Tag Archives: John Carney

Yet More Suckitude From John Carney

He is terrible. Today, our ‘Honorable’ voted with the Rethugs and 35 other phony D’s to “exempt many private equity fund advisers from a provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law which required advisers with more than $150 million in assets under management to register with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.”

What earthly public purpose could be served by such an exemption? None, none at least that makes sense from a progressive perspective.

John, you were elected under the false pretense that you are/were a Democrat.

You’re not. You’re a tool of this nation’s greediest.

Do everyone a favor and retire. Time for a real Democrat.

Open Letter to John Carney

Representative Carney,

Your Democratic colleagues in the House are supporting an effort to expand Social Security benefits. I think it is time for you to break with the right-wing policies you’ve supported in the past and join your fellow Democrats in helping restore sanity to the debate over this vital social insurance program that has done so much to allow our nation’s elderly to live in dignity.

At a time when the 401k system has been proven to be a failed experiment, based on legalized theft, it is not time to cut social security benefits. Rather, it is a time to ensure Social Security’s long-term solvency by “scraping the cap” and stop excluding income over $113,700 from the social security tax.

The current proposal, supported by your Democratic colleagues, would phase out that cap, so that millionaires like you, Chris Coons and Tom Carper would pay into Social Security throughout the year like the rest of us.

Now, I know you and your staff hate me. So imagine that this letter is coming from someone you don’t hate. (Frankly, I think it is time for Shelia Grant to put that pettiness aside, but that is a topic for another letter.)

Anyway, think about it. The Overton Window on Social Security is ready to move back to the middle, and it is well past time for you to establish some Democratic credibility as the sole representative in the House of a very Demcoratic state.

Thanks,

Jason330

QOTD — When Was the Last Time One of Our Congressional Delegation Had a Town Hall Meeting?

I see that our Congressional delegation is having another Job Fair (see details below) — which is very cool and certainly people who need jobs could use every bit of help they can get. But when I saw this item in a recent press release from Senator Coons’ office (an item I passed on to folks I know are looking), I couldn’t remember the last Town Hall from these guys. This is particularly odd since the August recess wasn’t too far back. I think that John Carney has had a forum on college costs, but that is all I can remember.

So help me out here. Have you heard of or participated in a Town Hall with Carper, Coons or Carney recently? And do you think they should have more in person opportunities to talk with constituents?

Job Fair Details:

MONDAY: Carper, Coons, Carney to host New Castle County job fair
The fair will feature more than 50 potential employers hiring for full and part-time positions

NEWARK, Del. – U.S. Senators Tom Carper and Chris Coons, and Representative John Carney will host a job fair Monday, November 4 at the Embassy Suites (654 South College Avenue, Newark) from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Delaware delegation will be on hand to greet job-seekers and employers at their last job fair of the year.

The New Castle County job fair is being organized with the help of Brandywine Counseling and Career Services and will features more than 50 potential employers, as well as several resource agencies to assist attendees with their job search.

WHAT: Senators Carper and Coons, and Representative Carney will meet with job candidates and potential employers
WHEN: Monday, November 4 at 10:30 a.m.
WHERE: Embassy Suites, 654 South College Avenue in Newark

John Bleeping Carney

John Bleeping Carney. One of 30 ‘Democrats’ to vote to enable ‘financial advisors’ to continue to rip you off. Worse than useless. Check out this article from Daily Kos:

The Labor Department proposal, known as the “fiduciary rule,” would change the ethical standards by which employer-based retirement products like 401(k)’s and IRAs are marketed and sold. The rule has not been updated since 1975, before 401(k)’s and IRAs even existed. The Labor Department wants to broaden the definition of a “fiduciary” to cover all financial advisers who offer individual investment advice for a fee. Under the rule, they would be legally required to work in the best interest of their clients. For example, a fiduciary would not be able to push investment products on customers in which they have a financial stake.

