Tag: Politics

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guest on Sunday’s “This Week” is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.

The roundtable guests are: Democratic strategist James Carville; Republican strategist Ana Navarro; Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens; and editor and publisher of The Nation and Washington Post columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieefer’s guests are: U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power; CBS medical adviser Dr. Jonathan LaPook; and Dr. William Schaffner, the chair on the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

His panel guests are: Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT); former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the Woodrow Wilson Center; Robert Kagan, the Brookings Institution; and Mike Morell, former CIA Deputy Director.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: The guests are: Adm. Michael Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Vali Nasr Dean, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; Michael Leiter, NBC News National Security Analyst and former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center; Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform; and Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

The roundtable guests are: John Stanton, Washington Bureau Chief, BuzzFeed; Amy Walter, National Editor, The Cook Political Report; Ramesh Ponnuru, Senior Editor, National Review; and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are: former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair;  Hall of Famer and former CBS commentator Shannon Sharpe; former NFL player Izell Reese; and USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan.

Her panel guests are Newt Gingrich; Donna Brazile; Marc Lamont Hill; and Tara Wall.

The leaders of 125 nations will meet on Tuesday at the United Nations for the largest summit on the climate since Copenhagen summit that ended in collapse in 2009.

Climate change is not a far-off problem. It is happening now and is having very real consequences on people’s lives. Climate change is disrupting national economies, costing us dearly today and even more tomorrow.  But there is a growing recognition that affordable, scalable solutions are available now that will enable us all to leapfrog to cleaner, more resilient economies.

The summit will be preceded by the People’s Climate March in New York City. The march is expected to draw over 100,000

The truth about our planet is horrifying, but the true leaders aren’t the ones at the UN – they’re in the streets

At exactly 1pm on Sunday, the streets of New York City are going to fill with the sound of clanging pots, marching bands, church bells and whatever other kinds of noisemakers that participants of the People’s Climate March decide to bring along.

It’s being called the “climate alarm”, and the general idea is that a whole lot of people are going to make the very loud point that climate change is a true emergency for humanity, the kind of threat that should cause us to stop what we are doing and get out of harm’s way.

Is it a stunt? Well, sure, all protests are. But the mere act of expressing our collective sense of climate urgency goes beyond symbolism. What is most terrifying about the threat of climate disruption is not the unending procession of scientific reports about rapidly melting ice sheets, crop failures and rising seas. It’s the combination of trying to absorb that information while watching our so-called leaders behave as if the global emergency is no immediate concern. As if every alarm in our collective house were not going off simultaneously.

Only when we urgently acknowledge that we are facing a genuine crisis will it become possible to enact the kinds of bold policies and mobilize the economic resources we need. Only then will the world have a chance to avert catastrophic warming.

In her new book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” Ms. Klein outlines the need for “a new economic model to address the ecological crisis.” She joined Amy Goodman and Juan González of Democracy Now! to discuss the radical action that will be needed,

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis,” Klein writes. “We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

Watch the livestream of the People’s Climate March on Sunday September 21 from 10:30am to 1:30pm ET via Democracy Now.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timme: Is Obama really going back to war with a worse legal rationale than Bush? He still won’t say

Whatever the administration’s tortured and torture architect-approved logic for combatting Isis, one thing is clear: the public isn’t allowed to see it

It was equal parts ironic and tragic watching US Secretary of State John Kerry testify before the Senate Foreign Relations committee this week, as he shamelessly made the case for a war without end against Isis. It was the same place he sat 43 years ago, as a young soldier, bravely and eloquently calling for an end to American fighting in Vietnam, his generation’s endless war – the same war that led to Congress passing the War Powers Resolution, the law the Obama administration has now decided it can completely disregard.

As with much of the White House’s secret and possibly illegal march back to Iraq and beyond, almost every aspect of Kerry’s testimony on Wednesday was riddled with holes. The Obama administration’s case for intervention begins and ends with the fantastical idea that it thinks it can use a law passed 13 years ago – before Isis even existed, and meant for the perpetrators of 9/11 – to start a war that White House officials freely admit will last for years, yet is aimed at a group that virtually all intelligence analysts agree is not an imminent threat to the United States.

Jess Zimmerman: The 1% has bought its own internet. What’s next? Words with Rich People?

