Goldman Sachs Gave Sen. Shelby $5,000 The Day After He Denounced The CFPB As ‘Dangerous’
By Pat Garofalo
Sep 6, 2011
Republicans today, as Travis Waldron noted, continued promising to filibuster the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as Cordray made his first appearance before Congress. A spokesman for Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), the Senate Banking Committee’s ranking member, said that “opposition to or support of Mr. Cordray’s nomination will become relevant as soon as the President agrees to make the structural changes we’ve requested.” “Until then, Sen. Shelby and his colleagues stand firmly behind the statement they expressed in their May letter: No accountability, no confirmation,” he added.
Few lawmakers have spent as much time trying to block the creation and then implementation of the CFPB as Shelby. And as the Public Campaign Action Fund noted today, some of Wall Street’s biggest players have rewarded Shelby for his efforts:
A day after Sen. Shelby published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about his opposition to Cordray, the Alabama Senator’s political action committee (PAC), Defend America, received a $5,000 donation from the Goldman Sachs PAC and $1,500 from the PAC for MFS, a Boston-based investment firm.
In that op-ed, Shelby called the CFPB “dangerous” for businesses and said that its “only a matter of time before [the CFPB's] concentration of power is abused or misused to the detriment of American businesses and consumers.” Of course, the timing could just be coincidental, but during the 2010 election cycle, securities and investment firms were Shelby’s top contributors, giving more than $1 million to his campaign and his leadership PAC.
OCU
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