Currently, it is depressingly common for financial advisers, more than 80 percent of whom are not fiduciaries, to self-deal when offering advice. First off, they obtain large fees from the retirement products they sell. According to the think tank Demos, a median-income, two-earner household will pay $155,000 during their lifetime to financial advisers on average. (The lifetime gains for two-earner households from retirement accounts are around $230,000, meaning that nearly two-thirds of the profits go to the industry.) Second, non-fiduciary financial advisers can enjoy kickbacks; right now there is no rule against an adviser from a mutual fund company encouraging clients to put their money in specific funds sold by that company. In fact, that’s the norm, and the adviser typically receives a commission for the sale.

Conflicts of interest like this cost retirement investors at least $1 billion a month, because the funds they get channeled into underperform the alternatives…

Let the record show that John Carney voted to support the continuation of these blatant ripoffs.

Please tell me again: Why the bleep is he our congressman? It is time for a true progressive to challenge this pathetic Carper clone. We’re supposedly one of the bluest states in the country. Carney, at best, approaches purple.

Not. Good. Enough.

John Carney Joins the SNAP Challenge Protest — UPDATED

UPDATE — courtesy of Rep. Carney’s office: The Congressman started his SNAP challenge yesterday, meaning I jumped the gun here relaying info from other sources. In any event, Representative Carney started reporting on his progress with the SNAP challenge via his Facebook page. According to that page, he’ll be meeting with various people in Delaware and DC to highlight the challenges of people who live on the SNAP program.
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The House of Representatives is getting to vote on its version of the Farm Bill — this GOP led version cuts 2.5% of SNAP funds. It is estimated that this might throw about 2.5M Americans who need food help off of the program. As a protest — 26 Democrats in the House have started a week-long SNAP Challenge (some reports have some of their staff joining them), where they pledge to live on the $4.50/day subsidy SNAP provides. Our representative, John Carney, is on the list of Democrats doing this challenge.

Representative Carney’s own webpage (or his Facebook page) doesn’t have anything about his commitment to this yet, and we’ll link that when it happens. In the meantime, I commend Representative Carney for taking up this challenge, and really, each legislator should have to live only on the “safety net” for a month before they are allowed to vote on a thing. Living on $4.50 a day is hard, especially if you are trying to maintain some semblance of a healthy diet. But I wonder about the effectiveness of this as a protest. No doubt there will be much attention to their efforts over the week (complete with Twitter hashtag — #SNAPChallenge), which is a great way to inform people, but will this change any GOP minds? I read this comment (or a variant thereof) someplace, recently:

It takes a coward to ignore the poor, it takes a monster to steal their food, it takes a Republican to ridicule their misery.

Fewer people would need food assistance if they could work at jobs that paid them enough to put food on the table. Because it isn’t just people who don’t work who get food assistance — it is people making minimum wage for few hours at the Walmarts of the world, too. Helping to push back on the so-called jobs that don’t even allow these workers to stop accessing these benefits would help too. Which isn’t to denigrate Rep. Carney’s challenge here — this is plenty tough — I just wish it was a better protest.

Weakening Dodd-Frank — John Carney Edition

According to this Saturday’s NJ, John Carney is lending some bi-partisan credibility to one of (there’s a package of bills out there trying to weaken an already weak legislation) the bills meant to loosen restrictions on banks who are trading in derivatives from their foreign operations:

Under Dodd-Frank, U.S. and foreign firms must comply with new rules affecting derivatives known as “swaps” in their dealings with U.S. customers.

Guidance from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, scheduled to take effect in July, would require that foreign branches and subsidiaries of U.S. financial firms also submit information to U.S. regulators on any foreign swaps transactions.

The commission would defer to a host country’s rules in some instances, on a case-by-case basis.

The financial industry is fighting the swaps rule, saying it could force them to comply with redundant sets of foreign and domestic regulations and would deter foreign firms from dealing with U.S.-based firms.

“They’re concerned they could get pulled into U.S. regulations and they’re inclined not to trade with those U.S.-registered firms,” said Kenneth Bentsen, head of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. “The U.S. firms are concerned that they could be at a distinct disadvantage.”

