Name: Jack Conway: Break Up the Big Banks - Shadowproof
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Jack Conway: Break Up the Big Banks - Shadowproof

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The Senate election in Kentucky offers a pretty stark choice – hardcore glibertarian Rand Paul, or mainstream Democrat Jack Conway. Conway, the state’s Attorney General, sat down with FDL News while at Netroots Nation, and I was impressed with his ability to describe common-sense issues in populist terms, and his insight on people’s anger with the current state of the economy. Notably, he supported breaking up the nation’s biggest banks and using the tools of the FTC and the Justice Department’s anti-trust division to restore competition to Wall Street and fix the economy.Conway and Paul are locked in a , and his internal polling, provided to FDL News, shows an even rosier picture (as it usually does). With leaners, Conway leads Paul in the horse race 48-46, despite Paul’s greater name recognition (82-63). Among voters familiar with both candidates, Conway leads 53-41, according to the Benenson Strategy Group poll. In addition, Paul is seen in the poll as too controversial to get things done for Kentucky, out of touch with the concerns of regular people, and more interested in putting his ideology ahead of what’s good for the state. “Rand Paul wants to preach. He’s trying to be an ideological leader, I’m trying to be a Senator for Kentucky,” Conway said.Conway has and his extremist rhetoric over and over again, but in my interview I tried to drill down in the areas of policy and figure out what kind of Democrat from Kentucky Conway would be in the US Senate. I found that he has a fairly compelling message about accountability and making government work. Some excerpts follow:• On FinReg: I didn’t realize that Conway had spent a year on the Senate Banking House Financial Services Committee staff. He seemed to have a good understanding of the bill. He would have voted for Dodd-Frank, though he was concerned by a number of provisions. He didn’t want the consumer protection agency to pre-empt state laws (like his own: Kentucky has a consumer protection act, and Conway as AG was instrumental in negotiating the Countrywide mortgage fraud settlement). “I’m not nuts about the Scott Brown compromise,” Conway said. “Commercial banks should be involved in sounder practices, and the investment banks should take on the riskier ones… right now there is no disincentive to risky practices.” He said he probably would have supported the Brown-Kaufman amendment to reduce bank size, and that “some of the biggest banks need to be broken up… the top six are at 70% of GDP. The Justice Department and the anti-trust division needs to do its job. We haven’t had a real fight on a corporate merger in years. These banks got bigger after the crisis, and it’s got to stop. That’s not anti-business, that’s pro-competition. Wall Street is supposed to be this bastion of capitalism,” though he sees it more like a monopoly with private profits and socialized risk.This puts Conway in sharp contrast to other Senate candidates like former banker Alexi Giannoulias, whose says nothing on bank size. It’s a populist position to take that would fundamentally restructure the financial sector.• On spending and jobs: As I mentioned in my , Conway said to me that the biggest issues his constituents bring up are spending and jobs. When I said that public spending creates jobs, he said that the public has concluded that’s not true, and that public spending mainly goes to Wall Street. That’s a terrible conundrum for the economy, to have the two issues conflated.• On small business lending: Conway’s trying to deal with this by using policies like what he calls the , which would free up lending to small businesses by recapitalizing regional and community banks, and offering smaller credit rates to those banks based on how much lending they do. I asked him about this tension between whether small businesses can’t find loans, or whether they can’t find customers because demand is down and therefore they won’t expand their businesses. He said that it was a little of both. “Some exports are up in my state, like soybeans, and things are bouncing back a little. Kentucky didn’t have a huge housing crash. But it’s both. Lending standards have changed and dried up credit for small community banks, and the economy isn’t moving well and demand is down,” he said.• On health care and pharmaceutical reform: Conway has consistently said that one of his first bills would be to add bulk purchasing of prescription drugs to Medicare. “The VA does it,” he said. “We’re taking $200 billion dollars off the table in a bargain with the pharmaceutical industry. I think that’s wrong for our seniors.” Conway stressed his experience as AG cracking down on Medicare fraud, saying that he sued 47 pharmaceutical companies and dozens of other industry concerns. He thinks that decentralizing the bureaucracy and putting satellite offices around the country, through the Justice Department or some other entity, would be successful at extracting even more public money away from fraudsters.• On oversight. As the Dodd-Frank law now goes through a long implementation process, Conway said the Banking Committee “needs to do the job of diligent enforcement,” keeping up with the regulators and making sure they are acting in the spirit of the law.• On net neutrality: Conway said that he recently lost a donation from a cable company executive because of his support for net neutrality. He didn’t care, however, because he finds it to be an important issue for his constituents. “I just spoke at a forum for the Kentucky Farm Bureau, and broadband is a huge issue with rural farmers. They need to check commodity prices in real time to know how to price their goods,” he said. He sees broadband expansion and Internet freedom as a key rural issue, which was interesting.Overall, I got the sense that while Conway is running a locally focused campaign, contrasting his concern with the pocketbooks of Kentuckians with Rand Paul’s national ideological preoccupations, he wouldn’t hold the nation hostage because of parochial interests. “It’s naive and narrow” to not see that the economy is completely interconnected, Conway said. Despite the fact that Kentucky didn’t have much of a housing bubble, the subsequent economic failure and unemployment crisis still affects their exports, their businesses, and the like. I don’t think he’d be the type of guy like Ben Nelson, content to let the unemployed go hang because his state is doing fine.My impression was that Conway would make a fine Senator in his own right, not just in contrast to Rand Paul. He would have to be held accountable for his votes and not his rhetoric, but so far he has the right ideas.Shadowproof is a financially independent news organization. All of our funding comes from small donations made by readers like you.We use your donations to hire freelance writers and cover our operating costs. Monthly membership subscriptions give us the stability we need to make plans while ensuring our organization does not depend on grants or major funders. If you like what you read, support our writers with a donation today.&nbsp;

The Senate election in Kentucky offers a pretty stark choice – hardcore glibertarian Rand Paul, or mainstream Democrat Jack Conway. Conway, the state’s Attorney General, sat down with FDL News while at Netroots Nation, and I was impressed with his ability to describe common-sense issues in populist terms, and his insight on people’s anger with the current state of the economy. Notably, he supported breaking up the nation’s biggest banks and using the tools of the FTC and the Justice Department’s anti-trust division to restore competition to Wall Street and fix the economy.Conway and Paul...

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David Dayen

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Jack Conway: Break Up the Big Banks - Shadowproof

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