Sen. Sanders and Sec. Clinton have turned their backs on the prison industry.
In September Senator Bernie Sanders introduced “a bill that would ban government contracts with private prisons.”
Under “pressure from civil rights and immigrant justice groups, who launched online petitions and interrupted Clinton’s public events, demanding she cut ties with the private prison industry,” she has done the right thing. Her campaign “will no longer accept donations from federally registered lobbyists or PACs for private prison companies.” Going one better she has also decided to “donate the large amount she has already received from these sources to a yet-to-be-named charity."
Both of our candidates have acted admirably on this important issue.
On another important issue, we have heard no end of Senator Sanders’ promises to break up the Wall Street banks. We also know that those same institutions do not figure among his donors.
But up until last night, Clinton assured us that she was with the banks and the banks assured us that they were with her.
Then, Stephen Colbert challenged her on her support for Wall Street.
Colbert retorted, “You put forth a plan for Wall Street and Wall Street embraced it—is that a good sign?”
Clinton singled out New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's approval of her plan before adding, “Look at what happened in '08, we had a big insurance company that had to be bailed out, we had an investment bank, Lehman Brothers, that failed. We have to look at the whole financial system and my plan does that.”
Her stated refusal to bail out the big banks—to let them fail, if a 2008 scenario were to repeat itself—was a crystallization, a hardening, of her economic position. “First of all, under Dodd-Frank, that is what will happen because we now have stress tests and I’m going to impose a risk fee on the big bank if they engage in risky behavior,” she said. “But they have to know, their shareholders have to know that, yes, they will fail. And if they're too big to fail, then, under my plan and others that have been proposed, they may have to be broken up.”
I don’t think the Wall Street bankers expected her to go there, but she has, and she deserves our approval for doing so. But, at the same time, she should put their money where her mouth is. Her top ten donors are Wall Street banks and Wall Street law firms. Surely, these donors did not expect her to throw them under the bus after all the support she has given them over the years. Why, as recently as the October 13 Democratic debate, she even said “I represented Wall Street when I was Senator from New York.” Those donors counted on her to continue to represent them, but now she has turned her back on them.
Should she just keep their money on the principle that a sucker is born every minute? Or, should she do the honorable thing and return it to them? They bought her in good faith, but now she is reneging on the deal.