Salon.com > Lobbying

ALEC: We will stop being gun nuts now

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:01:00 +0000

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is a group that helps major industry players write their own legislation that Republicans then pass in state legislatures across the country. Traditionally, ALEC would draw up and promote bills limiting labor organizing rights and weakening workplace safety regulations and environmental protections, because those things anger the Market Gods. Fewer of those things means more money for ALEC's funders! Recently, though, ALEC also began dabbling in things that wouldn't make anyone any money but that happened to be right-wing political priorities.

ALEC is now shutting down its "Public Safety and Elections" task force. ALEC's Public Safety and Elections task force's goals were twofold: to improve "public safety" by making it easier for citizens to carry guns everywhere they go and to shoot certain people without fear of arrest or prosecution, and to improve elections by making it harder for politically undesirable types to exercise their right to vote. (Why were gun rights and voter disenfranchisement the purview of one task force? Those two issues really have very little in common besides being of supreme importance to paranoid white people.)

The fracking trade-offs

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Of all the political tactics used to protect business interests, none is as powerful as the layer ploy -- the one in which an ugly corporate giveaway is hidden one layer beneath something popular. It's the oldest trick in the book: Offer up Mom and apple pie, and few are likely to notice the noxious serving plate.

Whether it's a lobbyist-written trade deal lurking beneath a bill extending unemployment benefits or a corporate subsidy undergirding a must-pass defense spending bill, this is the way some of the most corrupt policy has become law in recent years. It's also the way oil and gas business allies are now advancing that industry's interests in the face of proof that drilling may be endangering Americans' health.

The situation is harrowing. In just the last year, the Environmental Protection Agency and Duke University have both uncovered evidence linking groundwater contamination to the controversial drilling practice known as hydrofracking. The incriminating findings are so clear that according to Pittsburgh's CBS affiliate, fossil fuel firms in Pennsylvania acknowledge that the "natural gas exploration industry is partly responsible for rising levels of contaminants found in area drinking water."

Romney aide lobbied for high-speed rail

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The Romney campaign has made Newt Gingrich's recent history as an unregistered "lobbyist" -- particularly his work for conservative bête noire Freddie Mac -- the key front in its attacks on him in Florida.

It's no surprise that Romney is using the lobbyist card: Polls consistently show that the American public view lobbying as one of the worst professions when it comes to honesty and ethics. More surprising is that the Gingrich campaign has not turned the tables on Romney by looking at the recent lobbying work of several of Romney's top aides.

I recently reported that informal Romney advisor Charlie Black, for example, lobbied for the DREAM Act, putting him directly at odds with Romney's position on the immigration legislation.

Romney attacks Newt as “lobbyist”

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Part of the aggressive new Romney campaign offensive against Newt Gingrich is to attack Gingrich for having been a lobbyist. The irony of the strategy is that Mitt Romney has surrounded himself with multiple registered lobbyists at the highest level of his campaign.

“Over the last 15 years since he left the House, he talks about great bold movements and ideas,” Romney told a Florida crowd this week. “Well, what’s he been doing for 15 years? He’s been working as a lobbyist, yeah, he’s been working as a lobbyist and selling influence around Washington."

In fact, Gingrich has never been a registered lobbyist -- a distinction that Gingrich invoked in the Monday night debate -- but his "strategic advice" work for Freddie Mac looked a lot like what can be colloquially described as lobbying, or at least something close to it.

The Wall Streeters Obama loves most

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:20:00 +0000

We’ve already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far:

"Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff."

When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile -- but the smile didn’t last long. There’s simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.

The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama’s new chief of staff -- arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn’t shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House.

Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported eighteen and a half million dollars.

The new guy, Jack Lew – said by those who know to be a skilled and principled public servant – ran hedge funds and private equity at Citigroup, which means he’s a member of the Wall Street gang, too. His last job was as head of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, where he replaced Peter Orzag, who now works as vice chairman for global banking at – hold onto your deposit slip -- Citigroup.

Still with us? It’s startling the number of high-ranking Obama officials who have spun through the revolving door between the White House and the sacred halls of investment banking. Sure, you can argue that it makes sense that the chief executive of the nation would look to other executives for the expertise you need to build back from the disastrous collapse of the banks in the final year of the Bush Administration.

Remember -- it was Bush and Cheney with their cronies in big business who helped walk us right into the blast furnace of financial meltdown, then rushed to save the banks with taxpayer money. That little fact seems to have been overlooked in the current primaries.

All this brings back memories of Hank Paulson, doesn’t it? Hank Paulson, the $700-million man who became secretary of the treasury for President Bush. Paulson had been head of Goldman Sachs, the rich investment bank. As his successor at Goldman Sachs, Paulson chose Lloyd Blankfein. Several times, according to Bloomberg News, Rolling Stone,and Paulson’s own memoir, the treasury secretary made sure Blankfein and Goldman got privileged inside information.

But Bush and Cheney aren’t the only ones to have a soft spot for financiers. President Obama may call bankers “fat cats” and stir the rabble against them with populist rhetoric when it serves his interest, but after the fiscal fiasco, he allowed the culprits to escape virtually scot-free. When he’s in New York he dines with them frequently and eagerly accepts their big contributions. Like his predecessors, his administration also has provided them with billions of taxpayer dollars – low-cost money that they used for high-yielding investments to make big profits. The largest banks are bigger than they were when he took office and earned more in the first two-and-a-half years of his term than they did during the entire eight years of the Bush administration. That’s confirmed by industry data.

