After Dick Fuld’s embarrassing and uncomfortable first outing since the fall of Lehman Brothers, Andrew Stiles over at the conservative Free Beacon eagerly claimed that Fuld is a big donor to Democrats, writing, “Given his history of political donations, its reasonable to assume that Fuld would prefer a Hillary Clinton presidency.” (sic)
Such high hopes.
But given the fact that Hillary Clinton was a Senator presiding over New York and thus Wall Street from January 3, 2001 to January 21, 2009, it’s reasonable to presume that Fuld wanted to grease the wheels. Since Stiles didn’t link to where he got his numbers that immediately followed this claim, Google took me to an old American Thinker blog post (also a conservative outlet) in which the author left out the donations Fuld made to Republican Senatorial Committee, PACs that serve Republicans, and in the last paragraph, conflated the employees of Lehman who donated to Obama with Fuld.
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The link that author used to Open Secrets to claim that Fuld gave over a hundred thousand dollars to Democrats says “no records found”. The only way to get those kind of numbers from the numbers available is to count donations form employees, family members of employees, etc as if they came from Fuld.
The fact of the matter is that Fuld donated to both Republicans and Democrats. They all took his money, though I couldn’t find records of him donating after 2008. In 2008, for example, Fuld donated the to Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John McCain, Barack Obama… Yes. That’s right. He greased the wheels every which way. He gave $10,000 to both Republican and Democratic Senatorial committees. Fuld donated to Bush/Cheney and to Democrats in 2000.
Fuld also donated to the “Freedom Fund” which in turn donated only to Republicans, another figure left out of the calculations used to prove that Fuld is a “benefactor” of Democrats and thus smear Democrats with his failure.
These people don’t donate to one party, they hedge bets like all entities that need laws bent their way.
This is why we must all remain vigilant about the policies politicians are hawking. But no matter who they donate to, it’s beyond disingenuous for conservatives to pretend that their platform doesn’t push for total deregulation of Wall Street and the dismantling of all speed bumps.
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