At the heart of much of the debate between the Clinton and Sanders camps is the role of asset wealth in a democracy: can it be used for good in a way that allows a rising tide to theoretically lift all boats even if wages stagnate, or is the mere fact that so much wealth is sloshing around in the hands of so few an intrinsic threat to democracy? Much of “neoliberal” Democratic centrism is built around the idea that one can use market forces to achieve fundamentally progressive aims without upsetting the corporate apple cart: if wages are stagnant, boost home prices to create wealth; if people can’t make ends meet from month to month, democratize debt through credit cards; if schools are underfunded, privatize them; if healthcare is unaffordable, compel Americans into private insurance through a mix of subsidy and regulation.

It’s not so much that these solutions don’t appear to work in the short term, or that they’re not in some ways better than the previous status quo: they do and they are, at least for a while. The problem is that they sort of sweep the problem under the rug, substituting a bigger problem down the road for the one they’re trying to solve. You can’t lower the price of foreign goods via trade deals enough to make up for the jobs lost. You can’t goose home prices beyond the ability of people to afford them without creating an economy-destroying bubble. You can’t quell desperation by providing credit, without ending up with a society in which the majority are in debt and few have the money to retire over time. And so on.

This fact has become increasingly clear to Americans of all stripes, but especially to 1) downwardly mobile blue-collar whites who used to think that they prospered over minorities by dint of their hard work and industriousness, and now flock to Trump in reaction to their betrayal by Reaganomics; and 2) younger Americans who realize that the deck is entirely stacked against them due to outrageous student loans, low-paying or contract-labor jobs, unaffordable housing costs, etc. Older, more established white collar types don’t tend to feel the bite of the broken economy in the same way, and therefore find themselves more attracted to incremental tweaks to the system.

The release of the Panama Papers is likely to add fuel to the argument that concentrated asset wealth is itself the problem. Even if no American names are found in the documents (because the firm didn’t want them and because it’s so easy to set up domestic ones), it’s more than obvious that not only is there too much sitting wealth in too few hands, those hands use legal loopholes or outright illegal behavior to hide their wealth from partial redistribution to those who actually make the economy work.

There aren’t incremental tweaks to address this problem: either tax havens will be eliminated or they won’t be. Either inequality will be reduced or it won’t. Politicians could make tax haven nations international pariahs and use trade agreements to punish them, but they choose not to because the international finance system is set up mostly to benefit the wealthy. Either the giant finance companies that enable and profit from this system are shrunk down to size, or the system will continue to operate the way it does.

Regardless of whether Sanders or Clinton prevails in the nomination contest (and Clinton almost certainly will), people in American and around the world have lost faith in philanthrocapitalism, the power of asset wealth to trickle down to the wage earners, and the benevolence of economic elites and the institutions that serve them. The Panama Papers will only hasten that trend and radicalize the public further toward disempowering the politicians and institutions that have served the comfortable asset classes so well at the expense of everyone else.

That’s the key difference between today and the 1990s. Back in the 1990s, it was credible to imagine that one could hand the keys of the economy over to the financial sector, and that everyone would grow richer together even if the rich grew fantastically wealthy and inequality increased. That argument was untrue then, of course, but at least it had not yet so obviously failed the test of trial and error. People know better now, which is why Reaganomics has run its course even in the Republican Party, and why an undisciplined septuagenarian socialist from Vermont will end up nearly tied in delegates with the most formidable, polished non-incumbent presidential frontrunner in modern American history. With the Panama Papers and related documents, the evidence continues to grow that bigger changes to the economic system are necessary than those on offer from the post-1980s center left.

It would appear that the gloves are indeed off in the Democratic primary. As so often happens when candidates start to sharpen their knives, the surrogates are the first to test various lines of attack. Sanders surrogates have foolishly brought up the Clinton email brouhaha, for instance, and now it appears that at least one Clinton surrogate is now red-baiting Sanders.

In the middle of an intensifying fight with Hillary Clinton over the Vermont senator and native Brooklynite’s suggestion that she is unqualified to be president, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn congressman and Clinton supporter, released a statement on Thursday calling Mr. Sanders a “gun-loving socialist with zero foreign policy experience.”

The problem here is that the voters who hate socialism are the ones who are already in Clinton’s corner. The ones she will need to win over to quell Sanders’ momentum or whose support she will need to secure after winning the nomination don’t necessarily find the word “socialist” to be much of an insult. In fact, a majority of Democrats say that socialism has been benign force:

Nearly six-in-ten Democratic primary voters believe socialism has a ‘positive impact on society,’ according to polling conducted this month for the right-leaning issue advocacy group American Action Network and provided to POLITICO.

Perhaps more importantly, socialism is very popular among Democratic voters under 45:

And among people 45 and under — a group that has helped power Sanders’ primary performances — the ideology is preferred to capitalism by a margin of 46 percent to 19 percent.

Nor is that the first poll to show the positive view of the word socialism. a YouGov poll posted similar results. Some of this is directly due to the embrace of the term by the Sanders campaign, but in fact 18-29 year old voters have been shown to favor socialism even going back to 2011.

As to the charge that Sanders is a “new Democrat,” that line may have some effect on the long-time Democratic rank-and-file. But again, older registered Democrats are largely in the Clinton camp already. Younger voters of all political stripes have a low regard for registering to vote with political parties, and often consider themselves independents even if their actual voting habits are highly partisan. And the charge that Sanders is a recent Democrat will obviously fall flat with actual independents of all ages, who have also swung heavily to Sanders even as Clinton has dominated among registered Dems.

