Wall St. Moves to Consolidate Power Over Democrats as the DNC Posts Disastrous Fundraising Numbers

Poor fundraising by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has been a reality for much of this year, and the trend continued in June. The Hill reports:

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) added $200,000 to their now $3.3 million debt in June, according to the most recent Federal Election Commission report, falling further behind Republican fundraising efforts.  

The Republican National Committee (RNC) outpaced the Democrats in fundraising in June by over $8 million, raising a staggering $13.5 million compared to the DNC’s $5.5 million. 

Unlike the Republican debt-free committee, the DNC typically goes into debt during election seasons, but it currently remains far behind the GOP financially. 

The DNC has only $7.5 million on hand, after a string of losses to Republicans in special congressional elections, including the race for Georgia’s Sixth District, which broke fundraising records to become the most expensive congressional race of all time. The RNC has $44.7 million in cash on-hand, according to the filings. 

Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise given the sleazy way the DNC handled last year’s Democratic primary, in which key players including head Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders in order to promote one of the worst Presidential candidates in U.S. history.

Moreover, the Democrats’ Russia obsession isn’t doing them any favors amongst the public, which rightly cares more about issues that affect their every day lives versus what Vladimir Putin ate for breakfast.

Indeed, the following graphic sums it up perfectly:

I suppose this is the sort of thing you’d expect when most of the major newspapers are owned by billionaires and other assorted oligarchs.

Moving along, just because the general public finds the Democrats and their power-worshipping leadership objectionable, this doesn’t mean Wall Street financial oligarchs have any intention on giving up control of the party and funding political puppets willing protect their rent-seeking interests. In fact, they very hard at work.

As was reported yesterday in the International Business Times:

By allying with the Blue Dogs, the DCCC is surely in for intense pushback from the left wing of the party. Bernie Sanders voters, Democratic Socialists of America, and other progressives are growing increasingly frustrated with what they see as a static, corporate Democratic machine that refuses to admit its 2016 faults and change its tactics. Conservative Democrats may have a difficult time winning their primary elections at a time when the left, which consists of several groups that may also field their own candidates to run in the Democratic primaries, is growing in size and influence.

“The days of the Blue Dogs are over,” Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a grassroots group dedicated to electoral and advocacy work on “economic populist priorities,” wrote in an email to International Business Times. “To win in red and purple districts, the party needs authentic local messengers who campaign on a bold, inspiring, economic populist message that challenges powerful interests on behalf of the little guy — not milquetoast candidates who are too cozy to Wall Street and special interests to connect with the concerns of working families.”

The DCCC, which raised $49 million from January through May of this year, receives some of its funding from congress members’ campaigns and joint fundraising committees; for example, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s campaign and joint fundraising committee combined to give roughly $1 million to the DCCC in the first five months of 2017. But the majority of its funds come from individual donors, including large sums from hedge fund managers, real estate investors and other wealthy mega-donors whose business profits could suffer under progressive political leadership.

Among the biggest individual donors to the DCCC this year, all of whom gave more than $230,000 to the group, according to public data from the Federal Election Commission, are Donald Sussman, chairman of hedge fund Paloma Partners; George Marcus, chairman of commercial real estate investment firm Marcus & Millichap; and investor and oil heiress Anne Getty Earhart. Out of roughly 288,000 individual donations from January through May of this year, 637 came from self-identified CEOs, and 81 were from individuals who listed themselves as “chair” or “chairman” of a company.

Hedge fund chairman Sussman, a former bank director who also chairs Essex Property Trust and another entity based in an offshore tax haven, is a familiar name among Democratic mega-donors. He poured nearly $42 million into politics in 2016, including $21 million to the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, making him the third-largest individual political donor of that election cycle. He has already given the maximum allowed amount, roughly $237,000, to the DCCC—including about $102,000 for “building fund/headquarters” that is now permitted due to a provision in a bipartisan 2015 federal budget bill signed by then-President Barack Obama.

