“I am asking you to please make a generous contribution of at least $99 (donations of $100 or more are publicly disclosed), or whatever you can afford, to help us reverse this unjust law and hold the legislators who imposed it accountable,” wrote NOM President Brian Brown (also treasurer of NOM NY PAC) in a fundraising email sent to supporters Sunday. “When it comes to elections, money talks. … We must have the resources to hold these turncoat Republican senators accountable! We CANNOT let them get away with this!”

According to Brown, NOM NY PAC needs to raise $100,000 by tomorrow night in order to make a “down payment” on the $2 million NOM says it needs to “restore a pro-marriage majority in Albany next year.”

The NOM NY PAC was created in 2009 and has a physical location in Huntington, N.Y., according to the New York State Board of Elections.

According to state campaign finance disclosure reports, in 2009, NOM NY PAC raised nearly $2,900 (about 75 percent of which came from NOM’s national organization and anonymous, “unitemized” monetary and in-kind contributions); in 2010, the PAC raised approximately $6,600; and as of July 2011, NOM had raised about $25,000, of which $10,872, or 43 percent, comes from anonymous “unitemized” monetary contributions. Of the identified 105 individual contributions, about one-third were made from New York addresses. The rest came largely from California and other states across the country, as well as one $100 donation from Pinegowrie, South Africa.

This month, NOM released a web ad showing heavily pixilated New York state Sens. Roy McDonald (District 43), Mark Grisanti (District 60), Stephen Saland (District 41) and James Alesi (District 55) “dancing” while money rains down on them. A banner reads: “Same Sex Money Dance for the NY GOP Four – Fundraiser Sponsored by Billionaires.”

The ad was in response to an Oct. 13 fundraiser held for the aforementioned senators, hosted by Republican supporters of gay marriage, such as Mayor Bloomberg, hedge fund managers Paul E. Singer and Daniel S. Loeb and software entrepreneur and philanthropist Tim Gill, who founded the LGBT-rights organization the Gill Foundation in 1994. (Full disclosure: The Gill Foundation is a donor to the American Independent News Network.) The fundraiser was expected to raise $1.25 million.

In September NOM launched a billboard campaign across the state of New York featuring the respective senators’ names with the messages “Your Fired!” and, more recently, “You’re Next.”

“[M]any elected officials like Mayor Bloomburg [sic] and Governor [Andrew] Cuomo think that their legislative priority is imposing same-sex marriage, not creating jobs and fixing the economy,” Brown writes in Sunday’s email. “I promise you, we will not rest until we have repealed same-sex marriage in New York and stopped this wealthy minority from thwarting the will of the people!”

Last week, Grisanti told Buffalo’s WIVP.com his vote for same-sex marriage was not about money.

“It wasn’t, you know, ‘You vote this way and you’re going to see an influx of cash,’ or anything like that in your pockets,” Grisanti told the local news organization. “If I had voted no on this marriage equality bill,” said Grisanti, “I’d probably be getting money from the other side as well. So I don’t see why it’s such a big issue.”

New York is not the only state where NOM is using out-of-state resources to influence state Senate elections by pushing marriage equality as a wedge issue. Last week, NOM launched an independent expenditure campaign in Iowa with The Family Leader, an Iowa-based affiliate of the Family Research Council, to support Republican Cindy Golding’s candidacy for Iowa Senate against her Democratic rival Liz Mathis.

As ThinkProgress reports, NOM has already committed more than $15,000 into the Iowa Senate election.

The revolving door has been swinging in the Romney campaign. One of his funders, T. Martin Fiorentino, has lobbied against anti-predatory lending legislation for a foreclosure mill called Lender Processing Services, according to the Boston Globe.

In his most recent FEC filings, one of his largest individual contributors was a Dallas area realtor, Ebby Halliday of Ebby Halliday Inc., who donated $10,000 to the campaign. In Dallas, foreclosure rates have been steadily but slowly increasing.

Romney’s position on fixing the housing crisis has been to reject any course of government regulation. Visiting Nevada, a state leading the nation in foreclosures, Romney told the Las Vegas Review’s Journal Tuesday that “as to what to do for the housing industry specifically… don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”

A former executive at Bain Capital, a company focusing on “venture and expansion capital for private companies,” Romney has also opposed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, which would regulate America’s financial institutions. Many say that stance is what led to his becoming the one recipient of Wall Street cash, having received more than $7.5 million from the finance, insurance and real estate sector since he launched his presidential campaign, which accounts for 23 percent of his war chest.

