OPINION:
Wall Street’s “fat-cat bankers,” as he calls them, are among those whom Mr. Obama loves to hate. Yet he has pocketed their supposedly tainted funds for years.
According to OpenSecrets.org, the Center for Responsible Politics’ indispensable campaign-finance database, Mr. Obama has collected $4,164,417 in donations for his 2012 election campaign from individuals in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors. Through Nov. 14, this included $1,778,628 from the securities and investment industries (his fifth-largest donation source), $584,384 from miscellaneous finance, and $251,324 from commercial banks. Bank of America employees, for example, have coughed up $26,562. OpenSecrets.org’s categories aggregate Federal Election Commission data.
These windfall profits from the money-changing upper crust did not prevent Mr. Obama from endorsing Occupy Wall Street, never mind its attacks on legal businesses as well as episodes of public defecation, anti-Semitism, sexual assaults, arson and other violence.
Mr. Obama told journalists on Oct. 6 that the Occupiers at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park were “giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” Five days later, Mr. Obama complained that “not everybody’s been following the rules.” He added: “Wall Street is an example of that.”
Occupy Wall Street’s early idealism soon grew ugly. Sexual molestation of women at Zuccotti Park prompted organizers to open a female-only tent where protesters could sleep, en masse, without getting groped.
“I think the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve … need to be run out of this country,” declared one Los Angeles Occupier. “Jewish money controls American politics,” a New York Occupier complained. Still others hollered: “Jews control Wall Street!”
“Shut down Burger King,” Occupy Oakland protesters screamed while sabotaging an establishment that feeds “the 99 percent.” They soon set fires in downtown Oakland and defaced buildings with graffiti. Then they blockaded the Port of Oakland on Nov. 2, irritating unionized longshoremen.
On Nov. 4, thuggish Occupiers forcefully disrupted the free-market Defending the American Dream Summit in Washington, D.C.
“I’m a communist,” one L.A. Occupier said Nov. 7 on Fox News. He concluded: “Nothing positive can come about unless you get rid of America.”
After all of this, when Occupiers heckled Mr. Obama in New Hampshire, he re-embraced them. As he said Nov. 22, “young people like the ones here today - including the ones who were just chanting at me - you’re the reason that I ran for office in the first place.”
Then again, Wall Street’s money never has been too dirty for Mr. Obama’s campaigns, his derision notwithstanding.
For his 2008 presidential bid, donors in the securities and investment industry were Mr. Obama’s No. 4 source of campaign loot, just behind education. Wall Street, broadly defined, poured $15,798,904 into Mr. Obama’s treasure chest. Overall, contributors in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors pumped $42,047,073 into Mr. Obama’s quest for “hope and change.” That contest’s top contributors included those at Mr. Obama’s No. 2 campaign spigot, Goldman Sachs ($1,013,091). Other leading donors included staffers at JPMorgan Chase ($808,799), Citigroup ($736,771), UBS ($532,674) and Morgan Stanley ($512,232).
Even for Mr. Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate race, the securities and investment industry’s political action committees furnished $61,500. Individuals wrote checks for $1,490,697. Total: $1,552,197.
Nevertheless, Mr. Obama denounced his own financial supporters April 10 as people who will “take whatever you can get, however you can get it.”
If Wall Street really is so disgusting, Mr. Obama easily can purify himself of this supposed infection: Return all this money and reject further funds from financiers. If Wall Street and its denizens really are as repulsive as Mr. Obama insists, he should eagerly refund their nasty money and refuse any more of it.
If Barack H. Obama fails to do this, Americans should conclude that the H does not stand for Hussein. It means Hypocrite.
Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
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