I have a question does anyone know where trial lawyer money is going to in this election? Does anyone know where the big city real estate interest money is going to?
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> Date: Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 9:28 AM Subject: Obama's Money Cartel To: Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com>
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16601
Obama's Money Cartel
How he's fronted for the most vicious firms on Wall Street
February 23, 2008 By Pam Martens
Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or
the last plantation in America, has defied courts and the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for decades in its failure
to hire blacks as stockbrokers. Now it's marshalling its money
machine to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. Why
isn't the press curious about this?
Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and
you'll see a self-portrait of upper management racism and sexism:
women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy offices occupied by
predominantly white males. According to the EEOC as well as the
recent racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and
Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between 1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of
stockbrokers - and this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and
empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.
The first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black
male occupant in the oval office (having placed only five blacks in
the U.S. Senate in the last two centuries) appeared this month on a
chart at the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of
the 20 top contributors to the Barack Obama campaign, and it looked
like one of those comprehension tests where you match up things that
go together and eliminate those that don't. Of the 20 top
contributors, I eliminated six that didn't compute. I was now
looking at a sight only slightly less frightening to democracy than
a Diebold voting machine. It was a Wall Street cartel of financial
firms, their registered lobbyists, ! and go-to law firms that have a
death grip on our federal government.
Why is the "yes, we can" candidate in bed with this cartel? How can
we, the people, make change if Obama's money backers block our
ability to be heard?
Seven of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors consist of officers and
employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with
looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or
bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left
thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities
coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs
nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.
These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman
Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan
Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel
Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall
Street. There are five large corporate law firms that are also
registered lobbyists; and one is a corporate law firm that is no
longer a registered lobbyist but does legal work for Wall Street. The
cumulative total of these 14 contributors through February 1, 2008,
was $2,872,128, and we're still in the primary season.
But hasn't Senator Obama repeatedly told us in ads and speeches and
debates that he wasn't taking money from registered lobbyists?
Hasn't the press given him a free pass on this statement?
Barack Obama, speaking in Greenville, South Carolina, on January 22, 2008:
"Washington lobbyists haven't funded my campaign, they won't run my
White House, and they will not drown out the voices of working
Americans when I am president".
Barack Obama, in an email to supporters on June 25, 2007, as
reported by the Boston Globe:
"Candidates typically spend a week like this – right before the
critical June 30th financial reporting deadline – on the phone, day
and night, begging Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs to
write huge checks. Not me. Our campaign has rejected the
money-for-influence game and refused to accept funds from registered
federal lobbyists and political action committees".
The Center for Responsive Politics' website allows one to pull up the
filings made by lobbyists registering under the Lobbying Disclosure
Act of 1995 with the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and
secretary of the U.S. Senate. These top five contributors to the
Obama campaign have filed as registered lobbyists: Sidley Austin LLP;
Skadden, Arps, et al; Jenner & Block; Kirkland & Ellis; Wilmerhale,
aka Wilmer Cutler Pickering.
Is it possible that Senator Obama does not know that corporate law
firms are also frequently registered lobbyists? Or is he making a
distinction that because these funds are coming from the employees
of these firms, he's not really taking money directly from registered
lobbyists? That thesis seems disingenuous when many of these
individual donors own these law firms as equity partners or
shareholders and share in the profits generated from lobbying.
Far from keeping his distance from lobbyists, Senator Obama and his
campaign seems to be brainstorming with them.
The political publication, The Hill, reported on December 20, 2007,
that three salaried aides on the Obama campaign were registered
lobbyists for dozens of corporations. (The Obama campaign said they
had stopped lobbying since joining the campaign.) Bob Bauer, counsel
to the Obama campaign, is an attorney with Perkins Coie. That law
firm is also a registered lobbyist.
What might account for this persistent (but non-reality based) theme
of distancing the Obama campaign from lobbyists? Odds are it traces
back to one of the largest corporate lobbyist spending sprees in the
history of Washington whose details would cast an unwholesome pall on
the Obama campaign, unless our cognitive abilities are regularly
bombarded with abstract vacuities of hope and change and sentimental
homages to Dr. King and President Kennedy .
On February 10, 2005, Senator Obama voted in favor of the passage of
the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. Senators Biden, Boxer, Byrd,
Clinton, Corzine, Durbin, Feingold, Kerry, Leahy, Reid and 16 other
Democrats voted against it. It passed the Senate 72-26 and was signed
into law on February 18, 2005.
Here is an excerpt of remarks Senator Obama made on the Senate floor
on February 14, 2005, concerning the passage of this legislation:
"Every American deserves their day in court. This bill, while not
perfect, gives people that day while still providing the reasonable
reforms necessary to safeguard against the most blatant abuses of
the system. I also hope that the federal judiciary takes seriously
their expanded role in class action litigation, and upholds their
responsibility to fairly certify class actions so that they may
protect our civil and consumer rights..".
