(Thomas Nast)
Reading more than half of Nicholas Confessore's
New York Times article about the resistance to contributing to President Obama's 2012 campaign by hedge-fund managers and others of Wall Street's elite may have you kneeling over the toilet the rest of the day. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Soaring profits, a return to executive compensation packages that would choke a herd of horses, a stock market at four-year highs, no prosecutions for financial skulduggery, and pretty much a return to business-as-usual hasn't been enough to persuade those elite campaign contributors that Obama's presidency has been good to them and for them.
How dare the adminstration suggest that millionaires pay a higher tax rate than wage earners like that class-traitor Warren Buffett has proposed. How dare Dodd-Frank seek to put controls on the financial industry when any problems that arise can be resolved by another bailout if things get a little out of hand again. How dare Obama even smile at Elizabeth Warren whose Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is just half a step away from what the Bolsheviks would propose. How dare he engage in a bit of populist rhetoric. He might as well be passing out pitchforks and torches at a general assembly of Occupy Wall Street.
The administration, in the view of the elite, writes Confessore, has "created a hostile environment for job creators." As a consequence, until March, the Obama reelection campaign had fallen far short of its expectations for fund-raising on Wall Street, which had given generously in 2008, far more than it gave to Sen. John McCain.
But this year, at the end of February, the Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future had raised $43 million, nearly half of that from the financial industry, more than Obama raised in all of the 2008 campaign. The Center for Responsive Politics reports the financial, real estate and insurance sector has given Republicans a higher percentage of its contributions so far this campaign season than at any time since 1990 when the center's data begin.
“Most people in the financial world,” a top Obama donor later told me, “do not understand how most of America feels about them.” But they think they understand how the president’s inner circle feels about them. “This administration has a more contemptuous view of big money and of Wall Street than any administration in 40 years,” the donor said. “And it shows.” [...]
One former supporter, Dan Loeb, compared Obama to Nero; the president’s enemies insinuated worse. In 2010, Stephen A. Schwarzman, a founder of Blackstone, said that an Obama proposal to raise taxes on “carried interest” — the main source of income for most private-equity managers — reminded him of “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Are these the same people who hung out the windows drinking Champagne when Occupy Wall Street began its protests? The ones who really, truly believe that the financial speculation and arcane derivatives of derivatives contribute to the nation's well-being? Who relish how the gains of productivity
are skewed away from the workers who actually do the producing? Who believe the social safety net just drains the Treasury of money to encourage the lazy when those funds could be used to cover the additional tax breaks they think they deserve for their hard work screwing anybody—home-buyers and investors alike—with their latest shenanigans? Who think the Robber Barons got bad press?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes.
All this and still they feel put upon because the president says "fatcat" once in a while and occasionally looks at them without smiling.