Editor’s Note: In the past week, a 2004 video from our NOW with Bill Moyers archive featuring an interview with then-Professor Elizabeth Warren talking about then-Sen. Hillary Clinton found new life on social media after Secretary Clinton recently challenged critics to name a time when her relationship with Wall Street banks influenced her policy decisions. The Warren/Clinton story is complicated. As this story continues to play out, Clinton is getting her share not only of detractors but defenders, including the post we present here.
This post first appeared at Mother Jones.
Hillary Clinton has received a lot of campaign money from the financial industry over the years, and after she left the State Department she gave several lucrative speeches to Goldman Sachs and other big banks. As Michael Hirsh puts it, this has given her a reputation for being “more than a little cozy” with Wall Street.
But is she? The truth is that I haven’t paid much attention to this question. In terms of the presidential campaign, it’s pretty obvious that Bernie Sanders is a lot tougher on the financial industry than she is. The details of their plans don’t really matter. Sanders has practically made a career out of attacking Wall Street. As president, he’d make financial regulation a top priority; he’d appoint tougher watchdogs; and he’d use the bully pulpit relentlessly to call out Wall Street’s sins.
Still, what about Clinton? How cozy with the financial industry is she? I asked about this on Twitter over the weekend, figuring that all the Bernie supporters would give me an earful. But no such luck. Mostly they just told me that she had taken Wall Street money and given Wall Street speeches. The only concrete criticism was one that Elizabeth Warren made in 2004: that Clinton had changed her view on the bankruptcy bill after she accepted lots of Wall Street money to get elected to the Senate.
But that didn’t really hold water. She opposed the bill in 1999 because she wanted alimony and child-support payments to take precedence over credit card companies during bankruptcy proceeding. The bill passed anyway, but Bill Clinton vetoed it. In 2001, she brokered a compromise that gave priority to alimony and child support, and then voted for the bill. It didn’t pass at the time, and in 2005 her compromise was removed from the bill. She said then that she opposed it.
This is classic Hillary. Once George Bush was president, she had no way of stopping the bill—so she worked hard behind the scenes to get what she could in return for her vote. Love it or hate it, this is the kind of pragmatic politics she practices. But there’s no hypocrisy here; no change of heart thanks to Wall Street money (she supported the bill when it protected women and children and opposed it when it didn’t); and no real support for the financial industry.
What else? Clinton says she gave several speeches in 2007 warning about the dangers of derivatives and subprime loans, and introduced proposals for stronger financial oversight. Apparently that’s true. I’m not aware if she took a stand on the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, but I don’t think this was responsible for the financial crisis and wouldn’t hold it against her either way. (And it was supported by nearly the entire Democratic Party at the time.) The CFMA did make the financial crisis worse, but Bernie Sanders himself supported it. Clinton voted for Sarbanes-Oxley, but everyone else did too.
Clinton has consistently supported increasing the minimum wage — though not to $15. She supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act. She supports higher taxes on the wealthy. She supported repeal of the carried interest loophole in 2007. The Boston Globe, after an extensive review of her voting record in the Senate, summed up her attitude with this quote from a lobbyist: “The financial sector viewed her as neutral. Not helpful, but also not harmful.” Citizens for Tax Justice gives her a generally favorable grade on financial issues.
The word “cozy” does a whole lot of heavy lifting in stories about Hillary Clinton and Wall Street. But what does it mean? Does she have an actual record of supporting Wall Street interests? By ordinary standards, is her current campaign proposal for financial regulation a strong one? (I’ve been impressed by her rhetorical emphasis on shadow banking, but it’s not clear just how far her proposals go in real life.) Has she protected financial interests against the Bernie Sanders of the world?
I think it’s safe to say that Clinton has hardly been a scourge of the banking industry. Until recently, her main interests were elsewhere. But if there’s a strong case to be made for “coziness,” I’ve failed to find it. Anyone care to point me in the right direction?
