Class Warrior-in-Chief awash in cash from Wall Street, Fatcats

posted at 1:05 pm on July 23, 2011 by Karl

As Pres. Obama prattles on about the evils of tax breaks for coprorate jets, the Center for Responsive Politics notes:

President Barack Obama has relied more on well-connected Wall Street figures to fund his re-election than he did four years ago when he campaigned as an outsider and an underdog.

One-third of the money Obama’s elite fund-raising corps has raised on behalf of his re-election has come from the financial sector ***.

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Meanwhile, employees of law firms and lobbying shops are responsible for at least $6.9 million so far this year, money which has gone to the Obama re-elect campaign and the DNC.

During Obama’s presidential bid four years ago, individuals in this economic sector were responsible for a minimum of $16.1 million — with the legal industry being the No. 1 industry among all of Obama’s bundlers.

This is no shocker. Obama’s 2008 campaign received loads of cash from people and groups associated with the top ten issuers of subprime loans. He then packed the key economic positions in his White House with the people he claimed caused the financial crisis.

Indeed, according to the Center for Public Integrity:

More than two years after President Obama took office vowing to banish “special interests” from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests ***.

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Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third, of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised more than half a million.

Politico details some of these cases, including Steve Westly, a major investor in the electric car company Tesla, who bundled up to $200,000 for the president this cycle — while his company received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.

Moreover, handing out those plum jobs and ambassadorships creates a vicious cycle:

[I]ncumbency can also complicate fund-raising. Only about one in five of the supporters who bundled checks for Mr. Obama last time appear on the list disclosed by his campaign Friday.

One reason for the drop-off: Upon taking office, Mr. Obama appointed dozens of his top fundraisers to ambassadorships, government advisory boards or jobs in his administration, perches from which they may be prohibited from raising campaign money for the president. One such supporter, Matthew Barzun, resigned in April as the United States ambassador to Sweden to become the Obama campaign’s national finance chairman.

Mr. Obama, unlike his Republican opponents, has made a point of swearing off contributions from registered lobbyists and corporate political action committees.

But the president’s bundlers include business executives whose companies have substantial interests before the federal government. Marc Benioff, who raised more than $500,000, is also chairman of Salesforce.com, a company whose software the Obama administration has adopted for wide use in federal agencies. Another bundler, Michael Kempner, is president of the MWW Group, a national public affairs company that has a lobbying practice in Washington.

TIME’s Michael Scherer has details on Kempner, not to mention influence seekers like Drug giant Pfizer’s top government relations executive, Sally Susman, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen, and Kenneth Jarin, the co-partner in charge of government relations at Ballard Spahr, to name but a few. Obama’s lobbyist ban seems to be as much a dodge as it was in 2008. Pres. Obama’s pretensions to populism were a scam then; it’s simply getting worse — and more obvious — as we approach the 2012 campaign.

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