Lobbyist Getting The Boot From Obama?

Published on Thursday, November 13, 2008 by The Independent/UK

Obama Acts To Drive The Lobbyists Out of Washington

by Leonard Doyle

The leader of Barack Obama's transition team has delivered some bad news to the hordes of lobbyists plying their trade in the fancy restaurants and faceless offices along Pennsylvania Avenue: they are not welcome.

A dog passes in front of a mural painting of US President-elect Barack Obama in Venice Beach, California. Mr Podesta, Obama's transition manager, unveiled what he said was "the strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history," and declared "that the undue influence of Washington lobbyists and the revolving door of Washington ceases to exist." (AFP/Gabriel Bouys)

John Podesta, the transition chief, has revealed a set of draconian new regulations aimed at curbing the excessive influence of lobbyists, as Mr Obama promised throughout his election campaign. They are to be denied their normal role of greasing the wheels of the new administration's costly transition to power by paying for office space and staff between now and the inauguration on 20 January.

Mr Podesta unveiled what he said was "the strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history," and declared "that the undue influence of Washington lobbyists and the revolving door of Washington ceases to exist."

The White House and the Capitol are the two most impressive buildings in Washington but power is really along Pennsylvania Avenue and K Street, where the top-tier lobbyists arrange access to decision-makers and cut backroom deals for special interest groups.

Now, in the dying days of the Bush administration, an unprecedented frenzy is under way as Washington's legal and lobbying establishment tries to get its hands on some of the $700bn (£470bn) financial rescue package for clients before a deadline of tomorrow.

One of the top firms is Alston & Bird, which boasts it has the former Republican presidential contender and senator, Bob Dole, on its books. But Democrats are no slouches at lobbying either. The national co-chair of Mr Obama's election campaign, former Senator Tom Daschle also works for Alston & Bird though not, we are assured, as a registered lobbyist. Instead he provides "high level advisory and strategic advice" to the company.

To cope with the crush of lobbyists at its doors, the Treasury Department hired Jeb Mason, a 32-year old Texan who wears cowboy boots and hat to work. A former White House aide of the political adviser Karl Rove, he is now the point of call for the hired guns of the banking industry, insurance and credit card companies lining up to get some of the taxpayers' billions.

Talking about the dozens of phone calls and emails he gets from lobbyists, he told the New York Times, "this must have been how the Politburo felt".

Mr Obama's transition team is planning to hire about 450 people, who will be divided between Washington and Chicago, at a cost of about $12m. Less than half of that amount will be paid for from the public purse and Mr Obama is planning to fund the rest by asking the more than 3 million people who poured small amounts of money into his campaign to make up the rest. No incoming president before him has had access to such a potential well of money and his team has already sent out emails offering "Victory T-shirts" in return for fresh contributions.

Ever since Ronald Reagan's day, corporations and law firms have picked up the tab for presidential transitions. To avoid even the appearance of abuse, the Obama team is limiting private donations to a maximum of $5,000 and will disclose the names of all donors. "So you'll see our contributions... to the transition prior to the inauguration, yes," Mr Podesta said.

One problem the Obama transition team faces is that some of the brightest Washington brains it might want to hire for the transition and later in government are already registered lobbyists. "I've heard the other complaint, which is we're leaving all these experts on the side... We're leaving all the people who know everything out in the cold," Mr Podesta said. "And so be it."

Mr Podesta, who is himself the head of a think-tank, the Centre for American Progress, says that any lobbyists who are hired will be banned from working in areas for which they have previously lobbied.

And anyone who turns to lobbying after gaining insights and contacts working on the transition for the next 69 days, will be barred for 12 months from lobbying the new administration on a subject area they worked on.

The restrictions are viewed as pious hopes by many in Washington. Former president Bill Clinton tried to restrict lobbyists and failed. President Bush did little to stop their growth and they are now a multibillion-dollar business of influence. Even if Mr Obama succeeds in limiting their access to his administration, Congressmen and women are particularly soft targets. For many politicians, getting elected and serving a term or two is merely a rite of passage on the road to a lucrative Pennsylvania Avenue career.

© 2008 The Independent

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

McCain Makes Stuff Up

No, shit Sherlock. Teflon Johnny lies like a freakin' rug. He's better at it than Junior and The Dick put together.

What's worse, he would be much more of a danger to the people of this country. Does anyone out there believe he would hesitate to use the powers that Bush and Cheney have accrued to the Executive branch against the American people, especially those who dared be critical of him?

John McCain is a huge disaster just waiting to happen.

By Robert Parry

June 12, 2008

For years now, the U.S. political press corps has traveled with John McCain on his “Straight Talk Express,” buying into his image as a paragon of truth-telling. But the real truth is that McCain routinely makes stuff up, as he did on June 11 in lying about Barack Obama’s “bitter” comment.

During a political talk in Philadelphia, McCain claimed that Obama had described “bitter” small-town voters as clinging to religion or “the Constitution” – when the second item in Obama’s comment actually was “guns.”