In particular, he has recorded more donations than any other candidate from employees of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase – financial firms which have all faced federal investigations in the past two years.

However, it’s still big banks that win most from loose regulations and continuing foreclosures.

Many of Romney’s big Wall Street donors have been accused of shady mortgage practices – Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley are all under investigation for concealing troubled mortgage loans.

Romney also brought lobbyists supportive of private interests onto his campaign as foreign policy advisors. These included an advisor that works for a German bank opposed to cap-and-trade environmental regulation, according to The Boston Globe.

“A friend of mine chastised me the other day. He said I was being too hostile toward the occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere,” Wrote Erickson in the Friday blog. “[A]round the country there are… a lot of angry, unemployed people who just think the deck is stacked against them… These people are open to listen to anyone who is willing to take on Wall Street…. We shouldn’t let unwashed hippies be the only people they hear speaking to their concerns.

“[T]he time is right for a Republican candidate to take up the cause of populism against Wall Street.”

Erickson has mocked the Occupy Wall Street movement as anti-American, communist and vague and its supporters as generally filthy and unlikeable. That line got a lot of traction on the political right for weeks. Erickson even took the lead in formulating the right’s online response to the movement.

“We Are the 53 Percent” is the tea partyish response to “We Are the 99 Percent,” an Occupy Wall Street blog that posts stories of the overwhelmingly unemployed, underemployed, semi-employed, overworked, debt-ridden and uninsured population of the United States. That’s the 99 percent. The 53 percent referred to in the anti-Occupy blog refers to the specious GOP talking point that only 53 percent of households pay federal income taxes.

The stories posted at the “We Are the 53 Percent” are supposed to provide a peak into the lives and mindset of hardworking conservative contributors to American society, a supposed contrast with the kind of people who want a free-ride, which is how Erickson had been describing the Occupy supporters.

Just looking at the substance of the posts at the two sites, however, the lines get blurred. The stories of the 53 percent, including Erickson’s, are also about hardship, about being taken for granted or taken advantage of and being ignored by lawmakers. Gawker described the site as heartbreaking.

What makes “We Are the 53%” so heartbreaking isn’t that its contributors are enormous jerks-— it’s that so many of them could just as easily be writing in to “We Are the 99 Percent.” Like the guy… who can “barely afford” his rent. Or the “former marine” … who hasn’t had “4 consecutive days off in 4 years.” The phrase “I don’t have health insurance” pops up frequently on “We Are the 53%,” but not as a cry for help or an indictment of a broken system. Here, it’s a badge of pride.

Fox News is conducting an online poll that asks its readers if they support the Occupy Wall Street movement. Seventy percent of the first 190,000 respondents supported the movement.

Exaggerated bafflement about what the Occupy Wall Street supporters hope to achieve, an early line of dismissal, is now falling away, thanks in part to patient explainers like Alan Grayson.

The revolution that toppled the anachronistic and unresponsive French government in 1968 began with a student protest in Nanterre. That student sit-in started at the end of March. In May, students at the Sorbonne in Paris joined the protest. Then came more students at more schools. Then came the labor unions and factory workers. Then came celebrities and moms and dads. Last came the politicians. President DeGaulle on May 29 abandoned the capital and his wife gave her jewels to relatives for safekeeping. From a French military base in Germany, the World War II icon, an avatar for a certain kind of France as well as its president, decided to dissolve the government, which he did the next day.

Hat tip on the Fox poll to the Brad Blog.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

“As ranking member of the Agriculture Subcommittee that oversees the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, I have a responsibility to ensure speculators are not exploiting oil supply fears to make big profits,” Boswell said in a prepared statement.

“The CFTC determined in 2008 that Wall Street speculators were increasing their positions in energy markets to capitalize off of political unrest in heavy oil-producing nations. Energy prices drive up the cost of goods across the board — from input costs on the farm to the food on the kitchen table. I am calling for a hearing to make sure that Wall Street and Big Oil are not purposely driving up prices once again to make a quick buck on the backs of the middle class and small business owners who are hit the hardest when the price of gas skyrockets.”

Boswell and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont co-authored a letter to Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) and General Farm Commodities and Risk Management Subcommittee Chairman Mike Conaway (R-Texas). Both GOP leadership members represent states that hold a special interest in the oil industry’s success, but Boswell remained optimistic that his request would be given serious consideration.

“The Agriculture Committee has a history of investigating oil speculation when gas prices reach record levels, regardless of what party is in charge,” he said. “It is my hope that Committee leadership will take the issue of rising gas prices seriously, as well as our hearing request, and allow daylight to be shed on this important issue.”

