To: Jim McMannis who wrote (245519 ) 4/25/2010 12:59:41 PM From: joseffy Respond to of 306849 Obama should return Wall Street's money Examiner Editorial April 23, 2010 washingtonexaminer.com President Obama took his case for vastly increasing federal power over financial institutions to Wall Street yesterday, but he forgot something while packing for the trip. He should have taken with him all those bags of dirty money he received on the campaign trail in 2008 from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms whose greedy ways he claims led the nation's economy into the Great Recession. Since Obama received nearly a million dollars in contributions from Goldman Sachs executives in 2007 and 2008, maybe all those bags of filthy Wall Street lucre wouldn't fit on Air Force One. More likely, the dirty money stayed in the White House because Obama and his fellow Democrats want to keep having it both ways on Wall Street. On the one hand, Obama and congressional Democrats like Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Chris Dodd of Connecticut accuse Wall Street executives of routinely taking dangerous gambles with investors' money, fraudulently packaging and selling securities that are guaranteed to become worthless, lining their pockets with outrageous bonuses, and, worst of all, dispatching armies of high-paid lobbyists to Washington to keep the federal regulators off their backs. These sins and more are why, according to the Democrats' narrative, Congress must pass the Obama-Dodd financial reform bill that will make "too big to fail" a permanent part of federal regulatory policy. It will also empower Washington to designate selected financial firms as "systemically essential" and thus eligible for federal bailouts and other forms of regulatory favoritism like government-backed credit. On the other hand, the reality is that Obama-Dodd puts satin sheets on that king-sized bed federal regulators have shared for years with favored Wall Street executives. That's why Goldman Sachs and other huge Wall Street securities firms are quite comfortable with being bashed by Obama even as he makes deals with them and cashes their checks. By the way, Obama-Dodd does nothing about Fannie and Freddie, the government-created mortgage giants whose obsession with subprime mortgages and paying off influential congressmen to look the other way actually led to the economic meltdown. Obama, Dodd and other Democratic leaders want to keep taking Wall Street's campaign contributions, which they are raking in at a phenomenal rate. Nearly 70 percent of Goldman Sachs political donations went to Democrats in 2009, according to OpenSecrets.org. And, as the Washington Examiner's J.P. Freire reported earlier this week, combine Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's $415,595 in Goldman Sachs contributions to her 2008 presidential campaign with Obama's beaucoup bucks from the firm and the total is 10 times what President George W. Bush got from Enron. This is hope and change? Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com