Patrick Murphy-- Even Worse Than You Imagined

Recently Jim DeFede interviewed Patrick Murphy on WFOR-TV. He's a solid interviewer, and his questions helped bring out not just Murphy's despicable voting record but what he's all about. 

A couple of minutes into this segment DeFede asks Murphy, best known as Wall Street's most dedicated handmaiden on the Democratic side of the aisle, about greed. "Wall Street is going great," DeFede says. "Through the roof. Where does corporate greed come in in your mind?" Murphy acknowledges the problem: "No question it exists, and unfortunately America has topped the world in many ways, greed and selfish behavior." DeFede doesn't exactly accuse him of taking bribes from the banksters, but his next question gets close: "You sit on the House Financial Services Committee and you accepted a lot of money from banks on Wall Street. I could go through the list: CitiGroup, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, UBS, on down the line. You've accepted a lot of money from them. What are they expecting from you?

Murphy: "Nothing."

DeFede (laughing): "You think they expect nothing from you?

Murphy: "Nothing. I've never taken any pledge to not accept certain things. I don't tell people they're going to get anything but a hard-working Member of Congress. [This is especially rich inasmuch as Murphy was just named the least effective Member of Congress and is widely regarded as lazy as he is ineffective.] Sounding a lot like Donald Trump, with whom he has been in business, he then added, deceitfully, "The vast majority of my support comes from low-dollar donations, people from across the state of Florida sending five-, ten-dollar donations. You're not asking if I'm giving them any special commitments. That money adds up to significantly more than what these folks--"

DeFede, who may have seen the above chart from Open Secrets showing that only a minuscule 7% of Murphy's campaign contributions came from small donors, interrupts: "But if Bank of America ends up writing you checks for $10,000 here, $5,000 there, versus Joe Smith, who writes you a check for $25, there's a different weight there... You've been criticized for taking positions that have weakened Dodd-Frank. You've voted to delay implementation of some of the measures of Dodd-Frank that would be in protection guarantees against the type of greed that we saw the banks and the financial institutions use in the past. How do you address that?"

Murphy, uncomfortable and going into full-on liar mode worthy of a Carly Fiorina: "I support Dodd-Frank and the vast majority of Dodd-Frank is good. But like any legislation, its not perfect..." He droned on and on about how he supports small banks and how they support him as well. Last year he took in $873,330 from business-related PACs and only $250,000 from labor-related PACs, the opposite situation for a normal Democrat. And this chart shows which specific business-related sector was the most generous to Murphy's reelection campaign:

Back in 2013, when Murphy was a budding New Dem freshman who had just months earlier left the Republican Party to run for Congress, we covered a controversial vote on an amendment written by CitiBank lobbyists meant to gut a piece of the above-mentioned Dodd-Frank financial-reform consumer-protection act. Even before the vote on the amendment itself, there was a normally party-line roll call on the Republican rule allowing it to proceed. Every single Republican plus six of the most corrupt Wall Street-owned Democrats voted for it, all New Dems and Blue Dogs: Ron Barber (AZ), Jim Costa (CA), Mike McIntyre (NC), Bill Owens (NY), Scott Peters (CA) and, of course, Murphy. The following day 70 Wall Street-oriented Democrats-- including Murphy, naturally-- joined all but three Republicans to pass CitiBank's amendment. The final vote was 292-122. The 70 bad Democrats were led over the aisle by corrupt corporate business shills among the Democratic leadership and the New Dem leadership: Steny Hoyer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Crowley, Jim Himes, Ron Kind, and Rick Larsen. Murphy and the other 69 treacherous Democrats who crossed the aisle and voted with the GOP for the banksters' amendment that day were the ones who got the bulk of the bribery from Wall Street for the next four years.