If Internet Platinum Reserve is surprising, it’s only because we’ve been trying to fool ourselves that the web is a populist haven, over here at Poor People Online

In one of the best moments of the genius webcomic Achewood, occasional protagonist Ray – a Scottish Fold cat who is also a wealthy playboy – goes on eBay while high and impulsively types, in the search bar, WHAT’S THE BEST THING YOU GOT? The screen blinks, then lights up with the message “Welcome to eBay Platinum Reserve.” [..]

Proponents of net neutrality worry about this happening for real. Or at least they worry about a future in which a small handful of monopoly-happy telecoms are able to throttle access to any website that doesn’t make them money or provide lower-paying customers with slowed and restricted service. Net neutrality boosters want government regulation to dictate that all sites and customers get the same treatment, rather than splitting the web into “slow lanes” and “fast lanes” along financial lines. Internet pinkos don’t want rich people to have better internet.

Well, it’s too late. Rich people already have better internet. Mercifully, cable modems are fairly common these days – remember when the best you could afford was DSL? – so for now, the rich don’t necessarily get faster internet. But they do get Internet Platinum Reserve.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Richard (RJ) ESkow: Want to Save the Planet? Flood Wall Street

This is a critical week for the planet. A United Nations conference on the climate will be followed on Saturday by the People’s Climate March, which is expected to be the largest environmental march in history. But it would be a grave mistake, for the planet and for ourselves, to overlook another event that is to take place on Sunday. That’s when the Flood Wall Street rally will target the role of global capitalism in our environmental crisis.

The profit economy is a root cause — make that the root cause — of climate change.

Wall Street is, in a very real sense, the epicenter of our environmental crisis. To ignore that fact is to risk dooming our other climate efforts to failure, or to use them merely as palliatives for troubled consciences. There’s no other way to say this: Capitalism, as practiced on Wall Street today, is an existential threat to humanity.

Martin Kettle: Scotland votes no: the union has survived, but the questions for the left are profound

The immediate political question now suddenly moves to London: a new constitutional settlement needs to be on the table by the end of next month

Like the battle of Waterloo, the battle for Scotland was a damn close-run thing. The effects of Thursday’s no vote are enormous – though not as massive as the consequences of a yes would have been. [..]

But the battlefield is still full of resonant lessons. The win, though close, was decisive. It looks like a 54%-46% or thereabouts. That’s not as good as it looked like being a couple of months ago. But it’s a lot more decisive than the recent polls had hinted. Second, it was women who saved the union. In the polls, men were decisively in favour of yes. The yes campaign was in some sense a guy thing. Men wanted to make a break with the Scotland they inhabit. Women didn’t. Third, this was to a significant degree a class vote too. Richer Scotland stuck with the union – so no did very well in a lot of traditonal SNP areas. Poorer Scotland, Labour Scotland, slipped towards yes, handing Glasgow, Dundee and North Lanarkshire to the independence camp. Gordon Brown stopped the slippage from becoming a rout, perhaps, but the questions for Labour – and for left politics more broadly – are profound.

While Congress is holding hearings on whether or not President Barack Obama’s current plan to contain ISIS and assist so-called moderates of the rebel Syrian army, the CIA expressed its doubts on what the agency most likely perceives as an encroachment on their not so covert operations to train these un-vetted rebels that has been going on for a year in Jordan. That was reported earlier this week by Huffington Post‘s Ryan Grim and Sam Stein:

One Democratic member of Congress said that the CIA has made it clear that it doubts the possibility that the administration’s strategy could succeed.

“I have heard it expressed, outside of classified contexts, that what you heard from your intelligence sources is correct, because the CIA regards the effort as doomed to failure,” the congressman said in an email. “Specifically (again without referring to classified information), the CIA thinks that it is impossible to train and equip a force of pro-Western Syrian nationals that can fight and defeat Assad, al-Nusra and ISIS, regardless of whatever air support that force may receive.”

He added that, as the CIA sees it, the ramped-up backing of rebels is an expansion of a strategy that is already not working. “The CIA also believes that its previous assignment to accomplish this was basically a fool’s errand, and they are well aware of the fact that many of the arms that they provided ended up in the wrong hands,” the congressman said, echoing intelligence sources.

