Republicans Are Wall Street is a..Myth??

How did Republicans get saddled with Wall Street? Obama just got the biggest campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, and Republicans still can't shake the public perception that they are tied at the hip to Wall Street bankers who hate them.

It's as if National Rifle Association members conspired with Republicans to bankrupt the country and everyone blamed the Democrats for being shills of the NRA.

Maybe if the financial capital of the nation were located in Salt Lake City, rather than Manhattan, the financial community would support Republicans. But Wall Street is a street located in New York City.

No one in the top echelons of the financial industry who has a weekend place in the Hamptons is a Republican.

No, there is one. Teddy Forstmann. He has to throw his own parties and fly guests in. Otherwise, if they want to go to any half-decent parties, bankers must be Democrats. At their income bracket, multimillionaires will trade a little extra tax money for good cocktail parties.

Even the "Republicans" on Wall Street don't care about national defense or social issues. They just want to trade with China and hire illegal aliens.

Last September, The New York Times reported that individuals associated with the securities and investment industry had given $9.9 million to the Obama campaign, $7.4 million to the Hillary Clinton campaign and only $6.9 million to the McCain campaign. Either they're all Democrats or some commodity named "hope" was going through the roof last year.

Employees of Lehman Bros. alone gave Obama $370,000, compared to about $117,000 to McCain. (No wonder Bush let them go under.)

According to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records by the Center for Responsive Politics, the top three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan. Six other financial giants were in the top 30 donors to the White House Dream Team: UBS AG, Lehman Bros., Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse Group.

Since 1998, the financial sector has given a total of $37.6 million to Obama, compared to $32.1 million to McCain. But Obama ran for his first national office only in 2004. So McCain got less from the financial industry in a decade that included two runs for president than Obama did in four years.

As we've seen in recent weeks, Wall Street gets what it pays for. Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd included language in the stimulus bill allowing executives of the bailed-out banks to collect million-dollar bonuses.

And yet the Democrats' endless favors for their Wall Street friends never sticks to them because everyone treats Democrats' shilling for their own contributors as if it's a Nixon-goes-to-China moment.

On the March 23 edition of MSNBC's "Hardball," The Nation's David Corn said: "Remember -- What was it? A year or two back when there was talk about taxing hedge fund managers at the rate that the rest of us pay? Who intervened in that? Chuck Schumer."

But Corn then quickly added that this "got a lot of Democrats really mad. Here was a Democrat, you know, getting in the way of a populist issue at a time when the economy was already heading in the wrong direction."

Which Democrats got "really mad"? Chris Dodd? George Soros? Warren Buffett? Jon Corzine? Tim Geithner? Roger Altman? Bob Rubin? Jamie Dimon? Lloyd Blankfein?

Corn's formulation was wonderfully subtle: Admit that a Democrat preserved a sweetheart deal for hedge fund managers -- but then claim that his fellow Democrats were furious with him.

People are more likely to believe something if they think they came to it themselves. Hearing a liberal muse on TV that it was an aberration for Chuck Schumer to intervene to protect hedge fund managers -- risking the wrath of other Democrats -- the average person thinks: So Democrats must be the party of the people. I always thought George Soros was a Democrat, but he must be a Republican.

Democrats take care of the financial industry -- and the financial industry takes care of Democrats. After honing his financial skills as the bagman for Bill Clinton's White House, Rahm Emanuel was hired by the investment bank Wasserstein Perella, where he worked for 2 1/2 years.

For that, Emanuel was paid more than $18 million. (Maybe Rahm Emanuel was the Democrat livid at Schumer for preserving a sweet tax deal for hedge fund managers!)

Democrats have a beautiful system: They're showered with Wall Street money, but they also get to pillory Republicans for being the party of "Wall Street." The bankers don't care if Democrats attack them. They still get their bailout money.

Again The Bailout Fails

The first two words that come to mind when I saw the news that a weekend worked bill to push forward with a $700 billion bailout failed:

THANK GOD!

Now I'm no financial expert for sure (I've seen my credit report showing past incidences to back up this statement), but I do know a couple things. Between big government and big business cooperating with each other to cook books and speculate on financial possibilities without a true guarantee, we got ourselves into the biggest economic disaster of my lifetime, if not the history of our country, save the Great Depression.
And now, we have the government and big business cooperating with each other, AGAIN, to use a lot of the same basic principles and ideas to fix the problem they created.

Obviously, as a country, economically we are quickly preparing to fall down the rabbit hole. Whether or not we get this bailout plan urged by certain financial related industries and our current White House administration, that rabbit hole is approaching awfully quickly, and we're going to meet it regardless.

So let me get this right...we can let the chips fall and businesses fail, and things go to hell in a handbasket, OR we can make more chips, save these poorly run businesses and still go to hell in a handbasket. Given interest rates on loans produced through newly printed, and foreign entities loans that will take that $700 billion and turn it into most likely a minimum of $3 Trillion when all is said and done. We already have multiple books on the government's end of things that have us anywhere from $9.5 trillion to $54 Trillion dollars in debt. So what's another $700 billion, right? Yeah, someone has to learn to say no. Someone has to learn to tell the people that the buck is literally stopping with all of us, right here, right now. We're going to have to suffer a little bit. We're going to actually have to consider doing without. Now I know that many in my generation and some in the preceeding generation have little idea what this concept is, but now is the time to learn the lesson.
No more pet projects, no more bailing out consistently failing businesses. No more rewarding guys responsible for getting the domino effect started leading to the crippling of entire economic industrial sectors.

Even in this bailout debate, we have politicians working hard to blame the other side. And to a point there are members of all sides to blame for where we are now. There are members of the general population who bought into the lies who are now responsible for where we are now, biting off more than they could chew with no idea how to pay for it. Many of these politicians still admit that they have no idea how well this bailout will work if passed. So we get these guys and gals together to give spending authority to one guy, with little to no oversight, to the tune of $700 billion (with authority to expand it if he feels necessary?), while having no idea what effect it will have??
That seems pretty stupid to me. Especially if we can let everything fail, learn a lesson, and figure out how to correct it naturally through our market forces and American ingenuity that has gotten us this far over the last 232 years, without spending the hundreds of billions (leading to trillions when we pay it off), that we'll spend the next few generations (if we're lucky, that'll be all) trying to get back.
So to Congress, Bush, Bernanke, and Paulson..thanks but no thanks.