Beyond the direct electoral impact of these charges, they are also bad for the long-term health of the Democratic Party. The nominal frontrunner should not be pivoting to center by insulting the dearly-held ideology of much of the party’s base and the very voters it will need at the margins to come to the polls in November. Nor should it under any circumstance be insulting newcomers to the party from the left who might have felt the Democratic Party was too corporate or centrist before, but with Sanders’ campaign now feel they might have a legitimate ideological home as a Democrat.

It might be that the Clinton camp is turning to these attacks out of frustration, or it might be just an undisciplined surrogate spouting off. The most troubling implication would be that Clinton might be losing hold of some of her core Democratic supporters and looking to bring them back into the fold.

In any case, Clinton can easily win the nomination without resorting to red-baiting. It’s unnecessary and counterproductive both to her own campaign, and to the party’s long-term interests.

The negative reviews of and cascading events from Bernie Sanders’ less-than-deft Q&A; with the New York Daily News earlier this week continue. But there is one additional passage from that interview that deserves, but has largely escaped, notice (emphasis mine):

Alright, I believe that in the midst of the kinds of crises that we face with a disappearing middle class and massive levels of income and wealth inequality, the only major country on earth not guarantee to healthcare to all people, only major country not to provide paid family and medical leave, it is time to get beyond establishment politics. So to put your question in maybe a simpler way, is she a candidate of the establishment? The answer is, of course she is.

This is an astonishing thing for Sanders to say for a couple of reasons. First because, as he surely knows, it was the “establishment” Bill Clinton who, as one of his first acts as president in 1993, signed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) after it had twice been vetoed by his predecessor. Second (and maybe Sanders doesn’t know this; few do), having signed the FMLA providing up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to workers to care for a newborn or a sick family member, Clinton, with the active help of his wife, became the first president to use federal power to provide paid leave to American workers.

I know this because I wrote the speech in which he unveiled the policies. It was a commencement address delivered on May 23, 1999 at Grambling State University, an historically black college in norther Louisiana that boasts, among other things, one of the best marching bands in the country. In the speech, Clinton announce two executive actions. First, federal workers would be allowed to use the sick leave they’d earned to take time off to care for other sick family members. Second, and potentially more important, states would be allowed to let public and private sector workers who have paid into the state’s federally regulated unemployment insurance systems to collect payments from those systems while they’re on leave caring for a newborn or a newly adopted child. Having attended the meetings where these policies were hashed out, I can assure you that they were a joint East Wing/West Wing initiative. The main person behind them was Nicole Rabner, who was the First Lady’s senior domestic policy adviser as well as a special assistant to the president.

The first policy (paid leave for federal workers) is still in place today. The second (allowing states to tap their unemployment insurance systems for paid leave) was overturned by George W. Bush, who deemed it a harmful imposition on businesses. But four states (California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Washington) that have separate Temporary Disability Systems, which are not federally regulated, used those systems to create basically the same voluntary family leave programs the Clintons were trying to incentivize. A major study of California’s, the largest and longest running paid leave program, found that it improved children’s health outcomes without measurably harming business productivity.

So the “establishment” politician Hillary Clinton can rightly claim a share of the credit for the paid leave programs that exist in the United States. They’re far from universal, but they’re real, up-and-running programs that seem to be working as advertised. And the reason they’re not more wide spread is not “establishment politics”—they are in fact the result of establishment politics—but Republican resistance.

Both Clinton and Sanders sponsored bills in the Senate to expand family leave that didn’t pass, and each has put forward plans to do so if they’re elected president (though the plans differ in how they’re financed). So both are, for progressives, on the “right side” of the issue. But only one of them has actually accomplished anything on this, and it isn’t Bernie Sanders.

* A couple of weeks ago I suggested that, as we headed into a group of “closed” primaries, we would add a discussion about open vs closed primaries to the ones already underway about superdelegates and caucuses. We’re especially likely to hear about that from Sanders supporters because it is their candidate who will be impacted the most. Emily Atkin is the first I’ve seen to weigh in with an article titled: New York’s Upcoming Primary Is ‘Closed Shut’ To Certain Voters.

More than 3 million people — about 27 percent of the state’s voters — were registered outside the Republican and Democratic parties as of April. In a presidential campaign marked by popular non-establishment candidates and high independent voter turnout, those voters could swing the primary results significantly.

* I’m not sure this qualifies as a “fun” fact, but it sure is one worth pointing out.

FUN FACT: Americans United for Life have named Louisiana the most pro-life state for 6 years. It has the 3rd highest infant mortality rate.

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) April 7, 2016

* Senator Elizabeth Warren has been busy lately. As Martin pointed out earlier today, she wrote a blistering editorial in the Boston Globe about Senate Republicans obstructing President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. But in a fascinating pairing, she co-authored an article in Huffington Post with Sen. Cory Booker lauding the Obama administration’s new rule that raises the standards for investment advisors. The article itself didn’t break much new ground. But this photo of the two senators with Labor Secretary Tom Perez packs quite the political punch.

* I’m assuming that this is exactly the kind of thing Vice President Joe Biden was talking about when he said that Obamacare was a BFD.

* Finally, the folks of Greensboro, NC are the latest to feel the effects of Republicans in their state passing a law about “bathroom and shower management.” Here is a statement released today by Bruce Springsteen.

