Glass-Steagall Campaign Impacts Democratic Presidential Race

Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley began testing the waters for a potential presidential bid in 2016 on Feb. 28, by putting right up front regulating Wall Street and restoring FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall Bank Act which crushed Wall Street’s speculators. That plank was a pointed feature of his first two campaign stops, first in South Carolina, and then in New Hampshire. His next stop is Iowa.

O’Malley’s decision to take up Glass-Steagall as his banner, as Elizabeth Warren has, is a telling reflection of the rebellion underway in sectors of the Democratic Party against President Obama’s merciless defense of Wall Street. People are asking, as former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it in his March 3 column syndicated in numerous papers: “Will the Democratic Nominee for 2016 Take On the Moneyed Interests?” Reich named Glass-Steagall as the plank which should top the Democratic presidential agenda.

Two factors push a Maryland Democrat to get on this bandwagon. First, during O’Malley’s entire second term as governor, Glass-Steagall bills promoted by LaRouchePAC and EIR were in the Maryland legislature, with bipartisan backing there and from unions and other constituency organizations. A number of Maryland Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives took up sponsorship of the Glass-Steagall bills there (H.R.1429 and then H.R.129).

And then there was the massacre of Maryland Democrats in the November 2014 elections because they didn’t break with Obama.

O’Malley’s catch-phrase in both South Carolina, and his March 6 stop in Concord, New Hampshire, is that

“we would make a mistake as a party if we held ourselves out as becoming some kind of a version of Dodd-Frank Lite.”

He told 300 Democrats attending an annual “Issues Summit” in South Carolina on Feb. 28 that pushing for Wall Street regulation would be a major issue, if he ran.

“If a bank is too big to fail without harming the common good of our nation, then it’s too big and we must break it up before it breaks us.” Democrats have to “talk about reinvigorating and making more robust the regulation of Wall Street so that rank speculation and gambling with other people’s money does not once again wreck our economy and our common good.”

New Hampshire newspapers reported that O’Malley called reinstatement of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act “a very important issue that’s out there right now,” and told reporters that he favored its reinstatement.

The New Hampshire Union Leader reported that O’Malley cited Glass-Steagall as something that might distinguish him from other Democrats: