Sean Patrick Maloney: Pond Scum Of The Week

A GOP ad that was inadvertently correct about Sean Patrick Maloney

Every now and then David Feldman, originally a San Francisco standup comedian, more recently a TV script writer, interviews me for his radio show on one of the public stations here in L.A. I've never heard it but everyone now and then I'll get an e-mail from someone who heard it, usually as a podcast they listened to in Sweden or Germany or Australia. We did another one on Thursday and David asked me if there was a political villain of the week. There were so many but the one I was focused on at the moment was rotten New Dem Sean Patrick Maloney, a freshman from New York's Hudson Valley. He's been voting really badly all week-- in committee and on the floor... and especially as it pertains to the plutocracy he's obviously enamored of (like most New Dems).

Maloney is openly gay and supports LGBT rights. That's about the only good thing you can say about his time in Congress. He represents a swing district but Obama beat McCain 52-47% in 2008 and beat Romney 51-47% last year. Maloney votes as though he were representing a deep red district and had to cater to wingnuts to keep his career going. On Wednesday, for example, he was one of the 19 Democrats-- mostly Blue Dogs and frightened members from oil states-- who crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans on their unconstitutional scheme to take President Obama out of the Keystone XL pipeline decision-making process. Maloney has a lot of very wealthy friends. Last year an astronomical 72% of his campaign contributions were from big donors. Small contributions made up just 10%, one of the smallest numbers for any Democrat in Congress. That helps explain why he always votes in the interest of the wealthy and is as against normal working families as any garden variety Republican. (Except, like I said, on gay issues; he's good on gay issues.) But it isn't the full story. On his blog yesterday, Robert Reich filled in another piece, although it wasn't just about Maloney but about bad Dems in general, and especially the Big Business-financed New Dems:

Who needs Republicans when Wall Street has the Democrats? With the help of congressional Democrats, the Street is rolling back financial reforms enacted after its near meltdown.

According to the New York Times, a bill that’s already moved through the House Financial Services Committee, allowing more of the very kind of derivatives trading (bets on bets) that got the Street into trouble, was drafted by Citigroup-- whose recommended language was copied nearly word for word in 70 lines of the 85-line bill.

Where were House Democrats? Right behind it. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a major recipient of the Street’s political largesse, co-sponsored it. [Reich didn't mention that Goldman Sachs was one of Maloney's Top half dozen contributors for 2012; I thought you'd want to know.] Most of the Democrats on the Committee, also receiving generous donations from the big banks, voted for it. Rep. Jim Himes, another proponent of the bill and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, now leads the Democrat’s fund-raising effort in the House.

Bob Rubin-- co-chair of Goldman before he joined the Clinton White House, and chair of Citigroup’s management committee after he left it-- is still influential in the Party, and his protégés are all over the Obama administration. I like Bob personally but I battled his Street-centric views the whole time I served, and soon after I left the administration he persuaded Clinton to support a repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

Jack Lew, Obama’s current Treasury Secretary, was chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit, a proprietary trading group, from 2006 to 2008, before he joined the Obama administration. Peter Orszag, Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, left the Obama Administration to become Citigroup’s vice chairman of corporate and investment banking, and chairman of the financial strategy and solutions group.

All these men are honorable. [I have to interrupt again; that last sentence is crazy and it's wrong and Reich is jumping to conclusions because these are people he knows personally.] None has broken any law [as far as Reich knows]. But they and their ilk in Congress-- the Democrats who are now rolling back Dodd-Frank-- don’t seem to appreciate the extent to which Wall Street has harmed, and continues to harm, America.

It’s not entirely coincidental that the Obama Administration never put tough conditions on banks receiving bailout money, never prosecuted a single top Wall Street executive for the excesses that led to the near meltdown, and still refuses to support a tiny tax on financial transactions that would bring in tens of billions of dollars as well as discourage program trading.

Democrats can’t be trusted to control Wall Street. If there were ever an issue ripe for a third party, the Street would be it.

Or serious campaign finance reform?

Friday night Chris Hayes and Eliot Spitzer showed the inherent corruption endemic to the New Dem freshmen like Maloney-- and why they should be defeated for reelection. This is a pretty amazing video: