Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg has hired a former Goldman Sachs vice president and Google executive to run his policy shop, his campaign announced Thursday. Sonal Shah, now executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University, will be the campaign’s national policy director. Shah worked at Goldman Sachs from 2004 to 2007 as a vice president, according to her LinkedIn page. She then worked for Google as its head of global development initiatives from 2007 to 2009.

...In a statement, Buttigieg’s national press secretary, Chris Meagher, said that while at Goldman, Shah “wasn’t involved in any deals nor did she benefit from any deals.”

“She developed and managed Goldman Sachs’ environmental strategy. She trained bankers to ask environmental questions, managed the grants to non-profits, and worked with their real estate team on how to build more green buildings,” he said.

...In early 2017, Shah cheered President Donald Trump’s hiring of Goldman executive Dina Powell, first as an economic assistant and later as deputy national security adviser.

“Great choice. Dina Powell will be great. Trump hires another executive from Goldman Sachs,” Shah wrote in a Twitter post.

https://twitter.com/SonalRShah/status/819936090245177344

More at https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/18/buttigieg-hires-former-goldman-sachs-executive-as-policy-director.html

Earlier this week, the Edmund Burke Foundation, a new conservative think tank, held its debut conference in Washington. I spent two days poking in and out of it, listening to everything from University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax rant about immigrants to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) call for an end to elites who prize their own economic gains ahead of that of the American middle class. One subject — or should I say name — that came up not infrequently was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass).

And, no, not all of the mentions were negative.

Warren’s overarching theme is that American capitalism, in its current form, runs roughshod over Americans workers, families and communities. That resonates in certain conservative circles, where people like to view themselves as defenders of traditional values. During the conference, one attendee asked Tucker Carlson, who spoke at a Monday keynote, if Warren could be a potential ally. That’s likely because last month, Carlson declared Warren’s “Plan for Economic Patriotism,” which argues for a government investment in green energies and an economic policy to encourage American exports, to be something that “sounds like Donald Trump at his best.” Carlson, if you are wondering, said no but added that he considered Warren’s book “The Two-Income Trap” one of the best books on economics he’s ever read.

...Warren’s plan would crack down on a host of practices that make private equity strip mining as lucrative as it is, eliminating many of the economic incentives for it. She would demand private equity companies share in the risks of their purchase, by making them partially responsible for the debt they would otherwise load on the hapless companies they control. If one of the firms they own makes a decision that harms consumers, courts could find them liable, something that is not true now. Warren’s bill would also ban the purchased company from paying dividends to investors for two years past the leveraged buyout, cutting into immediate profits. Should the company land in bankruptcy court, she would double the amount due to employees in owed wages and severance that is placed before the interests of the bondholders, something that would make a filing less lucrative to private equity. And ever the personal finance guru, she’s even onto how company’s skip out on their obligations to consumers possessing their gift cards. She’s demanding they receive more protection in bankruptcy court than they currently do, too. And while she’s at it, she’s demanding an end to the carried interest loophole, the tax dodge beloved by hedge fund managers and private equity investors alike.

None of this is likely to go anywhere in the current environment. Republicans control the Senate, and it’s not even clear how many Democrats will support it. The lure of private equity is, alas, bipartisan. But what Warren’s bill does do is highlight a certain hypocrisy. If you are a Democrat, it makes it harder for you to claim you are a progressive because you support raising the minimum wage and decriminalizing illegally entering the country if you cannot address the blight that is private equity. And it calls people such as Tucker Carlson and other attendees at the Burke Foundation event on their own stated values. If you want to help American families, you need to attack all the financial practices that are harming them, not just the ones that Trump thinks are damaging. At least one person at that conference got the exact nature of Warren’s threat to the right wing. Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, another speaker at the event, joined Carlson on his nightly Fox News television show Monday night. “I’m most scared by Elizabeth Warren,” he told Carlson when asked about the Democratic presidential field. “I think she’s the one who’s actually talking about the economy.”

More at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/18/warrens-latest-plan-highlights-economic-hypocrisy-both-sides/?utm_term=.b8690f95bf23

When Elizabeth Warren came to Washington — not the first time, as a bankruptcy expert, or the second time, to oversee the bank bailout during the Great Recession — but the third time, when she was elected to the United States Senate, she wanted to solve a growing problem: student debt.

During her campaign, against Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Warren had talked a lot about student loan debt and making college more affordable. She had run television ads about it, saying young people were “left drowning in debt to get an education.” So, as her Senate office began to staff up, the boss wanted to roll out a policy proposal to bring down the cost of student loans. Her staff did what they always did when working for Warren: They looked for the best existing plans and the best data to show her the root causes of the problem. What they found was lacking.

