Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Obama's Wall Street Socialism



Wall St. socialism
Rich Lowry, New York Post

When President Obama's vast new regulatory state is completed, Wall Street firms ought to have a competition over the naming rights.

Will it be the CitiDeal? The Goldman Society?

The UBS/JP Morgan Joint Initiative for the Establishment of a Social Democracy?

The Democratic majority was bought and paid for by Wall Street and corporate money.

The Masters of the Universe helped give us the Masters of the Beltway, in a synergistic exercise that would have dumbfounded even Lenin. When he famously said capitalists would sell the rope to hang them with, he was at least talking of a commercial transaction -- not maxing out to a campaign committee.

Back in 2006, Democrats began a hard sell on Wall Street led by Sen. Chuck Schumer and then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff. The basic pitch was that Democrats were taking Congress, and the financial world should get on board -- surely delivered with all the bare-knuckled subtlety for which those two are justly renowned. Democrats beat Republicans in the Wall Street money chase in 2006, and kept on going.

In the 2008 election cycle, Democrats garnered 73 percent of the political donations of Goldman Sachs, as well as the majority of donations from other financial giants such as UBS and Citigroup.


They soaked up most of the hedge-fund money, and won the battle for donations from industries as varied as health care, defense and law.

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