But the Arizona senator didn’t stop with a simple word substitution. He added that he will tell these voters that “they have trust and support the Constitution of the United States because they have optimism and hope. … That’s what America’s all about.”

In other words, McCain didn’t just make a slip of the tongue. He willfully accused Obama of disparaging the U.S. Constitution, a very serious point that, if true, might cause millions of Americans to reject Obama’s candidacy.

Still, when some of the U.S. broadcast networks – including NBC evening news – played the clip of McCain lashing out at Obama’s purported dissing of the Constitution, they didn’t correct McCain's falsehood.

That fits with a long-standing pattern of the political press corps giving McCain a break when he makes statements at variance with the truth. Even in the rare moments when he is caught in an inaccuracy – such as accusing Shiite-ruled Iran of training Sunni extremists in al-Qaeda – the falsehood is minimized as an unintentional gaffe.

However, McCain actually seems to be following a trail blazed by George W. Bush, saying what’s useful at the time even if it’s not true and then counting on the U.S. press corps to timidly look the other way. [For details on Bush, see our book, Neck Deep.]

Through all his misstatements, McCain’s “straight-talk” reputation survives.

Sweeping Denials

In another instructive case, McCain got away with sweeping denials in his reaction to a New York Times article on Feb. 21. The story led with unsubstantiated suspicions among some McCain staffers that their boss had gotten too cozy with female lobbyist Vicky Iseman, but McCain went beyond simply denying any sexual improprieties.

He put out a statement declaring that in his quarter-century congressional career, he “has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists.” But that simply isn’t true.

As the Times story already had recalled, McCain helped one of his early financial backers, wheeler-dealer Charles Keating, frustrate oversight from federal banking regulators who were examining Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.

At Keating's urging, McCain wrote letters, introduced bills and pushed a Keating associate for a job on a banking regulatory board. In 1987, McCain joined several other senators in two private meetings with federal banking regulators on Keating’s behalf.

Two years later, Lincoln collapsed, costing the U.S. taxpayers $3.4 billion. Keating eventually went to prison and three other senators from the so-called Keating Five saw their political careers ruined.

McCain drew a Senate reprimand for his involvement and later lamented his faulty judgment. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For.

But some people close to the case thought McCain got off too easy.

Not only was McCain taking donations from Keating and his business circle, getting free rides on Keating’s corporate jet and enjoying joint vacations in the Bahamas – McCain’s second wife, the beer fortune heiress Cindy Hensley, had invested with Keating in an Arizona shopping mall.

In the years that followed, however, McCain not only got out from under the shadow of the Keating Five scandal but found a silver lining in the cloud, transforming the case into a lessons-learned chapter of his personal narrative.

McCain, as born-again reformer, soon was winning over the Washington press corps with his sponsorship of ethics legislation, like the McCain-Feingold bill limiting “soft money” contributions to the political parties.

However, there was still that other side of John McCain as he wielded enormous power from his position as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which helped him solicit campaign donations from corporations doing business before the panel.

The Times story reported that McCain did favors on behalf of Iseman’s lobbying clients, including two letters that McCain wrote in 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission demanding that it act on a long-delayed request by Iseman’s client, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to buy a Pittsburgh television station.

Rather than simply acknowledge this fact, McCain’s campaign issued another sweeping denial of impropriety, calling those letters routine correspondence that were handled by staff without McCain meeting either with Paxson or anyone from Iseman’s firm, Alcalde & Fay.

"No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC," his campaign said.

McCain’s Own Words

But that also turned out not to be true.

Newsweek’s investigative reporter Michael Isikoff dug up a sworn deposition from Sept. 25, 2002, in which McCain himself declared that “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue. … He wanted their [the FCC’s] approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”

Though McCain claimed not to recall whether he had spoken with Paxson’s lobbyist [presumably a reference to Iseman], he added, “I’m sure I spoke to [Paxson],” according to the deposition. [See Newsweek’s Web posting, Feb. 22, 2008]

McCain’s letters to the FCC, which Chairman William Kennard criticized as “highly unusual,” came in the same period when Paxson’s company was ferrying McCain to political events aboard its corporate jet and donating $20,000 to his campaign.

After the Feb. 21 Times article appeared, McCain’s spokesmen confirmed that Iseman accompanied McCain on at least one of those flights from Florida to Washington, though McCain had said in the 2002 deposition that “I do not recall” if Paxson’s lobbyist was onboard.

First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who conducted the deposition in connection with a challenge to the McCain-Feingold law, asked McCain if the benefits that he received from Paxson created “at least an appearance of corruption here?”

“Absolutely,” McCain answered. “I believe that there could possibly be an appearance of corruption because this system has tainted all of us.”

When Newsweek went to McCain’s 2008 campaign with the seeming contradictions between the deposition and the denial of the Times article, McCain’s people stuck to their story that that the senator had never discussed the FCC issue with Paxson or his lobbyist.

“We do not think there is a contradiction here,” campaign spokeswoman Ann Begeman told Newsweek. “It appears that Senator McCain, when speaking of being contacted by Paxson, was speaking in shorthand of his staff being contacted by representatives of Paxson. Senator McCain does not recall being asked directly by Paxson or any representative of him or by Alcalde & Fay to contact the FCC regarding the Pittsburgh license transaction.”