There were plenty of policy experts on K-12 education, but relatively few were focused on higher education, and even fewer were focused on student loans. The number of ideas floating around to fix the problem was minuscule.

Policy development in Washington normally runs through think tanks. Think tanks need to raise money for policy programs. But since there was no money devoted to developing a policy to relieve student loan debt, there were relatively few experts in Washington on the issue at the time. So Warren hired a top academic expert to develop student loan debt relief policy on her staff.

In the seven years since, Warren has become the most active politician in America when it comes to investigating, transforming and eliminating student debt. As the problem has grown, her proposed solutions grew. She started by fighting to lower interest rates and pushing the Obama administration to investigate for-profit colleges with high default rates, and she slowly reached the point where it was time to push for the near-total elimination of student debt. This is how Warren has pushed the boundaries of progressive policy since coming to Washington. Instead of relying on the traditional D.C. think tank world, she made her office into her very own think tank. This vast, over-qualified policy team then consulted with a kitchen cabinet of legal academics, economists and other scholars outside the Beltway. Her goal all along has been to craft and sell policies to help solve one overarching problem: inequality in American society.

More at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elizabeth-warren-has-a-plan-for-that_n_5d279e9ee4b0060b11e9a22e

-On the Friday that Warren called for impeachment proceedings, she raised almost $94,000 in a single day from donations greater than $200. The next day, she pulled in more than $105,000.

-April 22: $114,000 -- Warren releases major student loan debt cancellation plan and participates in CNN town hall

-May 28 and 29: $116,000 and $109,000 -- Reproductive rights was already making national headlines, and Warren had already released a plan to protect access to abortion earlier in the month. On May 28, she tweeted about the potential closure of Missouri's last abortion clinic

-May 31: $106,000 -- The day before, Warren appeared on "The View," where she unveiled a universal childcare calculator

-June 26: $157,000 -- Warren made a last-minute decision to visit the Homestead migrant detention facility in South Florida, hours before she took the stage at the first Democratic debate.

-June 27: $166,000 -- Day after her debate appearance

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/elizabeth-warren-2nd-quarter-fundraising-takeaways/index.html

When Robert Mueller comes to Congress next week to field questions — "answer" is too optimistic — about what he learned in his investigation of Russia and Donald Trump, it’ll be his and our last chance to get it right; to inform the American people of the enormity of Trump’s offenses and our sacred duty to impeach him. If he doesn’t want to, or can’t be made to, we may all say, in unison with Mitch McConnell, “case closed” as all hope of impeachment will have died.

...We’re arrived here for two reasons. One is that Mueller, without telling anyone, took it upon himself to limit the scope of his mandate in a way no one foresaw or even imagined. Having accepted the idea — enshrined not in the Constitution or a law or a Supreme Court ruling, but only in a department memo — that no president may be indicted while in office, not even under seal for later prosecution, Mueller decided it would be unfair to the president even to mention that he’d committed multiple felonies. Till Mueller said it, no one, not even Bill Barr, had thought it.

The second reason is that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic political and media establishments bungled their jobs from the first. That’s true not only of impeachment but of all matters pertaining to corruption. The media doesn’t know how to cover it; Congress doesn’t know how to investigate it; neither grasps its centrality to our politics or to the sad condition of our middle class, our democracy and our country.

...It is a poor tactician who thinks only of tactics. The job of Pelosi and her caucus now is to focus on duty. If they do, I think they’ll be rewarded politically, but they must put that consideration aside, because other considerations so outweigh it. First is the magnitude of the crimes. Altogether, the crimes of Johnson, Nixon and Clinton don’t equal Trump’s. He’s the most corrupt president in history. He plotted with a foreign power to steal an election, which meets most Americans’ definition of treason. He obstructs justice, which violates his oath of office. His incessant lies shred democracy’s very fabric. Loyalty to country, the rule of law and the truth aren’t just "norms." They are core values. We must defend them.

Second is our need for a public record of Trump’s crimes. When Pelosi says she’d rather see Trump jailed, she’s kicking the same can Mueller kicked to her. At least Mueller knew to whom he kicked it. For all Pelosi knows, a President Biden may decide bipartisanship means letting bygones be bygones. In an earlier column, I talked about the price we paid for our failure to investigate the lies that led to the Iraq War and the 2008 global financial meltdown. Deep down, we know if we fail to impeach, we may never know what happened, and that a democracy that can’t look itself in the eye may not be long for this world. Most important is that these crimes are all ongoing. This isn’t Whitewater, a look back at a failed real estate deal. Our democracy is under siege. While Trump and Putin laugh out loud, our next election is being stolen right out from under us. If you say we can stop it without resort to impeachment, you must say how.

More at https://www.salon.com/2019/07/16/last-chance-for-impeachment-next-week-robert-mueller-will-shape-history-but-how/