As you, my fans, know I’m scheduled to play in Greensboro, North Carolina this Sunday. As we also know, North Carolina has just passed HB2, which the media are referring to as the “bathroom” law. HB2 — known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act — dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use. Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden. To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress. Right now, there are many groups, businesses, and individuals in North Carolina working to oppose and overcome these negative developments. Taking all of this into account, I feel that this is a time for me and the band to show solidarity for those freedom fighters. As a result, and with deepest apologies to our dedicated fans in Greensboro, we have canceled our show scheduled for Sunday, April 10th. Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them. It is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.

As The Boss says, “We Take Care of Our Own.”

As I have noted previously, President Obama has used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to preserve over 260 million acres of land and water as national monuments - more than any previous president. The stunning vista in the photograph above comes from the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, which was designated in March 2013. I have had the good fortune to visit this area on several occasions, and it is truly a remarkable place.

The monument includes an assortment of geographical attractions. The most prominent is the Rio Grande Gorge. The gorge is the result of a continental rift where two plates are separating at an extremely slow pace. This part of the Rio Grande has numerous hot springs and some class 5 rapids at the “Taos Box”. The gorge is home to bighorn sheep, river otters, beaver, ringtail, porcupine, bear, cougar, and many other species. The petroglyphs created by early Native Americans can be found on the rocks adjacent to the river. In addition to the Rio Grande Gorge, the monument includes Ute Mountain and San Antonio Mountain, both extinct volcanoes. A smaller gorge follows the Rio San Antonio to the west of the Rio Grande. The monument also includes open plains where elk and pronghorn antelope can be seen.

Preserving these natural wonders is what is often considered when they are designated as national monuments. Keeping them available for the public to visit and enjoy is also part of goal. But in what might be called a win/win/win, the Small Business Majority just released a report on how these newly designated national monuments are providing a boost to the local economies.

This study examines the economic impacts associated with visitation to 10 national monuments designated by an Obama Administration executive order. The report found the combined natural and cultural national monuments have a total economic impact of $156 million per year on the local economies surrounding the monuments, including direct and secondary impacts. Economic activity generated by national monument visitation contributes $58 million in labor income per year in the local communities surrounding the national monuments.

Maintaining public access is what provides opportunities for small businesses. Here is what the owner of Taos Fly Fishing Shop said about that:

I’ve been involved with the Rio Grande monument campaign for a few years on a volunteer basis. Now that it has been designated, we have seen a small increase in business. The vast majority of our guide business happens on forest service or BLM land. The thought of losing access to those is very troubling as it would certainly put us out of business.

I’m grateful that one of my favorite places on the planet will be preserved for future generations to enjoy. And it’s nice to know that the Taos Fly Fishing Shop is benefiting as well.

Not that I think it will really help, but I’m grateful to Sen. Elizabeth Warren for tearing into her Republican colleagues in the pages of the Boston Globe. Her conclusion is excellent:

For seven years, through artificial debt ceiling crises, deliberate government shutdowns, and intentional confirmation blockades, Senate Republicans have acted as though the election and reelection of Obama relieved them of any responsibility to do their jobs. Senate Republicans embraced the idea that government shouldn’t work at all unless it works only for themselves and their friends. The campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the next logical outgrowth of the same attitude — if you can’t get what you want, just ignore the obligations of governing, then divert attention and responsibility by wallowing in a toxic stew of attacks on Muslims, women, Latinos, and each other.

If Senate Republicans don’t like being forced to pick between a bullet and poison, then here’s some advice: Stand up to extremists in the Senate bent on sabotaging our government whenever things don’t go their way. Respect the oath you took to uphold and defend the Constitution. Show some courage and put that oath ahead of party politics. Do your job — and start by considering the president’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

You should really read the whole thing. If she hadn’t become a senator, Warren would have made a kick-ass blogger.

Here in Pennsylvania, you cannot participate in the primaries unless you are registered as either a Democrat or Republican, and this provides an incentive for people to ‘join’ a party even if they’d really rather not. In recent years, the percentage of independents on the voting rolls has been climbing. Naturally, with a contested primary in both parties approaching on April 26th, party switching is currently high. In fact, it’s at an historic high, with about half of switchers joining up for the GOP, a third changing to get a chance to choose between Clinton and Sanders, and the rest dropping a major party to become unaffiliated or signing up with a minor party.

So, in the short term, the movement is away from being independent, but that’s an artificial and temporary boost that simply wouldn’t happen if this state held open primaries. People are joining the two major parties just so they can have a say in who will be our next president. The longer term trend has been against party affiliation, and this will almost definitely be the trend going forward, once these primaries have concluded.

“What you’re seeing in those (suburban Philadelphia) counties is very much in line with what you’re seeing nationally,” said Chris Borick, director of Muhlenberg College’s Institute of Public Opinion. “Polls show voters are more likely than at any time in modern history to not want to affiliate themselves with either of the two major political parties.”

Now, you might be interested in Pennsylvania’s primary system because you want to know how it might advantage or disadvantage the candidates. For example, it hurts Bernie Sanders that the deadline for changing parties has passed because he does very well with independents and, if they haven’t already registered as Democrats, they can’t vote for him. I’ve met several young adults who are in this situation, and they’re not happy about it. They’re ‘Feeling the Bern,’ but they’re also lost votes.