And get this. It turns out, according to The New York Times, that as President Obama’s inner circle has been shrinking, his “rare new best friend” is Robert Wolf. They play basketball, golf and talk economics when Wolf is not raising money for the president’s campaign.

Robert Wolf runs the U.S. branch of the giant Swiss bank UBS, which participated in schemes to help rich Americans evade their taxes. During hearings in 2009, Michigan’s Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, described some of the tricks used by UBS: “Swiss bankers aided and abetted violations of U.S. tax law by traveling to this country with client code names, encrypted computers, counter- surveillance training, and all the rest of it, to enable U.S. residents to hide assets and money in Swiss accounts.

“The bankers then returned to Switzerland and treated their conduct as blameless since Swiss law says tax evasion is no crime. The Swiss bank before us deliberately entered United States, actively sought U.S. clients and secretly helped those U.S. clients defraud the United States of America.”

And so it goes, the revolving door between government service and big money in the private sector spinning so fast it becomes an irresistible force hurling politics and high finance together so completely it’s impossible to tell one from the other.

Top Obama campaign aide lobbied for bank bailout

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:30:00 +0000

The Obama campaign is keeping mum on the role senior advisor Broderick Johnson played in lobbying for the 2008 Wall Street bailout when he worked as a hired gun for the country's largest financial services companies.

Johnson’s past work as a lobbyist was noted in the press when he was appointed a top Obama surrogate in late October, but not the details of his extensive and lucrative work for the financial services industry. Johnson’s hiring despite his recent work for Wall Street strikes a dissonant note in view of the Obama camp’s reported strategy of "channeling anti-Wall Street anger" as a way to take on the Republicans.

Romney and adviser at odds on immigration

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

An informal adviser to the Mitt Romney campaign recently lobbied Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act, stances that are at odds with Romney’s increasingly hard-line position on the immigration in general and opposition to the DREAM Act in particular.

Longtime Republican operative Charlie Black, who was a top aide to the John McCain campaign in 2008, has joined Romney’s “circle of informal advisers,” the New York Times reported this week. After McCain lost, Black rejoined as chairman the high-powered bipartisan lobbying firm he founded in the 1980s, which is now called Prime Policy Group.

Disclosure records show that in early 2011, Black, personally lobbied for Wal-Mart on the issue of the DREAM Act, which would extend permanent resident status to illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and meet various achievement requirements. Wal-Mart has been a prominent voice in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. Prime Policy Group was paid $60,000 by Wal-Mart in the first quarter of 2011 for lobbing on immigration and other issues.

Lockheed Martin goes to bat for oppressive regime

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:30:00 +0000

A top executive at Lockheed Martin recently worked with lobbyists for Bahrain to place an Op-Ed defending the nation's embattled regime in the Washington Times -- but the newspaper did not reveal the role of the regime's lobbyists to its readers. Hence they did not know that the pro-Bahrain opinion column they were reading was published at the behest of ... Bahrain, an oil-rich kingdom of 1.2 million people that has been rocked by popular protests since early 2011.

The episode is a glimpse into the usually hidden world of how Washington's Op-Ed pages, which are prized real estate for those with interests before the U.S. government, are shaped. It also shows how Lockheed gave an assist to a major client -- Bahrain has bought hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons from the company over the years – as it faces widespread criticism for human rights abuses against pro-democracy protesters.

As Ken Silverstein reported in Salon last month, the kingdom is stepping up its Washington lobbying efforts. Here's the latest example, as far as I can piece together from lobbying disclosures filed by Bahrain's "strategic communications" firm, D.C.-based Sanitas International.

A reformed Jack Abramoff?

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Before the late aughts, the term "lobbyist" evoked an image of thousands of pinstriped cowboys using sheaves of greenback-stuffed envelopes to corral cash-eating congressmen on the floor of the U.S. Capitol. Then came the sprawling Jack Abramoff scandals, and a single fedora-clad icon became the picture of Washington corruption -- a political gunslinger whose flair and balls-out-ness made him stand out from his fellow ruffians on K Street.

Though there have been other well-known D.C. wranglers like Bob Livingston and Haley Barbour, the words "super-lobbyist" and "Abramoff" are basically synonyms. Eventually pleading guilty to felony charges of defrauding American Indian tribes and of public corruption, he went to prison for more than three years -- and he brought more than a few politicians and professional influence-peddlers into the slammer with him. Released to a halfway house in 2010, Abramoff just published a book titled "Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America's Most Notorious Lobbyist."

How Bahrain works Washington

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Ever since last February, when security forces in Bahrain brutally cracked down on demonstrators at the Pearl Monument, human rights groups have documented extensive violence by the government against pro-democracy protesters. In late November, an independent commission hired by the country’s king released a report that said 35 people had been killed during the protests, including five detainees who were tortured to death, and that hundreds more had been injured and nearly 3,000 arrested.

But to judge from Tom Squitieri -- the self-described “stargazer, Award winning reporter, communications crafter” who has tweeted and blogged about events in Bahrain for Huffington Post and the Foreign Policy Association -- demonstrators are largely to blame for the violence. In one item he wrote about a girl named Zahra who “was attacked with an iron bar wielded by protestors” and a demonstrator named Ali who was killed “after being hit by a police car.” While Ali’s family claimed “he was deliberately run down” by the cops, Squitieri suggested it was more likely that “the police car swerved out of control after skidding on oil poured on the road by protestors.”