The many other donors in the financial industry giving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the DCCC this year include William Derrough, managing partner at investment bank Moelis & Company; John Freidenrich, chairman at investment firm Regis Management; James Hormel, chairman of investment manager Equidex; Ahmad Khawaja, CEO of e-commerce merchant Allied Wallet; Seth Klarman, CEO of hedge fund Baupost Group; Dinakar Singh, CEO of hedge fund TPG-Axon Capital; and Daniel Neidich, CEO of Dune Real Estate Partners and former chairman and co-CEO of Dune Capital Management, the now-defunct hedge fund of which Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was also co-CEO.

Financial industry PACs donating to the DCCC in 2017 include the Wells Fargo PAC, the Managed Funds Association PAC and the Goldman Sachs PAC. The DCCC did not quickly respond to a request for comment.

In October 2016, The Intercept reported on a hacked fundraising document with notes from meetings between DCCC chair Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and special-interest groups, unions and corporations including the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), Goldman Sachs, and General Electric. Andy Blocker, executive vice president of public policy and advocacy at SIFMA, which represents major financial firms, told the DCCC that “Blue Dogs, New Dems and Progressives” needed to get “on the same page.” Blocker and Joseph Vaughan, managing director of federal government relations for SIFMA, were reportedly “upset around messaging demonizing Wall Street” and expressed some relief after being told that Pelosi had said, “Warren doesn’t speak for the party.” They preferred Clinton’s “messaging around ‘bad actors,’ which is more palatable and crosses industries.”

Joyce Brayboy, a Goldman Sachs lobbyist and a member of the Democratic National Committee who helped elect establishment-aligned Tom Perez as DNC chair over progressive Keith Ellison, and Michael Pease, co-head of global government affairs at Goldman Sachs, met with the DCCC to convey similar concerns. They “feel like the rhetoric [around Wall Street] is problematic,” the document states. Goldman employees who support Democrats felt that they were being attacked, and Brayboy and Pease said “there isn’t enough rhetoric coming from Pro-Business Democrats” and they “don’t like Warren’s messaging.” They wanted to engage with the DCCC on income inequality but said “it should be about lifting folks up, not tearing others down.

Wall Street owns both parties and has no intention of giving up control of either one.

Moving on, as revolting as oligarch donors may be, they aren’t stupid, and are already actively trying to find the perfect puppet to groom for 2020. Excerpts from a grotesque piece published by the New York Post shows that Kamala Harris is at the top of the list.

The Democrats’ “Great Freshman Hope,” Sen. Kamala Harris, is heading to the Hamptons to meet with Hillary Clinton’s biggest backers.

The California senator is being fêted in Bridgehampton on Saturday at the home of MWWPR guru Michael Kempner, a staunch Clinton supporter who was one of her national-finance co-chairs and a led fund-raiser for her 2008 bid for the presidency. He was also listed as one of the top “bundlers” for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, having raised $3 million.

Guests there to greet Harris are expected to include Margo Alexander, a member of Clinton’s inner circle; Dennis Mehiel, a Democratic donor who is the chairman of the Battery Park City Authority, even though he lives between a sprawling Westchester estate and an Upper East Side pad; designer Steven Gambrel and Democratic National Committee member Robert Zimmerman.

Washington lobbyist Liz Robbins is also hosting a separate Hamptons lunch for Harris.

Despite being less than seven months into her new job as senator, Harris is already said to be the Democrats’ top fund-raiser and is being talked about as a 2020 presidential hopeful.

A Democratic insider said, ­“Kamala is the big Democratic star right now, at a time when they badly need a star. She’s coming to the Hamptons to meet key people as she takes a national stage, and expands her influence and ambitions.”

So why is Harris considered a star by corporate Democrats? All you have to do is go back and read a post I published earlier this year titled, Donald Trump Has an Enormous and Very Dangerous Wall Street Blind Spot.

Onewest Bank, which Donald Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, ran from 2009 to 2015, repeatedly broke California’s foreclosure laws during that period, according to a previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office.

The memo obtained by The Intercept alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.