This is not why I am bringing up this topic, however. I want to talk about a different disconnect between the system as it exists and the people’s expectations for how things ought to be in a sensible and fair world.

What people don’t really get is the idea of delegating their decision-making to someone else. But that’s what Pennsylvania voters really do, to a very large degree:

The arcane rules governing the [Republican] nominating process mean that in Pennsylvania, a populous state that all three remaining candidates are targeting, the winner will automatically receive only 14 of the state’s 71 total delegates. The other delegates — 54 of whom are elected on the primary ballot in congressional districts, plus three RNC members — will be unbound.

“Even if you stood up and said, ‘I’m for Governor John Kasich’ and your district duly elected you based on your word, you can go to the convention and say, ‘Nope, I changed my mind,’ ” [Ed] Brookover [a senior adviser to Trump] said.

Phil English, a past delegate from Pennsylvania and a former congressman, is among the 162 Republicans running to become delegates. He said he considers himself “a free agent” and is open to nominating someone not currently campaigning, such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

“I intend to listen to people in my community, look at how they vote in the beauty contest, and then make my own assessment of what would be the strongest ticket for the Republican Party,” English said.

Is there really anything wrong with this?

I am sure it strikes most people as grossly unfair, if not outright corrupt. How could their vote not be binding? What’s the point of even voting?

And, in a country where people are increasingly disassociating themselves from party politics, it seems less sensible and just than ever for party insiders to have this kind of control and power over who will stand for the presidency.

But delegates are really just like our elected representatives in Congress. Our senators and congressmen are elected by us, but we don’t control their votes once they get to Washington DC. They might promise to vote against a free trade agreement and then be persuaded to support it once they have the opportunity to sit in hearings, question witnesses, introduce and pass amendments that satisfy their concerns, or just get corrupted by big money and lobbyists. We vote for people to represent us, and if we don’t like how we’re represented, we get to vote against them when they stand for reelection. That’s our system.

Delegates to the party conventions are also our representatives, and in states like Pennsylvania, we elect them directly. They may be pledged to vote for Trump or they may not be pledged to anyone. When they get to the convention, some of them will be designated by the whole state delegation to serve on committees where they will craft the platform and set forth the rules that will govern the nomination. We’re electing these people to do these jobs for us, and there’s nothing wrong with that. At least in theory, the only people voting for these delegates will be members of either the Republican or the Democratic Party, and they have a right to expect that members of their party will craft the platform, not independents who have no commitment or skin in the game.

This is the way the system works, but it’s not how people think the system works, nor is it how they think it ought to work. But maybe it’s precisely how it ought to work.

If people realized that they’re really electing members of their community to represent their interests at a party convention, then maybe there would be some vetting of the delegates and some real competition and debate about who will be sent to serve. If people realized that you ought to belong to a party if you hope to have a say in who that party nominates, maybe they would get involved in local politics rather than treating our elections as a spectator sport.

What irks people, I think, is how the two-party system limits our choices. Nobody really complains when Green Party members pick their nominee without their say, but it makes them angry to think that the Democratic or Republican Party might do the exact same thing. Of course, in a lot of states, the parties let non-members vote, which muddies the waters and delegitimizes the idea that these are political parties at all.

Finally, think about how these contests are covered by the media. They don’t explain the system very well at all, although I think they’re getting a little better with each new presidential cycle. Think about what it means that Trump can win every delegate in Florida by getting one more vote than the guy in second place, but can get fewer delegates than Cruz in Louisiana despite getting more votes. Why did they split votes proprotionately in one state, give a big bonus for winning in another, make another winner-take-all, and have another bind only 14 of the 71 available delegates? There absolutely no sense of one-person one-vote in that. But people think their vote should be treated that way.

What people ought to think is that their decision is less about which candidate they support than which member of their community they trust to represent them at the convention. What they ought to be taught by the media is how they can influence who will be their representative at the convention. Is their time best spent knocking doors, casting a vote on primary or caucus day, or in showing up at their county convention to cast a vote there?

Ideally, we’d have a system where numerous parties could field viable and well-funded candidates, and only party members would have a say in who runs on their party’s ticket. That will never be the case, though, because of our first-past-the-post plurality-wins system. Instead, what we have is a system that is more of a trial by fire than a democratic process.

And within the system we have, which can be tweaked but not fundamentally changed, wouldn’t it be better if people understood its mechanisms and didn’t have false expectations about how it works or how it should work?

In a general election, the principle of one-person one-vote is vitally important, but that principle doesn’t apply to parties picking their nominees, nor should it. If you want to be an independent, you really shouldn’t complain about what some party you don’t even belong to wants to do. If you want to have a real say, you should do the things that will give you some say, not just sit around bitching that people win nominations in a way that displeases you.

It’s not corrupt that committed party members tend to be the people who run to be delegates, nor that committed party members have a preference for candidates who support their party, work to make it stronger, and generally share its priorities and goals.

If you want a revolution, you have to do it on the ground within the party system, and you have to know how it works.

But don’t feel too badly, even Donald Trump is just figuring out that you don’t win a nomination just by getting the most votes.

Due to the capital requirements in the Dodd-Frank bill, we’ve seen some of the bigger financial institutions start to downsize - specifically GE and MetLife. There is some expectation that others will follow. Here is how Fed Chair Janet Yellen described that:

“We’re beginning to see discussions that these capital charges are sufficiently large it’s causing those firms to think seriously about whether or not they should spin off some of their enterprises to reduce their systemic footprint,” Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen told the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday. “And frankly, that’s exactly what we want to see happen.”

