NEW YORK, NY — The grassroots liberal organization Democracy For America, panned Hillary Clinton’s economic speech Friday. Accusing Clinton of appeasing Wall Street insiders who support her campaign, DFA is not impressed with Clinton’s attempt to “appeal to Wall Street and the Warren wing of the Democratic Party” through what DFA calls a “Wall Street front- group” otherwise known as the Third Way.
“When Jonathan Cowan and anyone else from the Wall Street-funded, corporate mouthpiece Third Way is praising your position, you should be deeply skeptical that you’re putting forward anything close to the Wall Street reforms the American people want, need, or should be willing to accept,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America in an email statement.
Chamberlain went further, “Working to end short-termism on Wall Street will definitely help working families in important ways. But let’s be really clear: The Democratic Party doesn’t want, and the American people don’t need, another Democratic President who tip-toes around Wall Street’s insatiable greed, makes corporate shills like Third Way happy, or portrays common sense, time-tested solutions to ‘Too Big to Fail’ like Glass-Steagall as too simplistic.”
He added, “If Secretary Clinton wants to earn the enthusiastic support of grassroots progressives that means standing up, staking out genuinely bold positions on income inequality, and aggressively taking on the powerful, greed-driven institutions that have dominated the Democratic Party and held back the prosperity of the American people for far too long. And today’s speech hits those notes in some ways, but fails to do so in others.”
Clinton’s economic speech was also criticized by a former official from her husband’s administration. Leonard Burman, director of the non-partisan think tank the Tax Policy Center and a former senior tax economist in President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department told Reuters his general impression of her plan is “deep skepticism.”
Clinton proposed to hike the capital gain tax rate on wealthier individuals as well as those who keep their stock investments in the market for a short period of time.
“The profits earned by the sale of stock and other assets to promote and reward far sighted investments–the current definition of a long term full length period of just one year is woefully in adequate,” she said, adding that she wants to hike the capital gains tax rate and end “quarterly capitalism.”