Three days before Senator Obama expressed that fateful yea vote, 14
state attorneys general, including Lisa Madigan of Senator Obama's
home state of Illinois, filed a letter with the Senate and House,
pleading to stop the passage of this corporate giveaway. The AGs
wrote: "State attorneys general frequently investigate and bring
actions against defendants who have caused harm to our citizens... In
some instances, such actions have been brought with the attorney
general acting as the class representative for the consumers of the
state. We are concerned that certain provisions of S.5 might be
misinterpreted to impede the ability of the attorneys general to
bring such actions..."
The Senate also received a desperate plea from more than 40 civil
rights and labor organizations, including the NAACP, Lawyers
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Human Rights Campaign, American
Civil Liberties Union, Center for Justice and Democracy, Legal
Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), and
Alliance for Justice. They wrote as follows:
"Under the [Class Action Fairness Act of 2005], citizens are denied
the right to use their own state courts to bring class actions
against corporations that violate these state wage and hour and state
civil rights laws, even where that corporation has hundreds of
employees in that state. Moving these state law cases into federal
court will delay and likely deny justice for working men and women
and victims of discrimination. The federal courts are already
overburdened. Additionally, federal courts are less likely to certify
classes or provide relief for violations of state law".
This legislation, which dramatically impaired labor rights, consumer
rights and civil rights, involved five years of pressure from 100
corporations, 475 lobbyists, tens of millions of corporate dollars
buying influence in our government, and the active participation of
the Wall Street firms now funding the Obama campaign. "The Civil
Justice Reform Group, a business alliance comprising general
counsels from Fortune 100 firms, was instrumental in drafting the
class-action bill", says Public Citizen.
One of the hardest-working registered lobbyists to push this
corporate giveaway was the law firm Mayer-Brown, hired by the leading
business lobby group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to the
Center for Responsive Politics, the Chamber of Commerce spent $16
million in just 2003, lobbying the government on various business
issues, including class action reform.
According to a 2003 report from Public Citizen, Mayer-Brown's
class-action lobbyists included "Mark Gitenstein, former chief
counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a leading architect of
the Senate strategy in support of class-action legislation; John
Schmitz, who was deputy counsel to President George H.W. Bush; David
McIntosh, former Republican congressman from Indiana; and Jeffrey
Lewis, who was on the staffs of both Sen. John Breaux (D-La) and Rep.
Billy Tauzin (R-La)."
While not on the Center for Responsive Politics list of the top 20
contributors to the Obama presidential campaign, Mayer-Brown's
partners and employees are in rarefied company, giving a total of
$92,817 through December 31, 2007, to the Obama campaign. (The firm
is also defending Merrill Lynch in court against charges of racial
discrimination.)
Senator Obama graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude and was the first
black president of the Harvard Law Review. Given those credentials,
one assumes that he understood the ramifications to the poor and
middle class in this country as he helped to gut one of the few
weapons left to seek justice against giant corporations and their
legions of giant law firms. The class-action vehicle confers upon
each citizen one of the most powerful rights in our society: the
ability to function as a private attorney general and seek redress
for wrongs inflicted on ourselves as well as for those similarly
injured that might not otherwise have a voice.
Those rights should have been strengthened, not restricted, at this
dangerous time in our nation's history. According to a comprehensive
report from the nonprofit group, United for a Fair Economy, over the
past eight years the total loss of wealth for people of color is
between $164 billion and $213 billion, for subprime loans which is
the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern history:
"According to federal data, people of color are three times more
likely to have subprime loans: high-cost loans account for 55 per
cent of loans to blacks, but only 17 per cent of loans to whites".
If there had been equitable distribution of subprime loans, losses
for white people would be 44.5 per cent higher and losses for people
of color would be about 24 per cent lower. "This is evidence of
systemic prejudice and institutional racism."
Before the current crisis, based on improvements in median household
net worth, it would take 594 more years for blacks to achieve parity
with whites. The current crisis is likely to stretch this even further.
So, how should we react when we learn that the top contributors to
the Obama campaign are the very Wall Street firms whose shady
mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and minority under
predatory loans? How should we react when we learn that on the big
donor list is Citigroup, whose former employee at CitiFinancial
testified to the Federal Trade Commission that it was standard
practice to target people based on race and educational level, with
the sales force winning bonuses called "Rocopoly Money" (like a sick
board game), after "blitz" nights of soliciting loans by phone? How
should we react when we learn that these very same firms, arm in arm
with their corporate lawyers and registered lobbyists, have weakened
our ability to fight back with the class-action vehicle?
Should there be any doubt left as to who owns our government? The
very same cast of characters making the Obama hit parade of campaign
loot are the clever creators of the industry solutions to the wave
of foreclosures gripping this nation's poor and middle class,
effectively putting the solution in the hands of the robbers. The
names of these programs (that have failed to make a dent in the
problem) have the same vacuous ring: Hope Now; Project Lifeline.
Senator Obama has become the inspiration and role model to millions
of children and young people in this country. He has only two paths
now: to be a dream maker or a dream killer.
Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no securities
position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article.
She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire. She can be
reached at pamk741 at aol.com
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