Why Clinton Can't Stop Raising Wall Street Cash - Politico

[WillyT]

Why Clinton can't stop raising Wall Street cash
Bashed by Sanders for financial-services ties, but dependent on big donors, she is caught in a vice.
By Ben White - Politico
02/04/16 07:00 PM EST


Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein shakes hands with Hillary Clinton at a Clinton Global Initiative event in 2014. | AP Photo

<snip>

NEW YORK -- One of Hillary Clinton’s top bundlers was grooving to a live performance by Bon Jovi and snacking on grilled salmon at a fundraiser for the former secretary of state at a converted Naval shipyard in Philadelphia last week when he got an urgent email.

At that very moment, the email said, Bernie Sanders was ripping Clinton for ditching Iowa on the eve of the caucuses to raise money from well-heeled financiers. “I forwarded it to the campaign immediately,” the bundler said. “And I think maybe they decided it wasn’t the best timing to hold these events with financial firms right now.”

Shortly after the Philadelphia event, the Clinton campaign postponed a fundraiser with BlackRock executives in New York. This week, they postponed another event in Boston with an affiliate of Bain Capital — the Democrats’ bogeyman in 2012 — that had been set for Friday.

The awkward timing of the Philadelphia fundraiser and the postponement of the other two events highlight an exquisitely difficult challenge for the Clinton campaign. It still needs money from Wall Street to keep pace with Sanders’ grassroots fundraising juggernaut. But if it takes the money, it would give Sanders and his populist supporters perfect fodder to paint Clinton as too cozy with Wall Street and beholden to financial industry interests.

“One of the problems is that she is going to need the money to get through the primary and then to still have some left because the Republicans, especially if it's Marco Rubio, are going to have tons of money to go after her,” said former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, a Clinton supporter and co-author of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. “But if she takes the money she gets hit with this McCarthyism of the left, this guilt by association, even though there is no evidence that taking this money has had any impact on her policies.”

Sanders supporters and activists on the left disagree with this assessment, saying Clinton's financial industry fundraisers and highly paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and others suggest she would be soft on Wall Street as president while Sanders would proactively bust up the big banks, impose much higher taxes on the wealthy and aggressively prosecute white-collar criminals.

They also worry that Clinton would bring Wall Street executives to top regulatory jobs, while Sanders would purge agencies of anyone with a banking background.

“Especially given her multi-hundred thousand dollar speeches to Wall Street executives the burden of proof is higher for her to show voters that she will truly hold Wall Street accountable and make the big picture changes our economy needs,” said Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “And continuing to raise big money from some of the more odious actors on Wall Street is not confidence-inducing for voters who want them held accountable.”

But one senior Democratic operative close to the Clinton campaign said...

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More: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/hillary-clinton-wall-street-fundraising-218737

[daleanime]

1. These are the problems you get....

when you pretend to serve two masters.

[Avalux]

2. - And when you sell your soul to the devil (money, in this case). n/t

[kath]

3. hey Barney Frank - Fuck you!

[dreamnightwind]

4. Epic fail by Barney Finance

“One of the problems is that she is going to need the money to get through the primary and then to still have some left because the Republicans, especially if it's Marco Rubio, are going to have tons of money to go after her,” said former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, a Clinton supporter and co-author of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. “But if she takes the money she gets hit with this McCarthyism of the left, this guilt by association, even though there is no evidence that taking this money has had any impact on her policies.”

OMG! Bernie is not using Wall St. money in the primary, yet Clinton needs to? If she can't compete with Bernie based on money raised from the people, she doesn't deserve to win. And the guilt by association bit is a hoot. We all know how the game works. Wall St. certainly knows. They haven't sent me any $200,000 checks recently. The whole "there is no evidence" line is a clever ruse, nothing more. Of course politicians do their best to obscure any such evidence. And of course the huge sums of corporate donations to politicans are given to further the interests of those corporations, and are highly successful in doing so. Nobody with any political awareness can refute this.

[earthside]

5. The mindset of entrenched, stale, old pols.

I find this sentence from Barney Frank revealing:

“But if she takes the money she gets hit with this McCarthyism of the left, this guilt by association, even though there is no evidence that taking this money has had any impact on her policies.”

This is the contempt that old-time politicians like Barney Frank and the Clinton crowd have for ordinary, average working people. Our notion that corporations and billionaires give money to candidates because they really want something is naive and we are all just a bunch of unsophisticated peasants.

We all know why Goldman Sachs makes sure Hillary gets big speaking fees and big donations to her SuperPAC -- whether Barney Frank, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Howard Dean, and the rest of the establishment elites believe it or not.

If those big contributions are so meaningless, then Democrats and the Clintons ought to have no problem with keeping the Citizens United decision in effect. (I really wonder if Hillary Clinton is against Citizens United ... she seems to be behaving as if it is to her advantage.)

As the article indicates, Democrats like Hillary Clinton are addicted to big corporate money and they are selling the soul of the Democratic Party to keep raising that money. We have to make a change or there won't be a Democratic Party worth saving (and a lot of folks are believing that may already be the case ... unless Sanders revitalizes the progressive principles of Democrats).

[nolabels]

7. Next take from Mr Frank : Water isn't wet

[speaktruthtopower]

6. Wall Street...

controls New York and no doubt played a large role in lifting her into the Senate with no prior elective experience. That doesn't mean all wealthy people on Wall Street are bad or that she is controlled. But she is probably likely to approach securities regulation from a responsible insider's perspective, not an outsider's. On the other hand she is less likely than some others to start wars over oil and os forth.

Practically every politician on both sides but Sanders has one special interest base that stands out.

[highprincipleswork]

8. Barney Frank, there is plenty of evidence that these relationships change her policies.

And there is plenty of legitimate fear that she will favor TPP and cutting Social Security and so forth, despite protestations (sometimes extremely vague and unconvincing) to the contrary.

[99th_Monkey]

9. BIG K&R!!! nt

[LiberalArkie]

10. If Bill and Hill had not been helped along by The Rose Law firm and Walton, Tyson and

J.B. Hunt they might have turned out to be more like Bernie and less like Blankfein.

[frylock]

11. McCarthyism of the left?

The fuck does that even mean?