Notice anything here?  It is the US regulations that might be redundant and the problem.  Not the multiple foreign sets of trading rules that already exist that these firms are living with.  Dodd-Frank already provides for living with foreign rules that are truly comparable to the US ones:

The proposed Dodd-Frank rule on international swaps already says that countries with truly comparable regulations are exempt from US regs. This bill weakens that by presuming that international rules are comparable and making it hard for the SEC and CFTC to decide otherwise.

The NJ makes that point too. But Carney says in the Press Release sent out by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) back in March (couldn’t find a press release from Carney on his site about this, though):

“For the last two years, I’ve been working with my colleagues to make the financial system stronger and help our economy recover and grow,” said Carney. “As we work to implement the provisions of Dodd-Frank, Congress and regulators must ensure that we’re protecting American consumers, ending future bailouts, and maintaining American competitiveness in an increasingly global economy. This legislation will give U.S. companies the certainty they need to compete overseas, while maintaining important provisions from Dodd-Frank that will increase transparency in the U.S. derivatives market.”

Somehow this weakening is supposed to be good for everybody and is one of the more insulting examples of regulatory talking points. If this bill passes, banks do not have to live with the strongest of the derivative regulations — the ones in Dodd-Frank — if they are doing business overseas. Weakening this provision makes it easier for these banks to misbehave in other markets, meaning that taxpayers are at greater risk from TBTF — not less.

Dodd-Frank is already much too imperfect a solution to trying to avoid another crash. And John Carney coming down on the side of the banks instead of taxpayers is all to a familiar scene. What’s especially tough about this is that Carney can be for cuts in Social Security while he is placing Social Security at further risk with letting banks get away with more foolishness. If you’re willing to let the banks play Russian Roulette with taxpayer funds, Rep. Carney, why not support getting at least Social Security funds out of harms way? At least *that* would represent genuinely centrist policy — not the craven calculation here that responding to the needs of banks is more important than the needs of the people you represent.

So far, President Obama, the Treasury Department and Elizabeth Warren are opposed to the complete set of these bills that are meant to weaken Dodd-Frank. Unfortunately, since these are bank bills and the banks have bought a very great many legislators, these will likely show up in the Senate at some point.

QOTD — Have You Seen Your Congressional Delegation Weigh In on the Sequester?

Seriously — the past week (especially this weekend) has send lots of legislators to the airwaves to weigh in on the sequester. Most of the Democrats are out making the case for their plan to replace the sequester. The GOP either: 1) aren’t talking; 2) blaming Obama or 3) saying the sequester is no big deal. After a quick Google search and look at each of their websites, none of them has addressed the looming sequester at all.

Not that a statement from any of them would change the train wreck that is the coming sequester. But given that there is plenty of press here on what this sequester would mean for Delaware, and the Governor weighed in last week. Frankly I’m thinking that the lack of discussion of this problem is the real signal that the sequester would happen — otherwise, we would have been treated to the usual bipartisan theater on this thing.

Giving Thanks for Delaware’s Politicans

People are thankful for many different things by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. Some are thankful for their health. Others are happy they have close friends and a loving family.

I’m thankful for politicians.

Seriously, without those do-nothing bureaucrats wasting taxpayer money, I would have to remove the “political” from my political cartoons. Suddenly, what passed as biting satire about the relevant issues of the day would quickly become an illustrated guide to your Facebook feed.

Continue reading at Newsworks.org…

Delaware Political Weekly: Oct. 13-19, 2012

1. Bodie Out. Pettyjohn In.

The political world in western Sussex returns to normal. While there will likely be some confusion on the R side, Eric Bodenweiser‘s full withdrawal from the 19th Senate District race virtually guarantees that Brian Pettyjohn will keep this crimson red senate seat in the R column come November. Bodenweiser’s name will not appear on the ballot. While voters indeed will have to write in Pettyjohn’s name, the DOE will make it as easy as possible for people to do so, and I don’t think it will be close.  Don’t blame Jane Hovington. She stepped up and took one for the team, whatever that team might be in western Sussex. Which begs this thought: You’ve got a moribund Democratic Party in western Sussex. You’ve got a growing Latino and minority population base that has next to no voice in the official party structure there. A party structure that is almost gone. I see a great opportunity to build a new and more inclusive Democratic Party in western Sussex. With grassroots leadership from these growing populations. It’s not as if there’s gonna be a revival of the good ol’ boys Democrats there.   There’s a political vacuum. Fill it, amigos.

