David Dayen, writing in The American Prospect:
This is fantastic news. Anything that accelerates the split in the decades-long marriage between the alleged party of the people and Big Money should be celebrated. The transformation in policy that would ensue if Wall Street Democrats walk away from the party, freeing it from self-censorship and bad ideas, far outstrips whatever money they might raise for Democratic candidates.
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The most telling quote came from a hedge fund executive, who fretted that if Warren helped people discover that the Trump tax cuts only helped fatten corporate wallets, “Wall Street would not like the public thinking about that.” So their beef with “far left” Democrats is that they would tell too much truth about our broken tax code and the soaring inequality it fosters.
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That’s exactly the right attitude, which Sanders has backed up with his constant invocations of the old FDR line about the economic royalists, “I welcome their hatred.” And proudly rejecting the support of Wall Street isn’t just a populist pose; it’s a viable economic policy. Just about everything that has ailed the Democratic Party since the 1970s from a policy standpoint can be traced back to an ugly partnership with Wall Street money.
Post-Watergate reformers did not place themselves in opposition to financial power; their first inclination was to throw out the populist head of the House Banking Committee, Wright Patman, who had been fighting consolidation for decades. Patman’s pro-bank foes on the committee ensured his fate by allying with the Watergate babies. Later, as Brooks Jackson details in the seminal book Honest Graft, Democrats, led by chief fundraiser for the House campaign arm Tony Coelho, cozied up to Big Money to hang onto power during the Reagan revolution.
This wound up betraying just about every New Deal principle there was, and muddying the distinctions between the party and the Republicans. Seduced by an ardor for markets, New Democrats and the DLC pursued financial deregulation and spurred financialization in a host of policy arenas, from education to housing to retail. Large companies like Apple and Koch Industries are as much derivatives traders and hedgers as they are product makers and sellers.