Hillary Rodham Clinton’s economic agenda targets companies that focus on short-term profits and high-speed trading instead of investing in workers. The Democratic presidential candidate’s finance operation is going after their executives for another purpose — donations. A day after proposing higher capital gains taxes on short-term investors, Clinton raised at least $450,000 Tuesday night at the Chicago home of Raj Fernando, a longtime donor. His firm, Chopper Trading, specializes in high-frequency transactions and was recently purchased by Chicago-based competitor DRW.
Clinton’s summertime fundraising circuit highlights a central tension of her campaign: how to encourage financial executives to open their wallets for her presidential effort even as she comes out with plans aimed at reining multimillion-dollar paychecks. Since her first presidential campaign in 2008, income inequality has become a bigger force in Democratic politics, with liberal voters clamoring for candidates who will take a sharply populist turn and enforce tough new regulations on Wall Street.
“Hypocrisy” is a term much beloved on the Left, where they accuse conservatives of it all the time. Their own, however, bothers them not in the slightest. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, knew that Obama didn’t mean when he said he was against gay marriage, or that he couldn’t unilaterally order amnesty for illegal aliens. Like partners in a fixed poker game, the Left sends signals to each other while they fleece the rubes. Who, by the way, are us.
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