Letters to the Editor
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@ Uncle Fester: Helpful Information
Donations are from individuals (employees, family members, PACs). It is possible that some of these banks/lenders do more than subprime lending. But Countrywide, WaMu, Citigroup are big time subprime lenders. Countrywide and WaMu, especially, are in serious financial trouble as a result of these loans.
Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs are brokerage firms, but they also serve as banks and have contributed to the subprime mess by holding mortgage securities for banks, then bundling and selling them to other countries (China, Japan, GB, Australia), sometimes at face value and sometimes for far less than face value.
I got a Factcheck alert a few days ago about campaign contributions, raised because Barack Obama said he received 90% of his contributions from "small" ($25) individual donors. According to Factcheck, he gets about 35% of his donations from small contributions; 2/3 comes from contributions of >$200. Then I received another factcheck that linked to CRP about corporate contributors, so I followed it and did some searching based on a USA Today article about subprime lenders.
It strikes me as disingenuous on Obama's part to say that he doesn't take corporate/lobbyist $$, when in fact he does. The $1.7 million is just a drop in the bucket of all industries that contribute to his campaign. OTOH, Clinton has never made this a centerpiece of her campaign.