But as Matt Yglesias points out - the Obama administration seems to be working another angle on this. It doesn’t have as much to do with shrinking individual financial institutions so much as it does with reducing the overall size of the entire sector. To get a look at the big picture, he points to two new rules recently released by the administration and a third one that is on the way.

First of all is the crackdown on corporate inversions. These are vehicles to avoid corporate income taxes by buying a company that is headquartered in another country. As Yglesias points out, stopping them does more than raise additional revenue for the federal government.

Thomson-Reuters estimates that $1.3 billion in fees have been paid to investment banks for work on tax inversions since 2011, amounting to a bit more than 5 percent of the overall merger and acquisition market. All that is now set to vanish, according to the Wall Street Journal’s John Carney, who notes that beyond direct fee collection, major Wall Street banks are also primed to lose because “if inversion deals dry up, fees earned from underwriting bonds and bank loans connected to them will do the same.”

Second is the crackdown on investment advisors - who will now be required to offer advice that is in the best interests of their clients rather than line their own pockets with fees. The White House Council of Economic Advisors expect that this will save investors $17 billion a year.

Finally, the administration has been working for several years on a rule that is aimed at preventing American banks from doing business with the kind of shell companies that have been the focus of revelations in the Panama Papers.

What Yglesias noticed in all of these efforts is that they are aimed at “shrinking the financial sector as a whole by cracking down on many of its sources of revenues.” But it is even more than that. Beyond reducing the size of the sector, it is the type of activity that is being targeted.

All three new rules shrink the financial sector by cutting down on lucrative activities that have nothing to do with finance’s core social purpose of channeling funds to economically useful activities.

In the March/April/May 2015 edition of the Washington Monthly, Daniel Carpenter wrote a prescient article that took issue with Thomas Piketty’s singular focus on raising taxes as a way to combat income inequality. He suggested that a real solution must also include stronger financial regulation. When Yglesias suggests that these new rules are focused on “channeling funds to economically useful activities,” he is reinforcing that point.

On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders often says that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. That is a crowd-pleasing slogan in this post-Great Recession era. But it overstates the case. What these regulations from the Obama administration are doing is cutting off activities that might not have been criminally fraudulent, but have grown the sector by engaging in the business of lining their own pockets without any public benefit.

None of this fits nicely on a bumper sticker and doesn’t provide Democrats with a slogan to juice up their supporter’s anger. But they address very real problems with the benefit of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater in ways that could potentially harm the economy. In other words, they are quintessentially Obama.

When it comes to specifics, the world is complicated and there are choices you have to make. The trajectory of progress comes in fits and starts and where you’re going is balanced by what is and where you’ve been. Progress in a democracy is never instantaneous and it’s always partial.

…It’s like steering an ocean liner and making a 2 degree turn so that 10 years from now we’re suddenly in a very different place. You can’t turn 50 degrees all at once because that’s not how societies - especially democracies - work. As long as we’re turning in the right direction and we’re making progress, government is working like its supposed to.

Earlier this week, a group of global news organizations published stories based on millions of leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm that reveal how some of the world’s most wealthy and politically powerful people, from Vladimir Putin to Jackie Chan, used offshore bank accounts to hide their wealth and avoid taxes. These revelations have now become an issue in the Democratic primaries. Bernie Sanders and his allies are alleging that a free trade deal with Panama he opposed but Congress approved and Obama signed in 2011 is partly responsible for the Wild West financial shenanigans in that country. The Obama administration and its allies in Congress counter that Sanders couldn’t be more wrong because, as a condition of signing the trade pact, U.S. negotiators required Panama to sign a separate financial transparency treaty with the United State that they had hitherto resisted.

One important piece of evidence suggesting that the Sanders side may be wrong on this is that very few Americans seem to appear on the lists. Indeed, since the lists were revealed a number of follow up stories have appeared in the media attempting to explain this anomaly. One theory is that America states like Delaware provide sufficient pseudo tax havens so that the demand just isn’t there. Another is that more American names will be revealed as reporters dig further into the data. Yet another, offered by Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View, is that since most of names on the list are of people living in unstable kleptocracies the data dump is actually “not so much an indictment of global capitalism as an indictment of countries that have weak institutions and a lot of corruption.”

One person who knows this terrain is my friend William Wechsler. Will was the point person combating money laundering in the Clinton Treasury Department and later oversaw counternarcotics and special operations in the Obama Pentagon. He’s now a senior fellow at the Center of American Progress. I sent him an email soliciting his views. Here, with his permission, is what he wrote back:

1. There’s still a lot of time for American names to come out.

2. To the degree they don’t, one explanation is that U.S. regulations and law enforcement are among the strongest on these subjects. At the end of the Clinton Administration we put out an advisory on Panama specifically. It was withdrawn early in the Bush Administration after Panama passed a law. But it’s still been a good place for money launders — see last year’s State INCSR report on Panama here.

3. Another factor that is specific to Americans is that we have a relatively unusual tax system in that for U.S. citizens worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where they reside. Every other developed country that I’m familiar with taxes their citizens only on income that they earn domestically. So if you want to evade taxes in these other countries you just have to have some way of showing that your income was earned abroad. But if you want to evade taxes in the U.S. you have to somehow show that you didn’t earn the money at all. Obviously, it’s much easier to do the former than the latter. Indeed, I suspect that activity constituted much of the work of this Panamanian law firm. If that’s the case then they really wouldn’t have been marketing much to Americans.