In addition to Boswell and Welch, the letter to leadership was also signed by Democratic U.S. Reps. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Terri Sewell of Alabama, James McGovern of Massachusetts, Bill Owens of New York, Joe Courtney of Connecticut and Larry Kissell of North Carolina.

The full text of the letter appears below:

Dear Chairmen Lucas and Conaway:

We are writing to request the Committee conduct a hearing to examine the recent rise in energy prices, particularly for oil and gasoline. The American public wants reassurance that these high prices are completely attributable to market forces and not due to speculation or manipulation in the futures or spot markets for energy.

The Agriculture Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has a long history of examining rises in energy prices and how they impact the agricultural sector. Since 2006, the Committee has held three hearings on this issue, under both Republican and Democrat majorities, which only further demonstrates the bipartisan commitment of the Committee to examine drastic price fluctuations in the price of oil.

In the last four months, oil prices have risen to date by 25% and we have not yet reached the summer peak season when oil and gasoline prices experience further increases. On March 31st, the House Committee on Natural Resources held its own hearing looking into rising gasoline prices. At that hearing, witnesses including Mr. William P. Graves on behalf of the American Trucking Association and Mr. Michael J. Fox, Executive Director of the Gasoline & Automotive Service Dealers of America raised concerns about continuing speculation in today’s energy markets.

Given the increase in energy prices and continued concern about speculation in energy markets, we believe it is appropriate and imperative that our Committee conduct its own hearing into energy prices and bring in representatives from the CFTC and the Department of Energy who can give us their views regarding what is occurring in the energy markets. We look forward to working with you to bring such a hearing to fruition in the immediate future.

Sincerely,

Rep. Leonard Boswell (IA-03)
Rep. Peter Welch (VT)
Rep. Tim Walz (MN-01)
Rep. Terri Sewell (AL-07)
Del. Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan (Northern Mariana Islands)
Rep. James McGovern (MA-03)
Rep. Bill Owens (NY-23)
Rep. Joe Courtney (CT-02)
Rep. Larry Kissell (NC-08)

Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, is quoted by the LA Times as saying:

“We operate like a hedge fund,” said Steven Law, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and president of American Crossroads, a nonprofit group that funds political ads. “We look for opportunities where we can invest and make a difference.”

Ironically, a November NBC News report suggested that donors to American Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” group that does not disclose its donors under tax law, were hedge fund managers:

A substantial portion of Crossroads GPS’ money came from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls, according to GOP fundraising sources who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. These donors have been bitterly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats — and endorsed by the Obama administration — to increase the tax rates on compensation that hedge funds pay their partners, the sources said

Crossroads GPS was very successful this past election cycle, winning in 15 of the 20 races it made independent expenditures in.

About three dozen of the top publicly held securities and investment-services firms — which include banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money-management firms and securities exchanges — are set to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits this year, a 4 percent increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009, according to the survey. Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms.

The data showed that revenue was expected to rise at 29 of the 35 firms surveyed, but at a slower pace than pay. Wall Street revenue is expected to rise 3 percent, to $448 billion from $433 billion, despite a slowdown in some high-profile activities like stock and bond trading.

Overall, Wall Street is expected to pay 32.1 percent of its revenue to employees, the same as last year, but below the 36 percent in 2007. Profits, which were depressed by losses in the past two years, have bounced back from the 2008 crisis. But the estimated 2010 profit of $61.3 billion for the firms surveyed still falls about 20 percent short from the record $82 billion in 2006. Over that same period, compensation across the firms in the survey increased 23 percent.

How are the banks making so much, despite the crummy economy? For one, reduced competition. Hundreds of hedge funds and a number of banks died between 2007 and 2009, leaving the others to pick up their business. Additionally, the carry trade. It is unbelievably cheap for big banks to borrow from the government, and they are picking up money on the margin when they lend it out. Moreover, big banks haven’t yet reckoned with the foreclosure fraud crisis. Nobody knows how much that will cost them, but some are estimating in the billions.

Lawmakers say more work is needed to reform Wall Street. (Flickr: Pamhule)

Soon after Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) came to Washington in 2002, a fellow member of the House Financial Services Committee told him to pick an arcane financial issue — any issue — and to make it his pet topic. Miller chose mortgage finance. He knew little about it. Banking lobbyists peppered him with data, but he had difficulty getting much information from independent sources.

