Barack Obama Sided with Credit Card Loan Sharks While Hillary Clinton Stood Against Them

Obama's numerous corporate donors were pleased -- especially The Bond Market Association's legislative affairs guy Mike Williams. While Obama voted against the 2005 bankruptcy bill, he voted against "an important amendment, which was defeated, that would have capped credit-card interest rates at 30 percent." 

"[Obama] studied the issue," Williams said. "Some assumed he would just go along with consumer advocates, but he voted with us on several points. He understood the issue. He wasn't closed-minded. A lot of people found that very refreshing." -- "Barack Obama Inc.,"Harper's

Sen. Hillary Clinton voted for the cap on predatory credit card interest rates.

The American economy is collapsing, middle class families are floundering, home foreclosures are spreading, housing prices are diving, unemployment is up (did you see the disturbing report yesterday?), oil is at $100 a barrel, and what can working families do to thank Barack Obama in this crisis? Obama made good on his rhetoric to work with Republicans -- by exploiting middle class and working people. (Dayton Amendment, U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote -- Obama Nay; Clinton Yea)

"There's a reasonableness about him," he said. "I don't see him as being on the liberal fringe. He's not going to be a parrot for the party line." -- Robert Harmala of Venable, one of the nation's top corporate law firms.

Here's what David Sirota had to say about Sen. Obama's vote for credit card company usury -- and please note that Sirota corrects the Obama campaign's attempt to confuse the issue:

October 24, 2007 11:13 AM

Obama Camp Feigns Outrage, Distracting From Obama's Vote to Allow Loan Sharking

The Obama campaign is attacking the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson for saying that Obama voted for the credit card industry-written Bankruptcy Bill in 2005, which is not true. Obama voted against the final bill. However, Obama did, in fact, vote against an amendment to that bill that cuts to the core of the matter. [...]

It was an amendment by Sen. Mark Dayton (D-MN) "To limit the amount of interest that can be charged on any extension of credit to 30 percent," as the Senate's website notes.

So sure, while Meyerson got the details wrong, the spirit of what he wrote is, in fact, right. Obama sided with the credit card industry on the core issue of whether it should be allowed to loan shark and charge customers more than an astounding 30 percent interest rate.

Adds Mother Jones magazine's article, "Campaign Contributions from Credit Card Companies? Priceless":

Obama, who made a strong floor speech in opposition to the 2005 bankruptcy bill, nonetheless voted against a key amendment that would have put a cap of 30 percent on interest rates. Financial firms, according to Ken Silverstein's much-discussed Harper's article "Barack Obama Inc.,""constitute Obama's second biggest single bloc of donors." You'll find nary a word about the debt crisis on his campaign web site.

Share this with your friends who are drunk with the prospects of "hope" and "change" and the end of "special influences":

Yet it is also startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation's manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama's top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a "leadership PAC," a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians' campaigns--and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.

Already considered a potential vice-presidential nominee in 2008, Obama clearly has abundant political ambitions. Hence he is playing not only to voters in Illinois--a reliably Democratic and generally liberal state--but to the broader national audience, as well as to the Democratic Party establishment, the Washington media, and large political donors. Perhaps for this reason, Obama has taken an approach to his policymaking that is notably cautious and nonconfrontational. "Since the founding, the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary," he told me during an interview at his office on Capitol Hill this summer. ...

Read all: "Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington machine," Harper's magazine.