some may contribute to cancer. They may also cross from a pregnant woman’s body into her fetus, potentially changing the way a baby develops.

It’s that last potential consequence of plastic junk that made Penn decide to found eXXpedition as an all-women’s endeavor. Men get these chemicals inside them as well, of course. “For women,” she said, “it felt like it was a greater significance because we’re passing them on to the next generation.”

looks like it is harder to ignore that we are earthbound, not humans on a stage of nature

at the same time to look back to ways of living of the past we also have to push forward with science to understand what is going on and then to politics to face reality

jcitybone

Following up on Subir’s DK article yesterday. It does show why AOC’s nomination to Oversight was so important. I’m sure she’ll have more interesting things to say on Financial Services too

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/c-span-aoc-ocasio-cortez-hearings

Ocasio-Cortez appears to be doing something similar with her newly won position on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which yesterday held a hearing on H.R.1, the House Democrats’ expansive anti-corruption and voting rights package. Watch this clip from yesterday’s session, in which Ocasio-Cortez plays a “lightning-round game” with the witnesses, in which she pretends to be a “bad guy” (“which I’m sure half the room would agree with anyway,” she adds with a smile) who’s trying to “get away with as much bad things as possible, ideally to enrich myself and advance my interests.”

Ocasio-Cortez has shown she can bring the style that’s made her a force of nature on social media to a committee hearing and, more importantly, do it in a way that makes clear to the public just how easy it is for the rich — or “bad guys,” to use her words — to control the political system. Here’s hoping someday she’ll get a chance to do the same on an issue like climate change, too.

jcitybone

Illegitimate Supreme Court comes after New York City gun control law. Will only make the Court even more illegitimate in the eyes of the fervently gun control majority up here.

https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/01/22/politics/supreme-court-second-amendment/index.html

A newly solidified conservative majority on the Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to take up a Second Amendment case for the first time since 2010.

At issue is a challenge to a provision of a New York City gun law that regulates where a licensed handgun owners can take their firearm. The law blocks licensed individuals from removing a handgun from the address listed on the license except to travel to nearby authorized small arms range/shooting clubs.

jcitybone

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/02/08/ocasio-cortez-not-phased-can-democratic-socialism-and-capitalism-coexist-question

While acknowledging there are things the private sector does better, like providing markets with consumer goods, she also noted that even businesses operating in the private sector can themselves be socially democratic and offered worker cooperatives as a great example. Democratic socialism, she said, is “not about government takeover, it’s about how much of a say do workers have in your business. Do you have workers on the board? Do workers enjoy a decent amount of the wealth they are creating? Or is the majority of these profits going to shareholders while you’re paying a worker $15 an hour to live in a New York City apartment? And so that to me is the difference.

“It’s not that the public sector is democratically socialist and the private sector is not. It’s really about a more nuanced understanding of how our economy should work.”

Later in the interview she was asked about democratic socialism’s ability to win elections, to which she noted that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the most high-profile elected in the U.S. Congress, showed in 2016 just how potent the message can be.

LieparDestin

.@DanielPipes was trying to explain that Palestinians should have EVEN fewer human rights 🤮

I had to disrupt pic.twitter.com/ccya7IKp8l

— Ariel Gold 🔥💕 אריאל (@ArielElyseGold) February 7, 2019

LieparDestin

"Indigenous Nations have been hollering about the Green New Deal for thousands of years, and we feel an energy coming alive" – @ChaseIronEyes

Full pod episode at https://t.co/CwZ6uUcYjF … #GreenNewDeal #ActOnClimate #TBT #Think100 @AOC @EdMarkey @RepDebHaaland @RepDavids pic.twitter.com/hqFczkD42m

— Hip Hop Caucus (@HipHopCaucus) February 7, 2019

Don midwest

Trump hiring undocumented people

“My whole town practically lived there’: From Costa Rica to New Jersey, a pipeline of illegal workers for Trump goes back years

Angulo learned to drive backhoes and bulldozers, carving water hazards and tee boxes out of former horse pastures in Bedminster, N.J., where a famous New Yorker was building a world-class course. Angulo earned $8 an hour, a fraction of what a state-licensed heavy equipment operator would make, with no benefits or overtime pay. But he stayed seven years on the grounds crew, saving enough for a small piece of land and some cattle back home.

Now the 34-year-old lives with his wife and daughters in a sturdy house built by “Trump money,” as he put it, with a porch to watch the sun go down.

It’s a common story in this small town.