Probably for all the wrong reasons, the CIA is right. President Obama’s plan is not just doomed to failure but may well make matters worse.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Ann Cury, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani expressed his doubts about the strategy and condemned ISIS

“Are Americans afraid of giving casualties on the ground in Iraq? Are they afraid of their soldiers being killed in the fight they claim is against terrorism?” Rouhani said.

“If they want to use planes and if they want to use unmanned planes so that nobody is injured from the Americans, is it really possible to fight terrorism without any hardship, without any sacrifice? Is it possible to reach a big goal without that? In all regional and international issues, the victorious one is the one who is ready to do sacrifice.

“Maybe it is necessary for airstrikes in some conditions and some circumstances,” he added. “However, air strikes should take place with the permission of the people of that country and the government of that country.”  [..]

Asked about the extremists’ beheading of American James Foley and Steven Sotloff and Briton David Haines, Rouhani said ISIS’ actions are at odds with Islamic tenets.

“They want to kill humanity,” he said. “And from the viewpoint of the Islamic tenets and culture, killing an innocent people equals the killing of the whole humanity. And therefore, the killing and beheading of innocent people in fact is a matter of shame for them and it’s the matter of concern and sorrow for all the human and all the mankind.”

But he also took issue with the American-led coalition, saying members include nations that helped ISIS with weapons and training.

At emptywheel, Jim White, noticed what the MSNBC article failed to mention

Rouhani told the NBC that the US-led coalition against the ISIL group was not a serious movement and added that US had been present in the region since 2001 to fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan but it not only did not solved the terrorism problem but exacerbated the crisis.

Iraq’s new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has emphatically stated that foreign ground troops are not needed or wanted

Al-Abadi praised the U.S. aerial campaign targeting the militants who have overrun much of northern and western Iraq and carved out a proto-state spanning the Syria-Iraq border, saying it has helped efforts to roll back the Sunni extremists.

But he stressed that he sees no need for the U.S. or other nations to send troops into Iraq to help fight the Islamic State.

“Not only is it not necessary,” he said, “We don’t want them. We won’t allow them. Full stop.” [..]

The comments provided a sharp rebuttal to remarks a day earlier by the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee that American ground troops may be needed to battle Islamic State forces in the Middle East if President Barack Obama’s current strategy fails.

And the insanity will continue

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Eliot Ross: The referendum that reinvented Scotland

Even if Scots vote no,™ their politics have been transformed

Things move very quickly in politics, and old certainties can die suddenly. As a high school student in Edinburgh in the early 2000s, I was taught that the devolution of major government powers to a new Scottish parliament in 1999 was Tony Blair’s masterstroke. Scottish nationalism, I learned, no longer made sense. With devolution, the Scots got meaningful self-governance, while Blair’s “new” Labour Party could look forward to long periods of rule in Edinburgh and London.

This week’s independence referendum and the great surge of support for the yes campaign over the past year are exactly what Blair thought he had made impossible. [..]

An independent Scotland would be faced with great uncertainties, but the idea that continued union in the U.K. ensures a clear political future is hardly borne out by the U.K.’s volatile and uneven experience of postimperial statehood over the past 70 years. Just ask Blair. At one time he was certain he had settled the question of Scottish independence once and for all with devolution. Instead he turned out to have laid out the basis for a political earthquake.

David Cay Johnson: Tax cuts can do more harm than good

Their design is crucially important for predicting their effects

Tax cuts are the one guaranteed path to prosperity. Or so politicians have told Americans for so long that the claim has become a secular dogma.

But tax cuts can do more harm than good, a new report shows. It draws on decades of empirical evidence analyzed with standard economic principles used in business, academia and government.

What ultimately matters is the way a tax cut is structured and how it affects behavior. A well-designed tax cut can help increase future prosperity, but a poorly structured one can result in a meaner future with fewer jobs, less compensation and higher costs to society.

William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit Washington policy research house, and Andrew Samwick, a Dartmouth College professor, last week issued the report, “Effects of Income Tax Changes on Economic Growth.”

Gale said he expects emailed brickbats from those who have incorporated the tax cut dogma into their views without really understanding the issue.

