Hillary Clinton and the Northern Strategy

[hedda_foil]

5. She bills herself a champion of Main Street over Wall Street, but she has been a lackey of Wall St "

This piece is SO on the money

She bills herself a champion of Main Street over Wall Street, but she has been a lackey of Wall Street her entire political life.

Candidate Clinton has put forward what she calls a bold plan to reform the excesses of Wall Street, including a tax on high-frequency trading. Just one problem: “her proposal is very narrowly targeted to one specific practice, in which a trading computer tells a marketplace that it’s going to make a large number of trades but then cancels them before they go through,” writes Alan Pyke at ThinkProgess. “All other forms of HFT would be free to continue as normal under the proposal.” Only a dupe would have expected otherwise. Clinton’s Wall Street record has been littered, in and out of the Senate, with such gems as refusing to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act (whose elimination contributed mightily to the crash of 2008 and our current Great Recession), rebuffing calls to break up big banks, and helping big banks screw their customers by making it ridiculously hard to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate crushing credit card debts. In fact, thanks to Senator Clinton and others, it’s easier for a bank to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate its debts than it is for you. Does it surprise you that four of her top five donors over the last 16 years are Wall Street firms? If so, count yourself among the duped. Are you shocked that among the truly unscrupulous tycoons she has taken cash from is one Donald Trump? The Don, in addition to giving big to her senate campaigns, gave between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Populist babble may burble off Clinton’s lips on the campaign trail, and Democrats may fall for it, but “[d]own on Wall Street they don’t believe it for a minute,” Politico’s William Cohen writes. What’s more, “the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president.” (Many are the reports that have said the same.) I don’t know what’s sadder—that Big Money is smarter than the average Dem, or that average Dems will be shocked when she chooses Wall Street over them if she lands in the Oval Office