Having billions of dollars immediately available to plug budget holes without raising taxes is very appealing. And to the delight of Wall Street investors, state and local governments often fail to ask the important questions or consider the long-term impact.
Obama supporters pretended that his 2008 campaign was some sort of populist uprising even as Wall Street overwhelmingly supported his candidacy.
It’s a battle in which the Wall Street lobbying and public-relations machine will have a decisive advantage…. With the regulators, you don’t have to win. You just have to gum them up. And that is exactly what Wall Street has done.
Men in the shadow of Wall Street are not qualified to be President.
Running against FDR for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination:
After all, Wall Street is clearly the most powerful lobbying force on Capitol Hill. From 1998 through 2008, the financial sector spent over $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to deregulate Wall Street.
Henry Blodget says, "It is not clear what, if any, power and influence [Steven Lerner] currently wields. His main message - that Wall Street won the financial crisis, that inequality in this country is hitting record levels, and that there appears to be no other way to stop the trend - will almost certainly resonate."
Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.
There is a reason why these people [from Wall Street] are putting huge amounts of money into our political system. And in my view, it is undermining American democracy and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors and not the working families of this country.
America is run by corporations, it is run by banks and Wall Street. That's why we can't get guns under control. It's because all these lobbyists don't want gun control, they don't want us to have strong environmental safety guards. Young people can become aware of that and they are the most powerful lobby. With a click of a text, you can have millions of people voting for one person.
I think what the secretary Hillary Clinton has recognized is the American people are extremely angry about the power of Wall Street, the greed, the illegal behavior of Wall Street.
I actually never thought that Barack Obama was anything but a typical Democratic party politician, which to me meant that he was probably in bed with Wall Street.
I don't agree with Bernie Sanders that the banks should be broken up at this point. But Hillary Clinton's acceptance of huge contributions from Goldman Sachs and others... And we don't debate what Clinton has done. She has a public record. She's been Secretary of State. She's basically a candidate of Wall Street, for Wall Street.
Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street... Over 100,000 shopgirls are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them.
Change the way we fund campaigns. Until we do, Wall Street will always be able to blackmail the Dems and GOP to giving them what Wall Street wants.
If there's anyone who's against Wall Street, it's Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, who basically lives off of the funding from Wall Street.
The Aldrich Plan is the Wall Street Plan. It means another panic, if necessary, to intimidate the people. Aldrich, paid by the government to represent the people, proposes a plan for the trusts instead.
The idea that we're going to austerity ourselves into prosperity is so mistaken, and honestly, I feel like one of the big problems we have is that, because Democrats don't have a deep understanding of or degrees in economics, they allow Wall Street folks to roll in the door and think that they're giving them an education.
Well, "The Washington post" three weeks ago had this investigation and they said that President Obama has now raised more money from Wall Street and the banks for this election cycle than all - than all eight Republicans combined. I don't want to say that, because if that's the truth, that Wall Street already has their man and his name is Barack Obama, then we've got a much bigger problem.
I supported Barack Obama originally. I supported him for reelection and the alternative of a Mitt Romney is very, very clear to everybody. And I think the president has done a good job in a number of areas. But one area that has concerned me from day one has been his reliance on Wall Street type people in terms of financial matters.
You know, I think many people have the mistaken impression that Congress regulates Wall Street. In truth that's not the case. The real truth is that Wall Street regulates the Congress.
Hillary Clinton is totally controlled by Wall Street and all these people that gave her millions.
Wall Street's outsized influence in our nation's capital is something I've talked about for a long time - long before I even thought about running for office. But where I see a problem - an infestation, really - a lot of others in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans, seem to see government working just fine.
The policies that Hillary [Clinton] advocates are going to be more of the same, whether you're looking at her cozy relationships with the banks, her refusal to support Glass-Steagall, her vagueness about what actually she's going to do about the control of the big banks.
I called for a consumer protection financial bureau before it was created. And I think the best evidence that the Wall Street people at least know where I stand and where I have always stood is because they are trying to beat me in this primary.
Say good-bye to Dodd-Frank and all of the financial reforms and efforts to try to rein in Wall Street. Just say good-bye to it. That means we can go where Wall Street gets to call the shots again. We saw how that worked out in 2008.