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| Home Front: Politix |
| Wall Street Buys Stock in Senator Sherrod Brown |
| 2018-12-13 |
| How they become millionaires. [Free Beacon] Democratic senator Sherrod Brown (Ohio) has raked in millions of dollars from the financial and banking sectors despite depicting himself as an anti-Wall Street populist. Brown, who is weighing a run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, has raised more than $7.3 million from the finance, insurance, and real estate industries since joining Congress in 1998. Of that total, more than $1.8 million came from donors in the security and investment industry‐a subsection of Wall Street. The overwhelming majority of those contributions to Brown‐more than $6 million‐began pouring into his coffers after his election to the U.S. Senate in 2006. As denoted by the Center for Responsive Politics, the donations have only increased in scale since 2015 when Brown became the top Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. The senator has accepted the donations while simultaneously denouncing Wall Street and "corporate greed." Earlier this year, Brown laid out his views on the industry: "Wall Street’s business model systematically undermines American workers," Brown told an Americans for Financial Reform forum in July. "Corporations and their CEOs focus almost exclusively on their quarterly performance in the stock market.... We need to change how we think about the economy‐CEOs don’t drive the economy." "We need policies that restructure our economy so that workers share in the profits they create, and Wall Street doesn't determine when workers keep their jobs or how much is in their paychecks." Despite the tough rhetoric, Brown's support from the financial and banking sectors has continued to flow unabated. During his reelection campaign this year, the senator pulled in more than $5 million from finance, insurance, and real estate interests. A substantial portion of that amount‐more than $1 million‐was raised from the security and investment industry. Overall, more than $3.3 million of the contributions came from individual donors, while more than $1.7 million came from industry-affiliated PACs. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |