Why it's OK to Accept Wall Street Campaign Cash

[flpoljunkie]

Why It's OK to Accept Wall Street Campaign Cash

By Bill Scher
February 08, 2016

What do Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Franklin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson all have in common? They all accepted campaign contributions from Wall Street tycoons.

And, for those on that list who have already been president, all successfully imposed regulations on corporations anyway.

The Internet Age has dramatically changed fundraising in the ensuing 100 years—or has it? On one hand, then-Sen. Barack Obama was able to tap nearly 4 million individual donors in 2008. On the other, when it came to actual dollars donated, the share coming from small donors was a similar one-third. Not only did some of Obama’s top bundlers hail from the world of finance, but he also took in almost twice as much Wall Street money as his Republican opponent, John McCain.

Sanders doesn’t name-check Woodrow Wilson on the trail, perhaps because the Wilson administration prosecuted his socialist hero Eugene Debs and imprisoned him. Sanders does, however, lean heavily on the two Roosevelts in making the case for his platform. Yet both of them tapped the financial industry to make it to the White House.

Approximately 25 percent of FDR’s donations in 1932 came from Wall Street. For the progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt, the extent of his reliance on Wall Street was kept secret during his successful 1904 campaign. It was only fully revealed in the midst of his 1912 third-party challenge with this scathing headline: “Wall Street Favored Roosevelt, Admits Monster 1904 Slush Fund.” J.P. Morgan himself ponied up $150,000. The Standard Oil monopoly gave $100,000 while the question of whether Roosevelt would bust them up was up in the air.

more...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/02/08/why_its_ok_to_accept_wall_street_campaign_cash_129584.html

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. I'd take Eugene Debs over Woodrow Wilson any day.

[Motown_Johnny]

2. Because influence peddling is really a unicorn and only Bernie supporters believe in it?

Isn't that the reason?


Hillary keeps hiding behind other people who have accepted money. She now claims that nobody is influenced by that money.



I guess we can all stop worrying.

[MrMickeysMom]

18. Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!

We should all just shut up and have our asses handed to us, uh-hmmm

[liberal_at_heart]

3. When Wall Street crashed in 1929 did the tax payers have to save the banks and allow them

to continue doing the exact same practices that led up to the crash? What happens when the banks crash again because they are still doing what they did before the crash in 2008? Do the tax payers get to bail them out yet again? Circumstances are different today than they were back then.

[cali]

4. Not a year or two before you are planning to run for president

And you're working directly with a SuperPac to that end.

And I'm not a great admirer of unvarnished greed- particularly when it's an ultra rich person exhibiting it.

[flpoljunkie]

7. Agree it was very poor judgment of Hillary to accept obscene money from Goldman Sachs for speeches.

It is unseemly to say the least. And, Madeleine Albright needs to get a f*cking clue! Gloria Steinem, as well.

I don't think Bernie can win the presidency, though it is a very strange 2016 election season--but I will definitely support him if he gets the nomination.

[Jefferson23]

9. +1. n/t

[flpoljunkie]

17. And, Bill Clinton needs to STFU!

[Jefferson23]

5. Third rate intellectual drivel, terrible appeal but he is GREAT for cynics...woohoo.

Political Positions

Bill Scher has been known to take positions that are controversial within liberal circles. In 2012, he published a New York Times oped titled "How Liberals Win"[9] which argued that liberals should treat "corporate power as a force to bargain with, not an enemy to vanquish." After the Edward Snowden leaks, he defended the record of the National Security Agency from the liberal perspective in essays for The Week[10] and POLITICO Magazine.[11] He defended his position in an appearance on MSNBC's "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell"[12] and later in a debate with Snowden's attorney Ben Wizner on MSNBC's "Up with Steve Kornacki."[13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Scher

[flpoljunkie]

6. Is there anything he said about FDR, Teddy and Obama that's not true?

They took the money the first term and did not do what Wall Street wanted so they did not get their money their second terms.