2. Who’s More Unfit for Public Office: Carper or Pires?

It’s one thing to run a vanity campaign. It’s quite another thing to run a vanity campaign seemingly based on the premise that you want everyone to know that you’re an asshole. The irony, of course, is that Alex Pires challenged a Democrat who is virtually not a Democrat at all. Senator Bipartisanship Unilateral Surrender, Tom Carper. Pires had the money and clearly the ambition to mount a serious challenge that could well have attracted a lot of progressive votes. Instead, he plastered the News-Journal with his grinning gargoyle mug, littered the roadsides with more signs than Burma Shave ever envisioned, and claimed that Carper was a wifebeater and in failing health. And now, apparently, a day trader.  Those claims, serious indeed if true, with absolutely no proof. Anyone who reads this blog knows I will not support Carper ever again. He’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of the banks, and his quests for bipartisanship have led him to, among other things, enable Alito and Roberts to become Supreme Court justices. Carper apparently missed Mitch McConnell’s pledge to screw Obama at every turn so that Obama would get the blame if/when the economy doesn’t recover. (More on that later).  However, Pires’ incendiary charges have made clear, at least to me, that he is singularly unfit to hold public office. Unable or unwilling to demonstrate that he is a viable alternative, he has simply thrown shit at the wall. Some of it recycled shit. It’s even possible that some of it is true, but he has brought nothing new, just wild-eyed assertions. Plus, as a progressive who won’t vote for Carper, I’m not bothered in the least should Pires’ assertions that Carper may not finish out his term prove to be true. I’d rather have Markell or Denn naming a replacement than to have Pires ensconced in D. C. for six years. Didn’t have to be that way, Alex, it was just the path that you chose. You should have kept your real self hidden. You’re no more fit to hold office than Christine O’Donnell.

3. R’s Worried About Their Slate.

Well, wouldn’t you be worried if you were them? The R’s have a statewide slate that has raised no money, generated next to no enthusiasm, generated next to no volunteers, and, with the possible long-shot unlikely exception of Ben Mobley, has no shot at winning. And, unless I’ve missed it, there is next to no ground game being put in place by the R’s. This in no way means that the D’s are gonna sweep all the contested legislative races. Keep in mind that the D’s had huge edges in both houses going into 2012. There ain’t that much more fertile territory to plow. And also keep in mind that R’s largely dominate central and western Sussex County. But it does mean that they’ll have much tougher races in the 4th and 5th Senatorial Districts (Katz/Lavelle and Cloutier/Counihan) than they might have hoped six months ago. And there could well be a surprise or two in Kent and Sussex. Plus, it makes it that much more difficult for the rare R recruiting successes this year to pull out victories. This assertion is not a figment of my imagination. I somehow was invited to talk about the 2012 elections on a panel at the Riverfront Center last week, and there were several prominent R’s there. They were the ones talking about this and lamenting the current state of affairs. These are, to put it mildly, not Tea Party types, and they and their supporters have spent this election sitting on their wallets.

4. Best/Worst Radio Ads I’ve Heard.

“Ladies and gentlemen, direct from the AMTRAK Northeast Corridor, wearing the well-worn knee-pads, please welcome Tom Carper and John Carney–The Supplicants!” Gawd, those treacly tributes to bipartisanship are sickening. At least they probably saved some money by having the same idiot write and produce both ads. You know, there’s too much partisanship in Washington, but they’ve crossed the aisle so many times that they are, well, Republicans-lite.  No, they ‘get things done’. You know, like Alito and Roberts on the Supreme Court, Tom. One reason why they’ll never be an effective tag team–you don’t even need to pin them. They unilaterally surrender. Makes for bad rasslin’ and bad radio ads.