“The idea that tax cuts raise growth is repeated so often it is taken like a form of gospel,” Gale told me. “We are not buying into that gospel” because it fails to consider their total effects.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Chelsea Manning: [How to make Isis fall on its own sword ]

Degrade and destroy? The west should try to disrupt the canny militants into self-destruction, because bombs will only backfire

The Islamic State (Isis) is without question a very brutal extremist group with origins in the insurgency of the United States occupation of Iraq. It has rapidly ascended to global attention by taking control of swaths of territory in western and northern Iraq, including Mosul and other major cities. [..]

I believe that Isis is fueled precisely by the operational and tactical successes of European and American military force that would be – and have been – used to defeat them. I believe that Isis strategically feeds off the mistakes and vulnerabilities of the very democratic western states they decry. The Islamic State’s center of gravity is, in many ways, the United States, the United Kingdom and those aligned with them in the region.

When it comes to regional insurgency with global implications, Isis leaders are canny strategists. It’s clear to me that they have a solid and complete understanding of the strengths and, more importantly, the weaknesses of the west. They know how we tick in America and Europe – and they know what pushes us toward intervention and overreach. This understanding is particularly clear considering the Islamic State’s astonishing success in recruiting numbers of Americans, Britons, Belgians, Danes and other Europeans in their call to arms.

Katrina vanden Huevel: Obama reneges on his foreign-policy promises

President Obama’s commitment to go into Iraq and Syria to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State, the brutal terrorist group that vows to carve a “caliphate” out of Iraq and Syria, should be seen for what it is: a capitulation to bellicose folly.

Obama was elected in no small part because he challenged the catastrophic “war of choice” in Iraq, and pledged to bring an end to U.S. entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Slowly, against the bluster and macho posturing of the opposition, he tried to introduce a modicum of common sense and prudence into our foreign policy. [..]

Now Obama has announced a “strategy” toward the Islamic State that rushes into a military adventure without sufficient thought of the consequences, and without building robust international support. Arguing that he doesn’t need congressional approval, he is taking us into a war we don’t need to fight.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dave Johnson: Corporate Courts — A Big Red Flag on ‘Trade’ Agreements

Think about everything you understood about our system of government here in the United States. We’re  governed under a document that starts with the words, “We the People.” Right? When We the People agree that something should done to make our lives better, it’s supposed to get done. Right?

You didn’t know it, but that whole system changed several years ago. Our government, in our name, signed a document that placed corporate profits above our own democracy. The “investor-state dispute settlements” chapter in NAFTA (and similar agreements) places corporate rights on above the rights of people and their governments. [..]

But wait, there’s more. The suits aren’t even heard in courts. They are settled by corporate-controlled tribunals set up by these trade agreements.

Trevor Timm: The billionaire, the NSA and the no-fly list: America’s ‘state secret’ obsession has gone too far

When lawsuits start hunting for the truth, the Obama administration shuts them down with one overreaching power and three words: just trust us

In lawsuits challenging NSA mass surveillance, torture and drone strikes on Americans in recent years, the US government has turned what was once a narrow legal privilege into an immunity trump card – a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for “matters of national security”. And now, despite publicly promising to restrict its use, attorney general Eric Holder is trying to expand the power even further.

In Monday’s New York Times, Matt Apuzzo wrote about a fascinating – if bizarre and publicly mysterious – court case between two private parties in which the US justice department has invoked the so-called state secrets privilege. A Greek shipping magnate has accused an advocacy group pushing for sanctions on Iran of lying about him, but the government argues that the case must be dismissed with hardly an explanation, citing only a “concerned federal agency” [..]

What’s truly revolting about this abuse of the state secrets privilege is that it used to be an issue Democrats ran against. President Obama said he would reform it in his 2008 campaign, and vice president Joe Biden co-sponsored a bill to do just that. All the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted for state secrets reform as well, explicitly citing NSA wiretapping and torture as things that should never be kept classified from the American people – that should always be able to face a challenge in court.

What have we heard since? Not a peep..

On Thursday, September 18, Scottish voters will decide if Scotland should secede from the United Kingdom. Polling shows that the vote is too close to call and the outcome is heavily dependent on workers turning out

The dramatic surge in support for the yes vote has made next week’s referendum on Scottish independence too close to call, prompting a panic across London’s political spectrum that has prompted offers of new political concessions to persuade want-away Scots to stay. But the secessionist impulse is being fueled by long-term economic changes that have left Scotland’s working class increasingly disenchanted with the economic policies of Britain’s major political parties.