[Jefferson23]

8. You're kidding right?

Look at the legislation now and see what gets through and the lack of
strength Frank Dodd has and ask yourself why?


What compromised negotiations with health care?

How do you think big Pharma got the law that the US government
would not be able to negotiate for drug prices?

Compromised candidates end up with compromised deals.

[flpoljunkie]

11. Compromise is necessary in a divided government.

There is no realistic expectation that that will change--too many gerrymandered districts. The President must work with the Congress they have--not the Congress that Bernie Sanders envisions with his talk of political revolution.

[liberal_at_heart]

12. Oh, you mean the compromises to social services during budget deals? No thank you.

[Jefferson23]

13. They do not have to take the money, the recipient is NOT in a better position to

negotiate so please do not make this pandering to corruption as necessary.

The gerrymandering and a Republican congress is a different animal.
When people do not feel their vote garners anything they don't vote,
and their candidate taking monies from those that are the problem
is not generally considered a confidence builder.

[flpoljunkie]

14. Barack Obama only raised 1/3 of his campaign funds from grass roots donors in 2008

The Internet Age has dramatically changed fundraising in the ensuing 100 years—or has it? On one hand, then-Sen. Barack Obama was able to tap nearly 4 million individual donors in 2008. On the other, when it came to actual dollars donated, the share coming from small donors was a similar one-third.

Why did these supposedly liberal champions take all this corporate money? Well, there is the little matter of winning. In the 2012 campaign, the first of the Citizens United era, Mitt Romney and his allied super PACs spent just over $1 billion trying to win the White House. How did Obama survive? By spending the same amount, making sure his message could not be drowned out. And as good as Obama’s small-donor base was, it couldn’t produce $1 billion by itself.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/02/08/why_its_ok_to_accept_wall_street_campaign_cash_129584.html

[liberal_at_heart]

15. Bernie is proving this wrong. We the people are funding his campaign.

[Jefferson23]

16. Sanders is doing fine, no corporate money. When they take that money they are not

in a better position to negotiate, you can spin it any way you like but it won't
change that fact.

[SunSeeker]

10. K & R

[RiverLover]

19. WOW The ignorance showing here. Sure, wall street gave FDR $, then they realized the mistake &

worked HARD to get him thrown out of office.

I really resent any implication that Hillary is in ANY WAY like FDR.

When The Bankers Plotted To Overthrow FDR


It was a dangerous time in America: The economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system.

The newly elected president pursued an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum.

"This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty," one senator wrote to a colleague. "The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom."

Those words could be ripped from today's headlines. In fact, author Sally Denton tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz, they come from a letter written in 1933 by Republican Sen. Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia, bemoaning the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Denton is the author of a new book, The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.

She says that during the tense months between FDR's election in November and his inauguration in March 1933, democracy hung in the balance.

"There was a lot at play. It could have gone very different directions,"

......snip......

When Roosevelt finally took office, he embarked on the now-legendary First Hundred Days, an ambitious legislative program aimed at reopening and stabilizing the country's banks and getting the economy moving again.



"There was just this sense that he was upsetting the status quo," Denton says.


Critics on the right worried that Roosevelt was a Communist, a socialist or the tool of a Jewish conspiracy. Critics on the left complained his policies didn't go far enough. Some of Roosevelt's opponents didn't stop at talk. Though it's barely remembered today, there was a genuine conspiracy to overthrow the president.


The Wall Street Putsch, as it's known today, was a plot by a group of right-wing financiers.

"They thought that they could convince Roosevelt, because he was of their, the patrician class, they thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government," Denton says................


http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plotted-to-overthrow-fdr

[flpoljunkie]

20. Both Obama, FDR lost Wall Street support in their second terms.

They took plenty in their first terms, but Wall Street shut them out in their second terms.

You are free to resent whatever or whomever you like. This is America.