That new denial crumbled, too, when the Washington Post interviewed Paxson, who said he had talked with McCain in his Washington office several weeks before McCain sent the letters to the FCC.

The broadcast executive also believed that Iseman had helped arrange the meeting and likely was in attendance. “Was Vicki there? Probably,” Paxson said. [Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2008]

So, in the months ahead, there’s urgency for American voters to figure out whether John McCain is the maverick “straight-shooter” of his usual press clippings or a sanctimonious phony who’s just masquerading as the guy who tells it like it is.

Is John McCain like George W. Bush, someone who has learned that the mainstream news media – ever sensitive to accusations of “liberal bias” – is hesitant to call a prominent Republican politician a liar, regardless of the facts and the circumstances?

In this political/media climate, McCain appears to believe he can get away with falsifying key details of something even as heavily reported as Obama’s infamous “bitter” remark.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Straight Talk Express: Nasty With The Smell Of K-Street

By Joe Conason

Disturbed by troubling connections and unflattering publicity, John McCain has just purged several prominent Washington lobbyists from his presidential campaign. Surely his intentions are laudable, but if Sen. McCain is consistent in ridding his campaign of such compromised people, he will find himself riding lonesome on the Straight Talk Express. That’s because nearly all of his advisers, fundraisers and top staffers have worked on K Street, starting with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, and his senior adviser and spokesman, Charles Black.

From the beginning, the McCain team has been thoroughly infested with representatives of corporate special interests, from the campaign’s national co-chairs, finance chairs, policy and political directors, and deputies of all descriptions down to the chairman of Young Professionals for McCain, who just happens to lobby for Airbus, the European aviation firm that benefited from the Arizona senator’s long inquest against Boeing.

Perhaps the senator hasn’t been paying attention for the past few decades, for he somehow seems to have surrounded himself with exactly the kind of Washington hustlers he professes to despise. How this happened is a question that McCain must answer for himself. What must be truly impressive to anyone glancing over the résum&ecute;s of Davis and Black, as well as the lesser members of the McCain entourage, is their magnetic attraction for the most questionable clients in the world.

Consider Charlie Black, a longtime Republican operative, whose lobbying activities first drew negative attention during the Reagan administration, when he represented such august figures as Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi. Marcos and Mobutu were infamous despots with a penchant for looting their own nations’ economies, as well as any American aid that came their way (presumably as a result of Black’s assistance). The theft of funds from taxpayers by those two crooks eventually mounted into the billions, and they savagely repressed democratic forces with U.S. arms. As for Savimbi, he was merely an authoritarian thug, a Maoist ideologue and, according to some reports, a sometime cannibal.

We safely can assume that Black never returned any of the stolen blood money that paid for his services. Recently, he has suggested that U.S. government support for those dictatorial regimes somehow justified his profiteering, as if he weren’t involved in shoring up that support.

Meanwhile, Davis was toiling in the Reagan White House as a Cabinet functionary, where his jobs included liaison with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, site of a major domestic looting scandal during those years. When he testified about his role in those events, his recollections of the influence peddling that had given housing contracts to well-connected Republicans were dim at best. But when he left the public payroll, he landed at the lobbying firm of Paul Manafort, who had gotten one of the most profitable of the HUD sweetheart deals, for a $30-million development in New Jersey.

Aside from the usual roster of deep-pocketed corporations paying to have their way with Congress, the White House and the federal agencies—which horrifies Sen. McCain, lest anybody forget—the McCain advisers have attracted a number of particularly noisome accounts.

For several years, Davis represented GTech, the lottery and gambling conglomerate that has been embroiled in bribery scandals in several countries, including the United States. During that same period, his firm also represented the government of Nigeria, among the most flamboyantly corrupt regimes in the world, at the time under the boot heel of the murderous Gen. Sani Abacha.

More recently, he has cultivated the business of Oleg Deripaska, the Russian mega-billionaire, who made his fortune by seizing control of Russia’s aluminum industry during the violent “Aluminum Wars.” That history earned him a reputation as an unscrupulous mafioso and put him on the State Department’s visa watch list until certain American lobbyists fixed the problem. According to The Washington Post, Davis arranged at least two meetings in Europe between Deripaska, a close ally of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, and Sen. McCain, a critic of Putin’s oligarchic and undemocratic government.

These episodes scarcely begin to describe the careers of Davis, Black and their colleagues on the McCain team. They’ve put lipstick on a lot of pigs.

But the question is why, at this late date, the Republican nominee-in-waiting is pretending to be shocked by “conflicts of interest” in which he stands neck deep and why he dismisses four or five lobbyists while keeping dozens of others, including his top advisers, because they claim to be “retired” or on “leaves of absence” from their businesses. He knows that a press release won’t change the habits of a lifetime in Washington’s corrupt corporate culture, but apparently he hopes we will think so.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer (www.observer.com). To find out more about Conason, visit the Creators Syndicate Web site at www.creators.com.

© 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.