Wall Street spent $1.4 billion to kill regulation

This is from a fund-raising letter from democracyforamerica.com, a progressive non-profit dedicated to saving and improving our democratic form of government.  I believe it is an honest, liberal activist group.

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"Wall Street is the single largest source of campaign contributions for federal candidates for both the Republican and Democratic parties.  In the 2014 cycle, Wall Street spent more than $1.4 billion on political donations and lobbying.
 
"Now Wall Street is demanding a return on its investment. Corporate banks are holding their campaign contributions over the heads of Democrats in Congress -- and if the party doesn't do their bidding, they're threatening to take their cash and go home. . 

"It's not a coincidence that bigwig bankers are choosing now to start acting like mob bosses, threatening to withhold precious campaign money if Democrats don't get in line with their agenda. Wall Street regulation is almost certainly going to be a central issue in the 2016 presidential election.

"Banks like Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs see 2016 as their big opportunity to elect a Congress that will repeal Dodd-Frank and neuter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- the agency that Elizabeth Warren fought to create in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. They want to take regulation back to the "good old days" when they could take all the risks they wanted and the taxpayers would foot the bill for their mistakes.

"Republicans will unquestionably campaign on giving the big banks their way. But Democrats? Many of them say they want an economy that works for everyone. But the more they depend on Wall Street for funding, the more likely they are to have the banks' back when push comes to shove.

"So what, exactly, are big banks getting in return for such a huge investment?

"More than most voters realize -- and not just from Republicans.

"Remember a few months ago when DFA joined Elizabeth Warren and other progressives to mount an aggressive push back against a Citibank-authored amendment -- the one which repealed the part of Dodd-Frank that stopped big banks from taking risky gambles with taxpayer money?

"That amendment passed with significant Democratic support -- and the Democrats who voted in support of deregulation received TWICE as much in campaign contributions from Wall Street as the Democrats who voted against it."

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 I think this is all true, and I trust Democracy For America to be honest -- even in a fund-raising letter.   Another example of the corrupting power of money in politics.

Ralph