Damn, she’s taking (some of) my advice! If she pushes this stuff in Obama’s face and the MSM lets the populist Hillary through (uh, here’s yesterday’s AP Obama press release ‘news’ on Hillary’s populist speech), we might actually have a Democratic nomination race on our hands, and it will be a left vs. right race as it should be. Three highlights from Hillary’s speech yesterday to Ohio GM workers:
Restore fairness to our tax code by making sure Wall Street investment managers never pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, and by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
Crack down on unscrupulous mortgage lenders to ensure that families are no longer lured into mortgages they can’t afford.
Enact a Fair Credit for Families Agenda to protect American families from abusive credit card practices like excessive fees and sudden rate hikes. . . . She will immediately impose a 30 percent cap on annual interest rates for credit cards and work toward a lower cap that is linked to a standard benchmark.
That last one is especially powerful anti-Obama populism, if Hillary reminds voters of this:
Obama voted against the [bankruptcy] bill, but Williams was pleased that he did side with The Bond Market Association position on a number of provisions. Most were minor technical matters, but he also opposed an important amendment, which was defeated, that would have capped credit-card interest rates at 30 percent. “He studied the issue,” Williams said. “Some assumed he would just go along with consumer advocates, but he voted with us on several points. He understood the issue. He wasn’t closed-minded. A lot of people found that very refreshing.”
And Obama hasn’t changed that position. Here is all of his ‘what needs to be done’ about credit cards his economic policy speech yesterday in Wisconsin:
A Credit Card Bill of Rights – Obama will institute a five-star rating system to inform consumers about the level of risk involved in every credit card and establish a Credit Card Bill of Rights that will ban unilateral changes to a credit card agreement; ban rate changes to debt that’s already incurred; and ban interest on fees.
Must be important to him, he’s sticking to his guns: nothing about capping interest rates.
From the second point I noted in her speech, it also looks like Hillary may be thinking of attacking Obama hard from the populist left — where the fuckin’ votes are! — on his ‘tepid’ response to the subprime loan crisis. Here’s an excellent article from The Nation on that:
John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are pledging substantial federal resources to stabilize the mortgage market and intervene on behalf of borrowers. Barack Obama’s proposal is tepid by comparison, short on aggressive government involvement and infused with conservative rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. . . .
. . . Clinton’s plan is weaker [than Edwards’] — a voluntary moratorium, a shorter freeze, less commitment to new regulations — but she has promised $30 billion in federal aid to help reeling homeowners and communities.
Only Obama has not called for a moratorium and interest-rate freeze. Though he has been a proponent of mortgage fraud legislation in the Senate, he has remained silent on further financial regulations. And . . . Obama’s foreclosure plan mostly avoids direct government spending in favor of a tax credit for homeowners, which amounts to about $500 on average, beyond which only certain borrowers would be eligible for help from an additional fund.
“One advantage to the tax credit is that there’s no moral hazard involved,” one of Obama’s economic advisers explains. . . . Obama has used similar language on the campaign trail. “Innocent homeowners,” he has promised, those “responsible” borrowers “facing foreclosure through no fault of their own,” would get help restructuring their loans. But no such luck for those “claiming income they didn’t have” or “lying to get mortgages.”
“There’s been less emphasis from the Obama campaign on the really dysfunctional role of the financial industry in the subprime mess,” says Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. “Edwards and Clinton talk much more about regulation of the financial industry going forward, and to the extent that blame is placed, they tend to place it on the lenders for steering people into loans they couldn’t afford.”
Looks like Hillary will take the populist road. This could get interesting. I assume the Obamans will answer with reminders that Bill Clinton wasn’t a populist, and that he and his wife share the same brain?