In the last cycle (2014) the finance sector gave the GOP $135,570,956 and the Democrats, primarily corrupt conservative Democrats, $85,174,595. Of the congressmembers whom the banksters gave a million dollars or more, 16 were Republicans and only 4 were Democrats. And only one, Murphy, was a junior Democrat. The top 9 recipients were GOP heavies like Speaker John Boehner, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, etc. The Democrat who got the most from the sector was Michigan New Dem Gary Peters, who was running for the Senate ($1,413,187), followed by former New Dem chairman and Wall Street suck-up Joe Crowley ($1,190,058) and New Dem vice chairman and former Wall Street banker Jim Himes ($1,144,988), followed by Murphy ($1,130,150), who managed to get more from the banksters than even Steve Israel and Steny Hoyer, two of Wall Street's top Democratic shills.

Kudos to Jim DeFede for noticing the relationship between Wall Street contributions and Patrick Murphy's voting record. Few journalists ever connect these kinds of dots, and fewer still have the gumption to throw them into a congressman's face. One of his local Florida newspapers, the Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News, also noticed that Murphy was voting with his old party, the Republicans, on the legislation Wall Street was pushing. They pointed out on May 10 of this year, for example, that Murphy was one of only a few Wall Street-owned Democrats to vote with the GOP for delaying a provision of Dodd-Frank that would force banks to divest themselves of the risky investments that caused the 2008 financial crisis: "Murphy also was one of 29 House Democrats who in January voted for a two-year delay in implementing a Dodd-Frank provision that requires banks to sell off risky debt securities, called collateralized loan obligations, similar to the mortgage securities that caused the 2008 crash."

But what the Wall Street banksters pay off Murphy for is his votes inside the House Financial Services Committee, where he almost always votes against consumers and for the powerful banksters who give him almost all the campaign cash he spends that he doesn't get from his father and his father's corrupt friends and cronies. This is a typical-- hard-to-come-by-- vote count from the committee that another member, who told me he wants to puke whenever he sees Murphy plottting with his Republican pals, gave me. Notice that all the Republicans and five corrupt New Dems voted for another attempt to cripple Dodd-Frank while the actual Democrats voted against it. Same thing with this bill on May 7, 2013, which found Murphy and the other untrustworthy Democrats voting with the Republicans in the committee while actual Democrats tried to hold the line against the tide of Wall Street bribes.

When Wall Street, angry at the beating they were taking at the hands of Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, publicly threatened to cut off the DSCC, Wall Street's #1 shill, Chuck Schumer, promised them he would help get Murphy into the Senate to help balance the "bad influence" of the likes of Warren, Brown and Sanders. Schumer has been fighting ever since-- fighting dirty, of course-- to sabotage Alan Grayson in the Florida primary and push Murphy, whom the DSCC was ordered to endorse. As Grayson said himself-- in a letter to supporters yesterday-- "four straight polls show, we’re leading, but it’s close-- and when you factor in the millions of dollars that Goldman Sachs and every other Wall Street bank is shoving into my opponent’s pockets, we have a real fight on our hands. Being one of the last true Democrats in this party has put a big, fat target on my back. I need your help to prepare for the onslaught of Big Money."

Your contribution, if you make it today, will pay for a lot of important things:

• Registering voters, and helping them to vote at home, by mail.
• Providing targeting software to our army of volunteers, who once dialed 62,000 voters in just one day.
• Paying canvassers who take our campaign to the doors of the voters.
• And so much more.

But here’s one thing that your contribution won’t do-- ever. You can’t buy my vote. Unlike my opponent, I am unbought and unbossed. I vote “yea” if a bill makes the world a better place, and “nay” if it doesn’t. So you can’t buy my vote, but then neither can the millionaires and the billionaires, and the special interests and the lobbyists and PACs. In fact, that’s exactly why I need your support-- and why I’m the only Member of the House who raised most of his campaign funds from small donors, just one out of 435.

We cannot afford yet another U.S. Senator who is owned by the Wall Street cabal. We cannot afford yet another U.S. Senator who has a lien on his voting card, and a mortgage on his soul. Nobody owns me. If I win this election, I will be the one U.S. Senator who-- you can be sure-- will fight for the common good, and owes nothing to anyone but the voters.

If you want a U.S. Senator who fights for justice, equality and peace, not for the top 1%, then chip in whatever you can afford to Alan's campaign. Want to help counterbalance Schumer and Wall Street? Here's the place.