Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) harnessed major banks’ reported threats to
withhold funds from Senate Democrats’ campaign arm as a fundraising tool
in a pair of emails to supporters this weekend.
Citing anonymous sources, Reuters reported Friday that representatives from Citigroup and JPMorgan are withholding all or part of their contributions to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in an effort to get Warren and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to soften their tone toward Wall Street. Each bank’s political action committee can donate a maximum of $15,000 per year to the DSCC.
“They have taken their shot, but it will not work,” Warren wrote Friday in an email to supporters that cited the Reuters report.
“I’m not going to stop talking about the unprecedented grasp that Citigroup has on our government’s economic policymaking apparatus,” she added. “I’m not going to stop talking about the settlement agreements that JPMorgan makes with our Justice Department that are so weak, the bank celebrates by giving their executives a raise. And I’m not going to pretend the work of financial reform is done, when the so-called ‘too big to fail’ banks are even bigger now than they were in 2008.”
Warren urged supporters to respond by raising the $30,000 the banks allegedly threatened to withhold from the DSCC. Having surpassed that goal, the senator sent out another email blast Saturday asking her supporters to throw down with the big banks once more and raise another $30,000.
I say let them withhold it and when the Democrats win in 2016 they can then thumb their noses at the banks and start regulating them properly again.
This is going make her look heroic, and gain her even more support.
People mostly hate banks. So they will vote the opposite of what the banks want, if the banks decide to be so nakedly pro-Republican.
Citigroup and JPMorgan should be taken apart and sold.
The TBTF banks will be fine if Warren can get enough traction behind a move to once again separate commercial banking form investment banking.
Not only will that make them considerably smaller, it will make banking what it should be—dull, boring, and reliably profitable.