So, what the lack of many American names in the Panama Papers might mean—and it probably is too early to know for sure—is that the United States has this part of its financial house more in order than we might have feared. And it looks like more cleanup efforts are on the way. A few days ago, the Obama Treasury Department announced that it is on the verge of releasing new rules that will require banks, including foreign banks with U.S. branches, to find out the identities of the actual human beings who own shell companies. If done right—and if the next president doesn’t undue it—that rule could put a big crimp in the use of such shell companies by the rich to hide taxable income and criminals to cloak ill-gotten gains.

* In his Tilting at Windmills column for the current edition of the Washington Monthly, Ben Wallace-Wells imagines what will go in the oppo researcher’s trash can during a Clinton/Trump contest.

One irony of the present campaign is that what might be the most buttoned-up political operation in history, Hillary Clinton’s, must now be busily preparing to oppose the most xenophobic, vulgar, and freewheeling candidate in modern memory. Whole teams of ex-Rhodes Scholars and promising Yale 2Ls are carefully highlighting old New York Post articles and busily assembling dossiers. The material they discard must be amazing.

That’s the teaser. He’s got some great examples.

* Here’s a headline you wouldn’t have seen during the Bush administration: Justice Department Sues to Block Halliburton’s Acquisition of Baker Hughes.

The Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today seeking to block Halliburton Company’s proposed acquisition of Baker Hughes Inc., alleging that the transaction threatens to eliminate competition, raise prices and reduce innovation in the oilfield services industry.

* Tom Randall writes: Wind and Solar are Crushing Fossil Fuels. If you like charts, you’ll want to click on that link because he has lots of them. His conclusion strikes me as really bad news for the Koch brothers:

Oil and gas woes are driven less by renewables than by a mismatch of too much supply and too little demand. But with renewable energy expanding at record rates and with more efficient cars—including all-electric vehicles—siphoning off oil profits at the margins, the fossil-fuel insolvency zone is only going to get more crowded, according to BNEF. Natural gas will still be needed for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, but even that will change as utility-scale batteries grow cheaper.

The best minds in energy keep underestimating what solar and wind can do. Since 2000, the International Energy Agency has raised its long-term solar forecast 14 times and its wind forecast five times. Every time global wind power doubles, there’s a 19 percent drop in cost, according to BNEF, and every time solar power doubles, costs fall 24 percent.

* Recently Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, issued this warning to the Clinton campaign: “Don’t destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions to become president of the United States.” Rebecca Traister responds:

It was a small comment, in every sense. A throwaway bit of nastiness coming from a campaign manager in the late stages of a long and hotly contested primary battle. But the line, which overtly cast Clinton’s political ambition as a destructive force and framed her famous drive and tenacity as unappealing, malevolent traits, played on long-standing assumptions about how ambition — a quality that is required for powerful men and admired in them — looks far less attractive on their female counterparts, and especially on their female competitors.

* Years ago when I taught parenting classes, I used to counsel against making rules you can’t enforce (like who your kids hang out with at school). Samantha Michaels says that is not something Republicans in North Carolina considered when they passed a law saying that transgender people must use bathrooms that correspond to the gender listed on their birth certificate.

Republican state Rep. Dan Bishop, a co-sponsor of the legislation, did not respond to requests for comment. But he has said he never intended for the legislation to lead to bathroom policing. “There are no enforcement provisions or penalties in HB2. Its purpose is to restore common sense bathroom and shower management policy in public buildings, not to pick out people to punish,” he wrote in a statement to WBTV.

Yes, you read that right. The party that loves the word “freedom” just passed a law about bathroom and shower management.

* Finally, regular readers here will understand why I liked this one so much.

Here is an interesting take on what it would mean to start a political revolution in this country:

If a president wanted to launch a radical transformation of the country, he would start it in the Civil Rights Division.

For some background, the Civil Rights Division is part of the Department of Justice that was formed by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to enforce federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability, religion, and national origin. You might remember that it was when President Bill Clinton nominated Lani Guinier to head this division that the Republicans threw a bit of a hissy fit over her prior writings about voting rights. That eventually led to the nomination and confirmation of Deval Patrick - who went on to be the Governor of Massachusetts.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, this is how Joseph Rich, former chief of the voting rights section, described what happened.

Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

It has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.

That is why, since the early days of the Obama administration, when many on the left were focused only on whether or not DOJ was prosecuting Wall Street or members of the Bush/Cheney administration, I kept a pretty close watch on what was happening in the Civil Rights Division. It was initially headed by Tom Perez. When he moved on to become Secretary of Labor, President Obama nominated Debo Adegbile, but Republicans refused to consider him. Since then, the acting director has been Vanita Gupta.

While too many liberals have ignored what has been happening in this division, there is one group that has been zeroing in on it…the radical right folks at PJ Media - which is where the above quote came from. I noticed this back in 2011 when they ran an article documenting the progressive bonafides of the people being hired in the Civil Rights Division. Of course their hair was on fire about it all. But what they reported demonstrated that this administration was hiring some of the best and brightest progressive minds to carry on this important work.