Last Monday former Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a Scot, hurriedly announced that, if Scotland remains part of the union, it will get significant new financial powers as well as greater control over its welfare and benefits system. These reforms would be delivered, Brown said, on the basis of an accelerated legislative timetable. “A no vote on 18 September will not be an endpoint but the starting gun for action,” he said. “We are demanding a tight timetable with tough deadlines and streamlined procedures … The alternative to an irreversible separation is a more powerful Scottish parliament.”

The current Prime Minister David Cameron made dire warnings about the consequences of a slit with the UK:

In an emotional speech on his final visit north of the border before polling day, the prime minister warned that a yes vote would end the UK “for good, for ever” and would deprive the Scottish people of a shared currency and pooled pension arrangements.

In a seeming attempt to reach out to voters who might be tempted to support independence to free Scotland from the Tories, Cameron said that he would not be prime minister forever – but a break with the rest of the UK would be permanent.

Mr. Cameron got a little help from British ex-patriot, John Oliver, host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight.” Well, almost.

Over the course of the show’s main segment, Oliver looked at the rival political operations, including the “Better Together” campaign’s slogan, “No thanks.” As the host said, “‘No thanks’ is a violently British way to refuse something. That is just one step away from ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly.'”

Later, Oliver turned to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s feeble attempts to keep the United Kingdom united. “He embodies all of the things I hate most about England,” Oliver said of Cameron, “and I’m English!” Showing a particularly damning photo of Cameron at Oxford, he added, “That is the face of a man who fast-forwards through the servant parts of Downton Abbey.”

Finally, Oliver decided to make his case for Scotland staying with the UK using the kind of grand, sweeping, romantic gesture found in films like Love Actually. Surrounded by bagpipe players and Scotland’s inexplicable official animal, the unicorn, Oliver used written placards to plead, “Don’t go, Scotland!”

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: Obama’s legally dubious Isis campaign is just a way to continue perpetual war

The question isn’t whether this is war. It is. The question is how long until we’re clamouring for ground troops in Iraq again

In a speech that would make Dick Cheney proud, the president told us (and the Pentagon repeated) this week that we are at war with Islamic State (Isis) “in same way we are at war with al-Qaida and its affiliates” – a war that will go on indefinitely, is based on a strategy that’s been failing for over a decade and will never legally be called a war.

What Obama really did, however, was confirm for everyone what the late Hunter S Thompson recognized, shortly after 9/11, when he wrote, “We are At War now – with somebody – and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.” [..]

The president also announced that he wouldn’t be needing congressional approval for prolonged airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, ignoring both their constitutional obligations and his … and that we’d be funneling more weapons to a group of “moderate” fighters that hardly anyone believes is moderate nor particularly good at fighting, including Obama.

Legal scholars on the left and the right denounced the president’s unconstitutional decision to bypass Congress and authorize military action unilaterally by pinning it to the 13 year-old Authorization for Use of Military Force against al-Qaida – which expelled Isis months ago.

Rebecca Burns: Wall Street’s teetering new rental empire

The rise of rent-backed securities ensures we’ll have another crash

History may repeat itself, but in few places are its cycles so maddeningly short as on Wall Street, where the recent advent of rent-backed securities has whipped financiers into another feeding frenzy. The innovators of this hot new financial product have found a way to slice, dice and repackage debt tied to thousands of real-estate-owned (REO) homes – a process that may sound awfully familiar.

That’s because it is: Rent-backed securities are the direct descendants of the mortgage-backed securities that crashed the economy in 2008. This time, however, investors’ income streams are coming not from monthly payments on frequently predatory mortgages but from the rent checks of thousands of ordinary tenants in single-family homes.

When rent-backed securities premiered on the market in October 2013, the $479 million offering from the private equity giant Blackstone Group generated more demand from investors than the private equity firm could accommodate. Since then, Blackstone and several other firms specializing in the rental of single-family homes have sold more than $3 billion of these bonds. REO-to-rental securitization has been hailed as an exciting new asset class, with financial analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods estimating that it could swell into a nearly $1 trillion industry over the next six years.