Obama's Tricky Campaign Cash: Insider Fundraising Events and Wooing Wall Street

Another money matter – courting Wall Street cash -- is also posing a tricky situation: whether Obama is getting too close to Wall Street executives and angering his liberal base.

"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat-cat bankers on Wall Street," Obama said in a “60 Minutes” interview in December 2009.

That comment, on top of the president signing sweeping Wall Street reform legislation exactly a year ago, brought huge support from his base.

“When he calls Wall Street bankers fat cats, then his base cheers, so you'll see him constantly trying to shift back and forth and keep wall street happy at one point and his base happy at another point,” said Jim Moorhead, current crisis advisor at Steptoe & Johnson, LLP and also a former Goldman Sachs investment banker.

One nod to Wall Street that pleased executives was the naming of former JP Morgan Bank Senior Executive Bill Daley to be Obama’s chief of staff.

There was also a secret meeting at the White House with Wall Street executives a couple weeks before he formally launched his re-election bid. While the administration says the meeting was just about job ideas, these moves cause consumer advocates to give a mixed review of Obama’s performance with Wall Street. They were pleased when he appointed bank critic Richard Cordray to head the new consumer bureau on Monday, but other courtship of executives makes them uneasy.

in full

[link to www.foxnews.com]

HAHAHA SUCKERS!

Barack’s Wall Street Problem is Now America’s

Barack Obama has a major Wall Street and Washington problem that the media so far is refusing to acknowledge or explore. He is in the pocket of the Wall Street firms and mortgage security companies that are at the center of the collapse of the real estate bubble. He is closely tied to at least two of the Fannie Mae principals. As Ricky Ricardo would say, “Barack, you got some splaining to do.”

Let’s start with the numbers. Why is a first term Senator pulling down almost $300,000 a year from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Countrywide Financial, and Washington Mutual? He has not even completed his fourth year in the Senate and received a total of $1,093,329.00 from these eight companies and their employees. (all data from OpenSecrets.org). John McCain’s numbers, according to OpenSecrets.org for the period 1990-2008 (i.e., 18 years worth of data) only collected $549,584.00. In other words, Barack is receiving $273,582.25 (and 2008 is not over) per year while McCain raised a paltry $30,532.44.

Want another shocker? Barack Obama has received more from one source–Goldman Sachs $542,252.00–than McCain has from all of the companies combined. Who the hell is more beholden to lobbyists? And why does a junior Senator from Illinois rate this kind of dough?

in full [link to www.noquarterusa.net]