In the more recent article, they are specifically reporting on people who have been hired to work in the voting rights section since 2011. If you take a look, you’ll find people who have worked for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the ACLU, the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Common Cause, the Century Foundation, the New Organizing Institute, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the Advancement Project. In other words, the voting rights section of the Civil Rights Division at DOJ is currently staffed by people with experience defending and championing the cause of civil rights. That’s one of the ways that you “launch a radical transformation of the country.”

P.S. This story is also a great example of why elections matter!

Greg Sargent talked to Democratic pollster Geoff Garin about the two most likely Republican nominees. Garin, who works for Clinton’s Super PAC Priorities USA, had a lot to say about Cruz.

“Cruz would be the most extreme right wing nominee in modern American history,” Garin told me. “He is deeply out of sync with a large majority of voters on social issues. His role in shutting down the government is anathema to most Americans. If Republicans nominate Cruz, they concede any claim to the center whatsoever.”

Garin cited Cruz’s opposition to Roe v. Wade and his desire to prosecute Planned Parenthood over the sting videos (Trump has actually defended the group’s role in providing health services to women) as well as Cruz’s vow to continue fighting to reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling of a constitutional right to gay marriage.

“The fact that he wants to defund and prosecute Planned Parenthood puts him at odds with voters in a general election and with women voters in particular,” Garin said. “His desire to roll back the clock on marriage equality will be a deal breaker with a generation of voters.”

It’s easy to forget how hard-right Cruz is on social issues, but he’s so far out on that limb that he’d have to have something awfully big to compensate for it.

The problem is, he doesn’t have anything.

Garin allowed that Cruz would have some advantages over Trump, particularly in the temperament department. “Trump’s liabilities relate in part to the sense of risk voters feel about having him as commander in chief,” Garin said. “More and more people are coming to think of Trump as a know-nothing. Cruz’s intellect and knowledge are not his problems.”

But Garin also suggested that Cruz would have liabilities that Trump might not — chiefly, that Trump, for all of his crazy ideas, does convey a sense that he cares about the economic plight of struggling Americans and possesses some economic know-how. Cruz’s instincts and interests seem more bound up with social and constitutional conservatism, and with battling whatever symbol of big government overreach (or Washington betrayal) comes along to activate his base at any given moment, than with how to recast economic conservatism for an era of anxiety over stagnating wages and inequality. Garin argued that Cruz would struggle to appeal to the middle on economic issues.

Cruz might be modestly more convincing as an economic populist than Mitt Romney, but Goldman Sachs loaned him the money for his campaign and they pay his mortgage. I’m just not seeing it.

“Trump has some credibility with voters in talking about the economy,” Garin said. “Cruz brings nothing to the table other than prepackaged ideology.”

I also don’t think we should discount just how repellent Cruz is as a personality. Generally speaking (and Nixon excepted), the sunnier personality usually wins these elections. I don’t think Bernie or Hillary are rays of sunshine, but they win that contest easily when put up against Truculent Ted.

The Republican coalition is commonly thought of as a three-legged stool. One leg is made up of social conservatives who are animated by matters of human sexuality and reproduction, as well as (obviously) anything touching on religion in public life or education. Another leg is made up of people who are concerned with national defense, either as a budgetary priority or as part of jingoistic national-greatness patriotism. The third leg comes from business interests, both Main Street and Wall Street.

I’d actually add a fourth. The fourth leg is conservative media dominance, particularly the FOX News channel and talk radio, but also their ability to use one voice across all platforms to push narratives favorable to their side.

Now, it’s harder to kick over a four-legged stool than a three-legged one, and that’s why the media component of this is so important. I’ve noted several times that the unity and cohesiveness of the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer has come apart as right-wing media outlets have divided themselves into pro- and anti-Trump organizations. They have not been able to agree on what hymn to sing for a while now, and many of them have lost the credibility they’d need to be persuasively pro-Trump or pro-Cruz in the general election.

Essentially, you can say that this fourth leg of the stool has been sawed off, and they’ll do little better than some kind of duct tape solution for repairing it for the autumn contest.

To see how Trump is doing with the national defense component, look no further than the vociferous opposition of neoconservatives to his campaign. While Trump does his best to whip up the jingoistic national-greatness nationalism of the people, his cluelessness and recklessness on foreign policy is so extreme that he’d lose the vote of a big swath of traditionally reliable Republicans. Cruz would do a better job of holding them in line.

The social conservatives have been driving the full-fledged revolt against the Republican Establishment, mainly because they seem to have finally wised up and realized that the promises they’ve been told for forty years were never meant to be taken seriously. They aren’t going to bolt to the Democrats, but they’ll probably give up on the political process for the rest of the year if Merrick Garland is confirmed and the balance of the Court is lost to them for the foreseeable future.

The Establishment will mobilize them to stop Garland and to vote for the Republicans, and then after the Republicans lose the presidential election, the same Establishment will quickly confirm Garland without much of a fight. Whether they’ll do it in the lame duck or shortly after the new president is sworn in is an interesting question. The important thing, though, is that the Republicans cannot afford to see this leg of the stool collapse prematurely or the resulting depressed turnout will kill them in congressional races.

But, it’s actually the business community that they’re clearly losing. Wall Street has already concluded that Hillary Clinton will be the next president and they can live with that.

More than 70 percent of respondents to a recent Citigroup poll of institutional clients viewed the former secretary of state, first lady and New York senator as the likely 45th president. Just over 10 percent give Donald Trump the nod, while fellow Republican John Kasich is a few points behind. Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Ted Cruz barely register. (The poll was taken before Sanders and Cruz scored big primary wins Tuesday in Wisconsin.)

