On July 21, 2011, the Huffington Post reported:
As Democrats urge Elizabeth Warren, one of Wall Street’s most public foes, to seek a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts next year, the financial industry is already throwing its support behind the seat’s current occupant, Sen. Scott Brown (R), giving him nearly $315,000 in the most recent fundraising quarter.
[…]
Financial donations to Brown also spiked last summer, as Congress was considering financial regulatory reform. As the Boston Globe reported, between mid-June and early-July 2010, Brown took in $140,000 from banks and investment firms and their executives, which was 400 percent more than the average received by other Republican senators during that same time period.
Brown eventually voted for the legislation, but not before extracting key concessions to benefit the financial industry in his state. As Newsweek wrote at the time, Brown “managed to dramatically weaken the ‘Volcker rule’ barring banks from speculative proprietary trading, proposing a 2 percent exemption (which conference chair Sen. Chris Dodd then generously raised to 3 percent), and he got the Democrats to quash a planned $19 billion rainy-day tax on banks as well.”
Read the whole article here
Published: Jul 22, 2011