Loyalty's for Chumps on The Street: Bankers’ Man in 2008, Obama's been Dumped by the Money Men

One thing you can say about the financial industry. It has no sense of loyalty.

Back in 2008, most of the biggest contributors to presidential candidate Barack Obama were financial companies. According to the campaign fund tracking website Open Secrets, after the $1.65 million donated by a political action committee (PAC) for the University of California, the next biggest contributor was a PAC for the giant bank, Goldman Sachs, whose employees ponied up a reported $1 million. Right up there among the top contributors to the Obama campaign that year were two other of the nation’s top banks, JP Morgan Chase, whose employee PAC gave $809,000, and Citigroup, which gave $737,000. Two more big banks, UBS and Morgan Stanley, as well as General Electric, which less than a year later bought a bank to enable itself to benefit from the government’s largesse in doling out billions of “rescue” dollars, were among Obama’s top 20 campaign donors, handing over $533,000, $512,000 and 530,000 respectively to support his election.

Obama, after winning the presidency, repaid all that campaign largesse, appointing bank industry lackeys and executives to top positions, including Timothy Geithner, who as head of the New York Federal Reserve branch during the Bush administration, had ignored the scandalous derivatives scandals that brought on the financial crash, and Lawrence Summers, who as Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, pushed for the deregulation of derivatives, and for allowing banks to merge with investment banks, and who during the Bush years earned millions as a consultant to the hedge fund industry and from speaking fees provided by Wall Street banks. 

Given the ease with which the Obama administration allowed the financial industry to subvert the Congressional legislation designed to reform the banking industry in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-9, one might think that Wall Street would have rewarded Obama with more money for his re-election campaign, but instead the industry, seeing even more advantage in having a Republican in the White House, and particularly one of its own -- venture capitalist and multi-millionaire Mitt Romney, has switched its support over to his opponent.

Open Secrets reports that this year there is only one Wall Street bank listed among Obama’s top 20 largest donors: Wells Fargo, which only gave the president’s re-election campaign a scant $202,000, less than half what the smallest of his top 20 donors gave four years ago. Over all, big banks gave Obama over $4 million in 2008, and only $200,000, or one-fifteenth as much, in 2012...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1371