White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel met with Wall Street investors Sunday, the night before his boss, President Obama, criticized such meetings with Wall Street investors.
In Los Angeles trying to help Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) boost her sagging senatorial campaign that is in serious trouble, Obama Monday called such Wall Street meetings “shocking.”
“The Senate Republican leader, he paid a visit to Wall Street a week or two ago,” Obama said. “He took along the chairman of their campaign committee. He met with some of the movers and shakers up there. I don’t know exactly what was discussed. All I can tell you is when he came back, he promptly announced he would oppose the financial regulatory reform. He would oppose it. Shocking.”
Just one day before, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was meeting with Wall Street “movers and shakers” working out the finer details of the Democrats’ Wall Street reform that sets up a permanent taxpayer-funded bailout structure for “too big to fail” companies.
(As Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a Democrat member of the House Financial Services Committee, told the Politico yesterday that even if the $50 billion bailout slush fund currently in the bill were stripped out, “The Dodd bill has unlimited executive bailout authority. … The bill contains permanent, unlimited bailout authority.”)
The Washington Post reports:
“As President Obama prepares to deliver a speech in New York later this week that will attempt to align his administration squarely on the side of American taxpayers furious with Wall Street, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, met privately on Sunday night with some of the city's top investors,” The Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz and Michael Shear report. “At a private cocktail reception at the Park Avenue home of investors Jane Hartley and Ralph Schlosstein, Emanuel joked about how each of the 60 guests should take a work of art home before speaking seriously about the administration's commitment to regulation reform.”
Perhaps Obama didn’t get the Rahmbo memo?
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blasted Democrats for their support of the $50 billion Wall Street bailout fund from the Senate floor today:
“It is important for the country and taxpayer that we get this right, that we put them before politics. That’s why I was disappointed to read that Senate Democrats are refusing to drop the $50 billion bailout fund - a fund that the Treasury Secretary himself opposes - unless Republicans pay a price for taking it out. This is exactly what Americans don't like about Washington: when one side tries to ‘get’ something for doing what they should have done in the first place. If everyone agrees it should be dropped, then it should be dropped. And if Senate Democrats think it should stay, then they should explain why they think the Treasury Secretary was wrong when he said that this bailout fund ‘would create expectations that the government would step in to protect shareholders and creditors from losses.’
“Both sides have expressed a willingness to make the changes needed to ensure without any doubt that this bill won’t put taxpayers on the hook for future bailouts of Wall Street banks. Let's just do that.”