In the memo, the leaders of the state attorney general’s Consumer Law Section said they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” in a yearlong investigation. In a detailed 22-page request, they identified over a thousand legal violations in the small subsection of OneWest loans they were able to examine, and they recommended that Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the Pasadena-based bank. They even wrote up a sample legal complaint, seeking injunctive relief and millions of dollars in penalties.
 
But Harris’s office, without any explanation, declined to prosecute the case.

As we know, the surest way to advance in American politics is by keeping Wall Street crooks out of jail. Well done Kamala, come to the Hamptons and collect your reward.

Meanwhile, Democrats are busy working on stupid slogans. As we learned yesterday.

Don’t worry though, I corrected it for them.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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8 thoughts on “Wall St. Moves to Consolidate Power Over Democrats as the DNC Posts Disastrous Fundraising Numbers”

  1. Kamala Harris is their female version of the next Barack Obama?!

    Black people didn’t turn out for Hillary.

    So:

    Let’s go from a house Negro,

    to a house Negress,

    but we gotta figure out how to shut up Kanye West.

    Sorry, couldn’t resist.

    Reply
  2. Just keep on scraping the barrel so the financial fundamentalist turds remain free to rise to the top … i wonder; when will the stench become too much to bare for ‘the screwed surf’ populace … ? Who or what will they turn to if mainstream poly-(as in ‘many’)-tics(as in blood sucking parasites) herds the masses into further desperation traps? How much naive gulliblity among the masses is there left for the war/profit worshipping financial fundamentalists to exploit? I dunno … duh’oh!

    Reply
  3. What’s the old saying? Fool me once shame on you, fool me 47,839 times shame on me? People (the really, really dense ones) have finally figured out that politicians are liars, thieves, scoundrels and hypocrites and have started doing something about it. Hillary Clinton was a perfect example of what happens when someone as vial as her becomes a candidate. Even those who supported her in the back of their minds wished her to loose.

    Reply
  4. The Dems are worse than the Republicans because they pretend to give a toss about the regular Joe’s, and I would rather have my corruption worn on the sleeve. They don’t even have the balls to run Elizabeth Warren, who isn’t exactly Fidel Castro. Harris is tokenism personified.

    On another note, I don’t even know what a transgender bathroom is. Is that a toilet that changes from a urinal to a shitter? lol

    Reply
  5. Autobiography of a Satrap by (oligarchy, fill in blank).

    As a child I loved to attend church next to the river. Pastor told us not to drink from the water, just as we had earlier found out it wasn’t safe to drink from the faucets at our home. I admired the powerful women and men who had managed to become environmental regulators over their industry. That way, they could create fantastic wealth for themselves. Even more so, I loved how powerful men and women could lie about important matters, even about unsafe drinking water, and get a way with it. I told my grandmother and my father– those are the people I want to be someday!

    As I grew older and went to Harvard, I was recruited by the very admirable group running GS. Jamie Dimon(d) tried to woo me away by promising to give me his presidential seal cuff links that he wore at his Congressional hearing but I stuck with GS. Those were my people. And even though I am actually cisgender I decided it was time to pose as transgender. I knew the party for me was the Democrats!

    Reply
  6. “Wall Street” has been in control of the Democrat party ever since they installed Woodrow Wilson, who promised the voters he would keep the U.S. out of WW1 then appointed Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch to head the War Industries Board. Same as it ever was.

    “In 1915, Bernard Baruch was invited by President Woodrow Wilson to design a plan for a defense mobilization committee. This Baruch plan subsequently became the War Industries Board… By March 1918 President Wilson, acting without Congressional authority, had endowed Baruch with more power than any other individual had been granted in the history of the United States. The War Industries Board, with Baruch as its chairman, became responsible for building all factories and for the supply of all raw material, all products, and all transportation, and all its final decisions rested with chairman Bernard Baruch. In brief, Baruch became economic dictator of the United States.”

    — Antony Sutton, “Wall Street and FDR”, chapter 6

    Reply

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