By RALPH NADER

http://counterpunch.org/nader07012011.html

Dear President Obama:

Yesterday's Washington Post published a page one article headlined "President Waging A Charm Offensive. Obama woos big donors to help fund early campaign expansion."

Later in the article appears this unseemly behavior by a public servant paid for by public funds:

"A key player in the closed-door donor recruitment is White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley, a former banking executive who has huddled in recent weeks over breakfasts and dinners with business leaders and Wall Street financiers in Chicago, New York and Washington--seeking to ease tensions over new financial regulations and other administration policies."

How rancid is the behavior described in the article compared to your no-more-business-as-usual rhetoric during your "hope and change you can believe in" 2008 campaign! What assurances are being given by your staff in order to secure donations NBC's David Brinkley once called "legalized bribery"?

Yesterday's New York Times has a column by Andrew Ross Sorkin about the campaign fundraising activities involving big time financiers. He writes: "While Wall Street executives still complain about the president's name-calling and pressure for a regulatory overhaul, many say privately that his bark has been worse than his bite."

It could be that your political advisers, viewing the unimpressive field of Republican wannabes for 2012, have neglected to crank in your stay-at-home voters who would exceed their number in 2010 by a substantial measure.

Not giving Elizabeth Warren a recess appointment (and using your Presidential authority to assure a recess, see attached letter) to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she is now building at her post in the Treasury Department, will produce many stay-at-home voters. These are the Americans for whom over three years of dashed hopes in many fields view abandoning the authentically admired Professor Warren as the last straw!

Given the crimes and derelictions that looted or drained trillions of savers' and workers' money in 2008-2009 and that collapsed the economy with its resultant unemployment and bailouts, they want law and order for Wall Street.

This letter is being sent to your political adviser David Plouffe and to Vice President Biden.

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Nader

P.S. By the way, have you met with Professor Warren in the last year, as you do with Wall Street CEOs?