…Wall Street-related firms are Clinton’s biggest contributor group, giving her just over $21 million of the total $159 million she has raised during her campaign, according to OpenSecrets.

“An awful lot of investors view her as the devil they know as opposed to the devil they don’t know,” said Greg Valliere, chief global strategist at Horizon Investments and widely recognized as one of the leading experts on how what happens in Washington affects Wall Street. “It’s a true cliche: The market doesn’t like uncertainty.”

…Investors, though, seem to be spending more time figuring out what impact a Clinton victory will produce [than figuring out who will win the election].

“The markets are going to be looking for signs of (Trump) mellowing. Does he turn down the bombast?” Valliere said. “But Hillary is still the favorite. … I think the markets could live with her. That’s a major reason why we haven’t seen market instability right now.”

The bottom line is that the financial elite are reconciled to a Clinton presidency and they’re planning for it. They’d prefer to vote for Ronald Reagan, but the best candidate on offer is Hillary. So, this leg of the stool is weak, and it’s also the leg with the most money and the leg that owns most of the media.

It looks a little like termites have been at work on the Republican coalition.

The business sector is Ready for Hillary. The neoconservatives and realists of the Republican Party are ready to bolt to her. The social conservatives are in full-revolt, and being held in line by Merrick Garland’s (very temporary) hostage situation. Once the Supreme Court battle is lost (however long that takes) the social conservatives will see that their forty-year battle is lost. They won’t be nearly as engaged without the encouragement of hope.

And the media is an unexpected problem for the Republicans because the right-wing outlets are not able to amplify a single message and the corporate media aren’t going to take their side this time around.

When we look at this four-legged stool, what do we have left?

This is how a major party loses its major party status, and it’s also how a major party loses a landslide election.

I wrote a whole series of articles last year about how then-Speaker John Boehner should make a deal with the Democrats, including giving them some committee chairs, in order to create a more rational governing coalition in the House of Representatives. In order to run the House, he needed mostly Democratic votes to pass appropriations bills and keep the government operating, so it made more sense to make this arrangement formal. It would stabilize his speakership by removing the risk of a coup, and the Democrats would make that deal in exchange for avoiding a more difficult Speaker and getting a real say in how the money they always had to spend was allocated.

The point was to highlight what the real governing coalition in the House was at that time, because the coalition that passes the spending bills is the actual parliamentary majority that matters. And, since the Republicans could not pass spending bills on their own, they had already collapsed as a governing party.

This was a canary in a coal mine for me, and it’s one reason why I was an early and bullish predictor that the Republican Party would come apart at the seams in this presidential election, offering more of a potential for a landslide election than most people then believed possible.

There are a lot of Democrats who look at this and say to themselves, “Well, gee, it’s not all that exciting to see neoconservatives and Wall Street executives and corporate media moguls rallying to our likely nominee.”

I recognize the potential problems for anyone with a progressive agenda, but this is what a realignment looks like. And the truth is, sheer numbers do more to promote a progressive agenda than purity. Rahm Emanuel handed President Obama a big congressional majority filled with very conservative Democrats, and they got more done than any Democratic Congress since Lyndon Johnson was in office. After most of those conservative Democrats were wiped out in 2010, the Democratic Party membership became much more cohesive and much more progressive, but they accomplished absolutely nothing.

I know it’s not simple. We’re talking about a lot of swinging parts, some of which might clock you right upside the head if you don’t keep your head on a swivel. But I’m trying to get you to swivel your head away from things like horserace polls and favorability numbers, because the Republican stool could be little more than sawdust soon.

The big discussion in the Democratic presidential primary today is about Bernie Sanders’ remarks last night that Hillary Clinton is not qualified to be president. As this thing gets spun by the candidates, pundits, campaign staffers and surrogates, it has the potential to lose touch with what has/hasn’t actually been said. So let’s ground ourselves in the facts.

It all started with Clinton’s appearance on Morning Joe yesterday. Here is the entire segment. Her response to the Sanders interview with NYDN goes from about 1:20 to 3:40.

Notice that at least three times, Scarborough directly asked Clinton whether or not Sanders is “qualified” to be president. But she consistently refused to answer the question on those grounds. That interview led to articles like this one in the Washington Post: Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Wednesday questioned whether her rival in the Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), is qualified to be president.

Perhaps responding to media reports rather than what Clinton actually said, here is Sanders at a rally last night:

Sanders use of “quote/unquote” certainly failed to capture what Clinton actually said.

Of course, this kind of exchange is nothing new in American politics. It is very common for candidates and campaigns to spin their opponents in the worst possible light in order to score political points. But it is also incumbent on all of us to weed through the exaggerations and base our conclusions on the facts. That’s why I think that watching these two videos of the candidates themselves is important.

Beyond that, there are some substantial issues that the candidates are raising about each other that need to be addressed beyond barbs about the word “qualified.” The NYDN interview raised some troubling questions about how well Sanders has thought through a lot of the issues he would face as president. And he has certainly made a point of questioning the role that money has played in Clinton’s position on the issues.

In the end, a challenge to Clinton’s qualifications to be president is perhaps more damaging to Sanders’ credibility than it is to hers. So perhaps he would do well to address the problem posed by his own interview rather than simply launch a rather Rovian attack on her.