[Economy1] “I was even reduced to reading blogs,” he quipped to a crowd of bankers, community organizers, financial reform experts, hedge fund managers and government aides at the Roosevelt Institute’s conference, “Financial Reform: Will It Work? How Will We Know?” on Monday. But Miller educated himself on the topic and became a leader in pushing for stronger regulation of mortgage products. By 2008, as the financial system collapsed, all of his colleagues in Congress had joined him in reading up on everything from liar loans to naked credit-default swaps.

That period of intense interest is over following the passage of financial regulatory reform legislation this summer, Miller and others said on Monday. But that does not mean that reform is done. In fact, because political attention has flowed from Wall Street to immigration, unemployment and myriad other topics, reform is imperiled. The regulatory law gave guidelines for fixing the financial sector, but the rule-writing process has fallen to dozens of agencies and government bureaucrats currently hammering out the details. That means the real work of reform is just beginning and the country is only incrementally closer to a safer financial system.

“It has become quite clear in recent years that the servant’s servant has become the master’s master,” argued Rob Johnson, a former hedge fund manager and current director at the Roosevelt Institute. Banks, he said, which should help companies merge, access credit and grow, instead ended up leeching off of them, piling on fees and unnecessary products. Ultimately, average Americans suffered. “We do not yet have a balance between society, the real economy and the financial sector.”

A few visiting investors noted that the sector has become more concentrated — due to a number of banks failing, and the others picking up their business — and therefore more dangerous. Each one of the systemically risky banks, like Goldman Sachs, has become more systemically important and therefore more likely to receive government backing if financial troubles re-emerge. (It will take years for Washington to put capital requirements and other safeguards in place.) Moreover, the long process of rule-writing allows banks ample time and opportunity to lobby bureaucrats working on legislation.

And that rule-writing is ongoing among dozens of agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. The government is also in the process of organizing and hiring workers for the new $500 million Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And the massive legislation is drawing major lobbying interest. This campaign cycle, the American Bankers Association has pledged $13.6 million on lobbying and $2.1 million to campaigns, pushing for looser rules on banks. J.P. Morgan Chase alone has contributed nearly a million to campaigns this year.

So how will those interested in reform know if it is working in the meantime? The question posed to the gathering of 40 or so met with many answers. “[Reform] would be working if the banks were making a lot less money,” Miller argued. “The reality is for it to be successful it has to be a win-lose-win,” with markets and consumers winning, and banks losing. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that financial-sector corporate profits are near their all-time highs.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) was more optimistic. He praised the reform process, citing the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, derivatives reform and proprietary trading regulations as big wins. (Elizabeth Warren, the White House and Treasury advisor helping to build the new bureau, attended the conference but did not speak.)

Still, Merkley conceded, “There is more to do.” He noted that ratings agencies — which stamped triple-A ratings on hundreds of billions of dollars of worthless mortgage-backed products in the run-up to the recession — remained unfixed. (“They’re almost useless,” sighed Jerome Fons of Kroll Bond Ratings agency.)

Others pointed to problems with the derivatives clearinghouses, which might now be the new “too big to fail” institutions. (If banks post insufficient capital to cover their derivatives trades, and another credit crunch hits Wall Street, with investors pulling cash out, the government might be forced to bail them out to calm the markets.) Some criticized the new Treasury Department Office of Financial Research, tasked with understanding Wall Street’s new innovations. Dozens of such niche issues arose.

“There are the tools there to do this,” Mike Konczal, a Roosevelt fellow, said. “Now it’s an issue of political will. [The financial regulatory law] doesn’t presuppose that [reform] will happen. But it does have the tools to do it.”

He concluded: “Those tools sit there, and there’s going to be a lot of pressure not to use them.”

“Effectively, what we’ve seen and a lot of other people have seen is we need to give them a better understanding of who we are and what we do,” David Wells, a spokesman for Goldman, told DealBook. “This is meant to help do that.”

The campaign, which is being overseen by the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, kicked off Wednesday with full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  It will include print advertisements in national, regional and local newspapers and banner advertisements on various Web sites and is planned to continue into 2011, Mr. Wells said.

I can just imagine the ads now:

Goldman Sachs. Making billions off the financialization of the U.S. economy since 1869. Making billions off the carry trade since 2008.

The company’s current slogan, addressed at other businesses, is “Our client’s interest always comes first.” Suspect.

Women are fading from the U.S. finance industry.

In the past 10 years, 141,000 women, or 2.6 percent of female workers in finance, left the industry. The ranks of men grew by 389,000 in that period, or 9.6 percent, according to a review of data provided by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The shift runs counter to changes in the overall work force. The number of women in the U.S. labor market has grown by 4.1 percent in the past decade, outpacing a 0.5 percent increase in male workers. The difference is pronounced at brokerage firms, investment banks and asset-management companies. [...]

