Obama Number Two on the Fannie Mae Contributions List

Will team Obama be chanting “We’re number 2! We’re Number 2! ?” somehow I doubt it.

** Video removed due to slow loading from Fox news
Previously:
Enough is Enough
Obama 2nd Biggest Recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Money in Last Ten Years

10 thoughts on “Obama Number Two on the Fannie Mae Contributions List”

  1. You should look at the numbers more closely. Obama is #2 – that is correct. But of the $126,000 that he received, all but $6000 were from individual contributors like you and me. Given that they have/had about 12,000 employees, this adds up to a big – so what!

    You might run the same check on IBM contributions which include both PAC money and individual donations. If individual IBM employees give a candidate a substantial amount of small donations, it hardly follows that the recipient is beholden to the the IBM corporation. The recipient is beholden to the individual donors, who are constrained to a max of $2300.

    The $6000 that Obama received from the Fannie Mae PAC was given prior to Obama announcing that he would no longer accept contributions from PACs. Do not loose sight of the fact that the Obama campaign is ENTIRELY financed by individual donations, most of which are less that $200. You have to admit that that is, quite frankly, remarkable.

    Roy Blount (R) by contrast got $78,000 from Fannie Mae, and the reverse is true. $70000 came from PAC money and $8000 from individual contributors. There are also prominent Democrats, like Harry Reid who took a lot of Fannie Pac money.

    Lies, Damn Lies, and Statictics…

  2. That’s specious bullshit. The Obama campaign is stinking with Union, NEA, and PAC money. It’s why he didn’t go with public financing as McCain did. Nobody from IBM is screwing the American public the Way FANNIE and FREDDY are either.

  3. I am sorry to have invoked that response. But please do a little fact checking before responding

    http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/summary.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638

    McCain is ranked below Obama in terms of the openness of his campaign finance reporting – not by much. In fact, both are the doing a pretty good job, but Obama is squeaky clean. Both have taken effectively $0 from PACs.

    It is fine for you to disagree with Obama on political grounds. We all have different opinions of how things ought to work. But creating acrimony based on bad information does not help anything. You are not alone in this. Our friends in the liberal blogs do the same sort of thing and it is not helpful. The numbers that I sited above are accurate, as is the information in the link that I hope you check out.

    It is astonishing how much money Obama has raised from small individual donors. I am sure that you could counter that Hitler appealed to the masses too. But I am not so cynical. There are millions of thoughtful, well-meaning Americans who have put up their hard-earned cash in support of a candidate that they believe in. The same cannot be said of McCain – at least to the same extent. Just look at the numbers.

  4. Yes, bundling is a problem and it occurs with both parties. However, check the top donors link:

    http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638

    Obama has raised $460 million from well over 2 million donors. The average per individual is about $250. If you add up all ot the money contributed by the top donor corporations and assume that all of this came from the practice of bundling, it amounts to a VERY small fraction of the huge sum that he has raised. I think that you would be very hard pressed to make a legitimate case against the fund-raising practices of the Obama campaign.

    Put simply, his campaign is BRILLIANTLY run, and he has a HUGE amount of financial support from common folks, the likes of which has never been seen in modern politics.

  5. I’m sorry I know where Obama gets some of his money, it comes from his credit card site with no oversight, no reporting and that’s the reason it’s all small donors — it’s a way to hide the true source. You can make donations there from Pakistan if you like. Donations have been made from the West Bank. Try again.

  6. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac employees donated $126,349 to the Obama campaign while they donated $21,550 to McCain. Corporations themselves are ineligible from donating to political campaigns. Whereas, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac board of directors and lobbyists donated $169,000 to McCain and his related committees, compared with $16,000 to Obama and his related committees.

  7. And FNMA and FMAC leaders are advisors to Barack. Barack is tightly tied to ACORN, and has tried cases for them. Barack used to be part of the shakedown of the financial community back in the day when this all started. He’s tightly allied with the house dems who fought off changes while McCain sponsored legislation in ’05 to get this fixed, if you have more I can go on all day. Here are friends of Barack now, trying to get a cut of the bailout http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_dangerous_pals_131216.htm?page=0
    Also you fail to mention that most of those donations to Barack were leadership figures at FNMA and GMAC, while the McCain donations were from general rank and file. McCain didnt’ get donations from Raines and Johnson, Barack did.

  8. I read the NY Post article that you linked to…

    “THE seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Commu nity Reinvestment Act – a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.”

    That is the most ridiculous explanation of the financial crisis that I have encountered to date, and I have read quite a few. While it MAY be a “seed” -and that seems to be quite a stretch in itself – it did not cause the doubling of the world money pool between 1998 and 2006 where the amount of money available for investment went from 36 TRILLION to 72 TRILLION. It was not “community organizers” that used predatory lending practices and willful disregard of due diligence to produce mortgaged-backed securities that were gobbled up by the world money pool. It was MORTGAGE BROKERS and INVESTMENT BANKERS. To lay this mess at the feet of social workers by making a string of thread-thin connections, as this article does, is ludicrous. The NY Post is not a bastion of journalist integrity – or were you unaware of that?

  9. Peter, you seem overly obsessed by this two week old article. There have been many more, with much more info since. Seed is appropriate, but nothing is ever simplex in finance, it’s not complex either, but rather multiplex. In other words there were many seeds to this field of thistles we are in.
    Like the joints on a geodesic dome, many things had to join together first, and at every hub and juncture that built this crisis you will find Democrats, community organizers, and party leaders like Barack Obama.
    Barack sued banks for lending practices right out of the gates of law school. He wasn’t suing them because they had high standards, but rather because they weren’t low enough yet.
    Just like the demonstrations Acorn used to have if loans were turned down. Just like the loosening of standards, just like creation of the GSE’s in the first place. Nurtured by Dems.
    Just like the energy stasis we’ve been in for thirty five years that’s caused so much export of our jobs.
    (America can pay a high standard of living and be more productive than other workers as a function of how much energy we use. The more expensive energy becomes the more our ability to export, produce, and create more withers. You see that effect now with the starvation in poor countries around the world.)
    What devalued home prices in CA and other populous states? Perhaps two years of sustained high energy costs led to that. It wasn’t the only thing, but that’s just one example of Dem policy gone bad.
    In nature you will find that once something stops growing it heads down a path of diminishment towards death, then decay — if something is not growing it’s in the process of dying in other words.
    The Dems are the party of Ennui, they are for steady diminishment by philosophy, they figure they will be dead before the piper comes for his pay. They miscalculated here it seems.

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