Other former employees of President Trump’s company live nearby: men who once raked the sand traps and pushed mowers through thick heat on Trump’s prized golf property — the “Summer White House,” as aides have called it — where his daughter Ivanka got married and where he wants to build a family cemetery.

“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Angulo said. “This golf course was built by illegals.”

polarbear4

Great campaign argument?

polarbear4

Woooo hoooo! Game on! Now that I’m working so much (started full time Wednesday—8 yr. old and 9 mo.) I won’t have much time, but I’ll have more small donations. :0)

phatkhat

I’ll take over for ya. I just quit my fulltime job. It was killing me. :o)

polarbear4

Congrats! 🎈🎉🎊

Bernie’s calling your name. 🌝🔥❤️

Don midwest

well,

Glenn Greenwald‏Verified account @ggreenwald 3m3 minutes ago
More
The Bezos story reminded me of one of the NSA programs we revealed with the Snowden documents that got less attention than it deserved: the NSA tracks “radicalizers” to store their porn browsing history & sex chats in order to ruin their reputation

Glenn’s article just up

Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of his Privacy as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State For Everyone Else

One recalls when Dianne Feinstein got pissed after CIA hacked her Senate documents, but does not give a crap about the rest of us

Benny

Yeah, TOP has a few diaries up heralding Bezo’s defiance against the AMI group. I had similar feelings to the headline from the Intercept.

jcitybone

I give zero Fs about Bezos, but if Trump is using the National Enquiror to intimidate and blackmail reporters et al, that is a very bad thing.

phatkhat

Bezos goes to show what happens to guys – even billionaires, or maybe ESPECIALLY billionaires – who listen to the little head instead of the big one. He’s in Trump’s crosshairs, and put himself in a position to be blackmailed. Dumb.

Not only is Trump jealous of B’s success, and money, he’s enraged at WaPo most of the time. IMHO, WaPo is way too kind to him, but there you are. I really don’t think Bezos controls the editorial content, anyhow.

polarbear4

“ Alexa, not me!”

phatkhat

Split the progressive vote? He’d be the ONLY progressive running, as far as I can see. I don’t know enough about Castro, but he is never mentioned, and I don’t think he will last as long as O’Malley, who actually was progressive.

LieparDestin

With all the other people in, the fact is, Bernie is the one whose ideas everyone else is ‘borrowing,’ whether it be Wall Street reforms, or Medicare for all, or free college. These are all ideas that Bernie came up with first and best,” Fort said. “I’m a little bit skeptical of the sincerity of some of the latecomers.”

phatkhat

“… little bit …”??? LOL. I’m not at all certain Bernie can win the primaries. For sure the DNC will do all in its power to ensure Kamala or maybe Biden. But I think Bernie would beat Trump in a landslide (as he would have last time) if he is able to overcome the DNC and the army of Hilbots. Harris will go down in flames. I’m not sure she would even win the popular vote outside of California.

OTOH, the tribal warfare between the parties is so intense, and the devotion to Capitalism so great, I think the DNC would far prefer more Trump to a Sanders win. Railing against Trump seems to be a big fundraising gambit.

Benny

I wish that weren’t the case, but I believe there is some truth in what you are stating.

jcitybone

At least none of the Dem presidential candidates voted for this. Even Klobuchar and Beto. Who knows what Biden thinks

https://theintercept.com/2019/02/08/elizabeth-warren-was-right-new-law-is-already-making-banks-bigger/

THE PROPOSED $28 BILLION merger announced Thursday between large regional banks SunTrust and BB&T is the biggest banking tie-up since the financial crisis, creating what would become the nation’s sixth-largest bank. And it’s a direct result of actions taken by the Trump administration and the bipartisan group of lawmakers who passed a bank deregulation bill in 2018.

While Democrats insisted that the bank bill, S.2155, was merely about community bank regulatory relief, critics and industry experts expected that it would lead to consolidation of the sector, which began to occur almost immediately after passage. “I’m concerned about the negative impact of increased consolidation caused by S.2155 on community banks and on customers who benefit from more competition for their business,” wrote Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren in April 2018, just a month after the bill’s passage.

Warren singled out by name her own Democratic colleagues who were supporting the bill, catching internal blowback from the caucus. But Warren’s warnings have proven prescient, as the SunTrust/BB&T merger represents the latest in a wave of deals in the financial sector. “Once again, big bank deregulation is leading to more consolidation,” said Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., a Warren protégé and first-term congressman who sits on the House Financial Services Committee. “I opposed last year’s bank giveaway bill, and the Trump administration’s loosening of protections, precisely because it would make Too Big to Fail even worse. This merger will do the same, and end up hurting our nation’s community banks.”

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