Dean Baker:  Elizabeth Warren Should Stay in the Senate

[eridani]

https://www.thenation.com/article/elizabeth-warren-should-stay-in-the-senate/

 Perhaps most importantly, the agenda calls for a financial-transaction tax (FTT). A robust financial-transaction tax, like the one put forward by Representative Keith Ellison or the one being developed by the European Union, would take more than $100 billion annually out of the pockets of Wall Street by reducing the volume of transactions. This is a great policy—it makes the financial sector more efficient—but is disastrous for Wall Street types who would see their millions and billions slipping away. These people would love to prevent a real FTT from being put into place. Without Warren in the Senate, that task would be made immeasurably easier.

Warren has also pushed for serious prosecutions of Wall Street criminals. We put kids in jail for passing bad checks or stealing an old car. How can it not be a comparable crime for bankers to steal hundreds of millions or even billions by defrauding the public?

 Warren’s agenda is not Clinton’s agenda. Does anyone think that Hillary Clinton expects Wall Street to look fundamentally different at the end of a Clinton administration? Does she think that JPMorgan Chase should be downsized and broken up so that its current structure will not be recognizable in 2025? Does Clinton expect Wall Street to be doing half the trading volume in 2025 that it does today, so that the high-rollers will have to look to the productive economy to make big bucks? Does she think that some of her campaign’s biggest contributors will be in the jail cell next to Bernie Madoff?