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At least a hundred Wall Street donors who backed Barack Obama in 2008 have switched sides and given money to Mitt Romney, Bloomberg's Jonathan D. Salant and Lisa Lerer report. For some, it's about hurt feelings. "It's going to be very hard for the president to bash the rich and create jobs at the same time," Anthony Scaramucci, who gave Obama $4,600 in 2008, told Bloomberg. So far, Romney has raised $2.3 million from the financial services sector, while the president has raised $87,000. But the trend is not entirely about partisanship. Politico's Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman reports that Michele Bachmann, too, has problems courting big donors. Echoing Scaramucci, a source told Politico, "It's really hard to convince Wall Street donors to give to someone who is trashing their industry."
[The U.S.] used to be a very efficient place to do business. Efficient logistics, very flexible, very dynamic. We had good infrastructure, but the quality of some of our infrastructure has become less efficient. We’ve got this very high cost of health benefits and health care…. We’ve got a rather substantial regulatory burden, which takes different forms in different industries…. We’ve got a litigious society, where everything is handled through lawsuits and adversarial processes, which comes up over and over again in our interviews. And then, right now, what’s really piled onto this is this concern that people have about what is the future? Are we really going to be fixing these problems? What does the future bring? There’s enormous concern on the part of business leaders that there’s nobody in government that’s actually taking on and working on these challenges. And this is shocking for the U.S.When a country is in trouble, you can’t have a polarised political process. There’s too much comfort. We need more needles to stick in politicians.
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