[Y]oung women are becoming more rare in the country’s banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies. Since 2000, the number of women between the ages of 20 and 35 working in finance has dropped by 315,000, or 16.5 percent, while the number of men in that age range grew by 93,000, or 7.3 percent.

From a round-up of studies showing women are better investors than men, as they are likely to have lower short-term returns but are much better at avoiding catastrophic losses:

Women made fewer investment mistakes and were less likely to repeat them — or at least to admit to survey takers that they repeated them. [Merrill Lynch] said its results showed 35 percent of women said they had held a losing investment too long, while among men it was 47 percent. The worst part: Of those who did it once, 48 percent of the women and 61 percent of the men admitted to doing it again.

Similar gender differences turned up on other issues: 13 percent of women and 24 percent of men said they had bought a hot investment without doing any research. The men were more likely to repeat that mistake. “Everyone makes mistakes,” said Hannah Grove, chief marketing officer of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers. “Successful investors learn from theirs.”

The numbers come from a telephone survey of 1,000 people with household incomes of at least $75,000 and investable assets of at least $75,000. They jibe with what other surveys and studies have found.

Terrance Odean, a University of California at Davis professor who also has studied the issue, found women earn slightly better returns because they trade less frequently. Men, he says, are overconfident. That showed up in the Merrill Lynch survey, too. Women were more likely to say they are not knowledgeable about investing and more likely to rely on a financial adviser. Other studies show men are more willing to take risks and invest more aggressively than women.

I’ll post the full video when available — the above is a clip via ThinkProgress — but here’s a rundown of some of the interesting tax, economy and financial topics covered.

Hedge fund managers: not “put upon”

A hedge fund manager, CNBC contributor and former classmate of Obama’s, Anthony Scaramucci, stood up during the town hall and told the president the “Wall Street community” feels like “a piñata.” (Video above.) He asked him how he planned to repair that damage.

Obama answered politely, saying that the ties between Wall Street and Main Street are close. He noted that he wants and America needs a “vibrant and vital” financial sector. But, he said, “I have been amused over the last couple years, this sense of somehow me beating up on Wall Street. I think most folks on Main Street feel like they got beat up on.”

He continued, “There’s a big chunk of the country that thinks that I have been too soft on Wall Street. That’s probably the majority, not the minority.” He cited the billion-dollar payouts to executives in the hedge fund industry, then said, “I think that you shouldn’t be feeling put upon.”

On saving Wall Street

Obama argued that his administration’s efforts to stabilize the financial sector worked, and said he is staunchly pro-business, when queried by a Home Depot executive. “It’s very hard to find evidence of anything we’ve done that’s designed to squash business as opposed to promote business,” he argued. “What I’ve tried to do is just try to be practical.”

He also said: “As a consequence of reckless decisions that had been made, the economy was on the verge of collapse. Those same businesses now are profitable; the financial markets are stabilized. The only thing that we’ve said is that we’ve got to make sure that we’re not doing some of the same things that we were doing in the past that got into this mess in the first place.”

On the jobs hangover

A few callers spoke of their personal plight in the wake of the recession. One law school grad said he cannot pay his loans, let alone get a mortgage or afford a family. He asked “Is the American dream dead?” Another woman described how her family might be reduced to “hot dog[s] and beans,” the sort of belt-tightened times she thought were behind her. She asked, “Is this my new reality?

Obama replied, “Absolutely not.” He said: “We are still the country that billions of people in the world aspire to.” But he called the frustration of average Americans “understandable,” given the state of the economy. “The hole was so deep that a lot of people out there are still hurting, and probably some folks here in the audience are still having a tough time.” He cited victories in aiding the middle class and said it would take time before the economy would recover.

On higher taxes for millionaires

Obama defended his proposal to keep tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans, but to allow income taxes to rise for the remaining two percent. “On average, millionaires would get a check of $100,000. And, by the way, I would be helped by this, so I just want to be clear. I’m speaking against my own financial interests. This is an irresponsible thing for us to do. Those folks are the least likely to spend it.”

On Tea Parties

Showing plenty of political aplomb, asked about the Tea Parties, Obama said Americans have a “noble tradition of being helpfully skeptical about government.” But he noted that Tea Partiers who want to slash both taxes and spending should name where they would cut the budget. “I think it’s important for you to say, ‘I’m willing to cut veterans’ benefits’” or Medicare or Social Security, he said.