(CNN) Elizabeth Warren pivoted her presidential campaign on Thursday to the issue that made the Massachusetts senator a hero of the progressive left long before she was first elected in 2012: Reining in Wall Street.

In an extensive plan released two weeks ahead of the second round of Democratic presidential debates hosted by CNN , Warren is calling for the reinstatement of a modern Glass-Steagall Act , which would wall off commercial from investment banks, new restrictions on the private equity industry, and legislative action to more closely tie bank executives' pay to their companies' performance.

The proposal is red meat for the Democratic party's liberal base, which has zeroed in on Wall Street speculation as a root cause of growing economic inequality. Backlash from the financial industry would be an added bonus for Warren's campaign, which is keen to remind primary voters of her long record of opposing deregulation and supporting stricter rules on the big banks and other corporate lenders. The plan arrives as Warren climbs in most public polling of the 2020 race, placing her in firmly in a four-candidate mix -- with former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Kamala Harris of California -- at the front of the pack.

"In the lead-up to the 2008 crisis, I rang the alarm bell as I saw the same tricks and traps emerging in mortgages," Warren says, recalling her pre-Senate record, in a Medium post. "And after I proposed a new federal agency to protect consumers -- and President Obama signed that agency into law in 2010 -- I spent nearly a year setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and helping write new rules to crack down on financial scams."

This latest policy rollout is the second piece of what Warren is calling her "economic patriotism agenda." Her campaign's proposals are designed to curtail capitalist excess by increasing oversight and implementing rules to increasing corporate accountability to workers and small-time investors.

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