Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders says that Hillary Clinton isn't truly interested in challenging the influence of billionaire Americans to address rising income inequality.
“It's not what she says, it's what she does,” Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist considering challenging Clinton for president in 2016, told Bloomberg reporters and editors in a meeting Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
“Based on her record,” Clinton isn't “prepared to take on the billionaire class,” Sanders said.
“The country belongs to all of us and not just the billionaire class,” he added. “Do I think that's Hillary Clinton's politics? No. No I don't.”
Following Clinton's official presidential campaign launch on Sunday, she promised to tackle the issue of economic inequality, even criticizing business executive pay and tax rates for hedge-fund managers during her first campaign event in Iowa.
"There's something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker," Clinton said in Iowa on Tuesday, reported The Huffington Post. "There's something wrong when American workers keep getting more productive, as they have, and as I just saw a few minutes ago is very possible because of education and skills training, but that productivity is not matched in their paychecks."
"We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all, even if that takes a constitutional amendment," Clinton said, ABC reported.
But one major Democratic donor on Wall Street told Politico in a new report that all that populism rhetoric is “just politics” stuff that needed to be said now in order to prevent attacks from the left. The fact is that Clinton has longstanding ties to Wall Street, receiving more than $7 million in donations from the securities and investment industry during the 2008 presidential election, according to the Center for Responsible Politics. Since then, she's earned millions of dollars by speaking at events across the country, some sponsored by investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.
Politico's WIlliam Cohan wrote on why Wall Street loves Clinton:
"While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry -among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America - consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she's someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism."
Some reports, including one from Salon, suggest that Clinton will likely stick to focusing on issues such as unions and working women, while leaving larger, perhaps more influential, issues untouched, which is exactly what Sanders fears.
"The American people want Secretary Clinton, all candidates, to talk about why the middle class continues to decline, why the rich get richer, why Wall Street continues to have unbelievable power over the American economy," Sanders said. "The American people not only want a serious debate on this campaign, they want candidates who will deal with the most important issue, and that is are we prepared to take on the billionaire class which has so much power over our economic and political life."
Sanders is expected to decide on a presidential bid by April 30.