Man, the Rethug brand must really be toxic in Brandywine Hundred. Otherwise, why would the Vice-Chair of the Republican State Committee claim that he is an ‘independent voice’? He is the most partisan R legislator in Dover, he’s never met a microphone that he doesn’t use to make a partisan point, he’s certainly not independent of the pedophile-protecting/anti-choice wing of the Catholic Church. I don’t think you can find a single issue where he has declared his independence from Republican boilerplate or Papal infallibility. Yet, his radio ads make sure that the word ‘Republican’ is never mentioned. Greg Lavelle an independent? News to me. And to the Rethugs who prefer him and John Sigler locked and loaded together at all times.

The best radio ad, by far, that I’ve heard this cycle, is Tom Gordon‘s. I’m sure that fact-checkers might have a field day with it, but the ad features upbeat, even peppy, music, and an announcer seemingly struggling to cram all of Gordon’s (alleged) accomplishments into the limited space of the ad. If this ad is designed to make wayward D’s feel better about voting for Gordon, I think that it has succeeded.

That’s it for this week. What’d I miss, and whaddayathink?


Bad Triangulation Theatre Starring John Carney

Bumped up to get a wider, non-holiday weekend audience.–Delaware Dem.

WDEL did an interview with John Carney yesterday and they put a snippet of it up on their website. It is worth it to go over there to hear the whole thing. Our lone Representative in the House tries to have it both ways on the critique of Bain Capital and ends up looking pretty insensible in the end.

Here’s a rough transcript of Carney’s soundbite from WDEL:

The vast majority of jobs are created by small businesses, so while critiquing the approach of Governor Romney, we don’t want our constituents — sound like we are anti-business because you have to create conditions where businesses can be successful.

The WDEL piece ends with this:

Carney says the question voters should ask is whether rich investors or blue-collar workers reaped benefits from Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.

I’ve been thinking about this since I saw it this AM and I can’t quite figure out what he is trying to get to here. The choices are:

  1. John Carney thinks  that we really are that stupid.
  2. John Carney actually believes this stuff.

Seriously, the vast majority of small businesses are not private equity firms in the bustout business so that their investors can benefit.  And if the free market is actually working, it doesn’t need John Carney to create conditions where businesses can be successful.  In fact, the market is specifically damaged every time John Carney (and his colleagues to be fair) are providing subsidies and supports to businesses as a way to minimize business risk.  None of them have but the mushiest of reasons why we have to accept socialized business risk.

It doesn’t matter though.  Bain is a specific type of business (and not small worth a damn), and if you are paying attention to the President, he is specifically calling out the destructive tendencies of the Bains of the world, while their investors make tons of money and the workers at these busted out firms end up with the short end.  So if voters are asking themselves about who benefits from the Bain experience, you certainly are not going to have blue collar workers on the winning end.  That is something of the business model for Bain and the like, right?

If you are going to triangulate here, Representative Carney, you need to start with understanding the two points you will be triangulating from.  Defending Bain as a way to support small businesses is something of an insult to most small businesses and definitely an insult to Delaware voters.

DL Tracking Poll Results — Congressman John Carney (D) — Round 2

Last month, John Carney had a 56% approval rating and a 32% disapproval. Those were approval numbers that any politician would have happy with. This month, the results are much more mixed. Carney has a 46% approval rating and a 44% disapproval rating.

Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of Congressman John Carney (D)?

Approve — 29% (34%)
Disapprove — 25% (12%)
Strongly Disapprove — 19% (20%)
Strongly Approve — 17% (22%)
Undecided / Unsure / Meh — 10%

Total Votes: 112. Started: 3/23/12 (Prior Poll: 2/17/12)

Next up is a poll that I did not perform last month, because the subject is not really a “Delaware official up for election” anymore. But he is “Delaware’s own Joe Biden.”