Only one month before that populist moment on Capitol Hill, (Dick) Armey was employed as a lobbyist by leading international “consulting firm” DLA Piper. In that capacity, from 2005 to 2009, Armey promoted the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, otherwise known as Mujahedeen-e-Khalq MEK, which the State Department has branded a terrorist group. Armey lobbied his former colleagues on behalf of legislation that would have provided taxpayer support to the MEK.

Armey’s work as a lobbyist—during which time he also served as chairman of FreedomWorks and organized Tea Party protests—is not mentioned in his FreedomWorks biography. This omission can perhaps be explained by the anti-lobbyist sentiments held by so many Tea Partiers. At the first national Tea Party Convention held in Nashville in February, former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin spouted off on the Obama administration’s failure to eliminate lobbyists and cronyism in D.C. during her keynote speech and the crowd burst into loud applause.

As a lobbyist, Armey has not let his stated ideology stand in the way of his paycheck. In 2008, as corporations and banks across the nation were being bailed out with billions of tax dollars, Armey was lobbying on provisions of the TARP Reform and Accountability Act of 2009 for CarMax, a Fortune 500 company that went on to issue $1.5 billion in asset-backed securities eligible for investor loans under the TARP and Federal Reserve-subsidized Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility TALF.

However, the most interesting set of clients Armey represented during his career as a lobbyist were two Iranian-American businessmen: Akbar Nikooie and Saied Ghaemi.

via Secrets of the Tea Party — In These Times.

A quick google of DLA Piper + MEK tends to support what this article says, although I haven’t dug deeply enough into this yet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bill Moyers on who is behind the teabaggers marching against health care reform … Dick Armey, of FreedomWorks. Armey has never known a day of his entire adult life that wasn’t covered handsomely by government-sponsored health care, by the University of Texas system or the federal employees’ system that he has until he reaches age 66. He so loves his current government-sponsored health care program that he has gone to court to keep it – to resist taking Medicare and still draw social security benefits.

And that’s no lie.

Additional Reading:

• PRWatch – FreedomWorks/Tea Party Leader Dick Armey Lobbied for Terrorist Group

Declassified files detailing an FBI investigation targeting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee are now available on the Internet. AIPAC was investigated after it acquired and circulated classified government information provided in strict confidence by US industry and worker groups opposed to AIPAC sponsored economic legislation.

The 50 pages now available as portable document files (PDF) include:

• FBI reports of Israelis circulating classified documents in the US Congress, “compromising” the authority of the U.S. President.
• US Trade Representative concerns that AIPAC was tactically “divulging” classified information supplied by US industries opposed to AIPAC lobbying initiatives.
• Reports from the International Trade Commission that AIPAC and Israeli operatives “usurped” US government authority and that an Israeli intelligence service operative was working undercover on AIPAC’s staff.
• Internal Department of Justice prosecutorial opinions that “theft of government property” had occurred.
• An FBI director order that the Washington Field office give the AIPAC investigation top priority after Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was caught on video surveillance stealing classified US national defense information.
• FBI special agent interviews of Israeli minister of economics Dan Halpern who claimed diplomatic immunity. Halpern admitted passing classified US documents to AIPAC but refused to name his source.
• FBI special agent interviews of AIPAC’s former director of legislative affairs detailing how he made copies of the classified documents for AIPAC’s lobbying use after being ordered to return them to the US government.
• FBI interviews of key AIPAC employees involved in handling the classified US government information (full document listing).

via New FBI Files Alleging AIPAC Theft of Government Property and Israeli Espionage Released – Forbes.com.

These are Reagan era documents.

Since then, Israeli intelligence operations here have hardly slowed. In 2005, U.S. counterspies overheard Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., agreeing to help a suspected Israeli agent lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two former AIPAC officials. Harman denied my account in Congressional Quarterly, which was subsequently corroborated by major news organizations.

Additional reading here. They’ve been at the spy game within the U.S. for a very long time. I’m still curious about all those roving Israeli “art students” back in 2001, that story still stinks like fish.

In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey’s financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the New York Times about the Pentagon’s use of former military officers–many lobbying or consulting for military contractors–to get their talking points on television in exchange for access to decision-makers; and in 2009 bloggers uncovered how ex-Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe had guest-hosted Countdown With Keith Olbermann while working at a large PR firm specializing in “strategies for managing corporate reputation.”

These incidents represent only a fraction of the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news, a four-month investigation by The Nation has found. Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials–people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests–have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens–and in some cases hundreds–of appearances.

via The Lobbying-Media Complex.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’ve heard plenty about the big banks’ role in the Great Recession, but their headaches are about to get worse.

At a packed hearing today, the Senate investigations subcommittee led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) shed new light on banks’ negligence and wrongdoing—and this time it’s not credit-default swaps or derivatives but money laundering and arms dealers. The hearing, held in conjunction with a 325-page report by the subcommittee, focused on four detailed cases of foreign money pouring in the United States and the ways in which American banks, lobbyists, lawyers, and other businessmen aided that money laundering. “For the United States, which has so much riding on global stability, corruption is a direct threat to our national interests,” Levin said in his opening statement. “The stories we uncovered are striking in their misuse of our financial system.”

In essence, the hearing and the report highlighted how institutions like Bank of America, HSBC, and Citibank snoozed when it comes to due diligence and investigating their clients, while notorious arms dealers, sons of despotic politicians, and even shady central banks channeled millions upon millions into the US to buy planes, sports cars, and luxury houses. Singling out HSBC, whose anti-money laundering compliance director testified at the hearing, Levin slammed the bank for actually encouraging the Central Bank of Angola—whose clients include many questionable red-flagged individuals, or “Politically Exposed Persons”—to move millions to an offshore bank in the Bahamas beyond the reach of British financial laws. “You claim that you’re a leader in anti-money laundering rules and enforcement,” Levin told HSBC’s Wiecher Mandemaker. Yet ”you facilitate people evading the law of your own country.”

via Banks Snooze, Arms Dealers Win | Mother Jones.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the common-sense financial reforms” needed by the public. “The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged that Wall Street’s intransigence was the reason for Congress’s failure to pass any bill to regulate the Street. “The refusal of large financial firms to work constructively with Congress on this effort borders on insulting to the American people who have lost so much in this crisis.”

In other words, it isn’t Congress’s fault. It isn’t the Senate Banking Committee’s fault. It certainly isn’t Dodd’s fault. The reason more than a year has passed since the biggest bailout in the history of the world and nothing has been done to prevent a repeat performance — even as the biggest banks are doling out more than $30 billion of bonuses, even as Goldman Sachs is awarding its big traders $16 billion in bonuses (more than the $13 billion Goldman collected from taxpayers via the bailout of AIG), even as AIG itself is handing out bonuses — the reason is … what, exactly, Senator? Because the Street has sent an army of lobbyists to Capitol Hill?

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought Congress was in charge of passing legislation, not Wall Street.

via Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. – Salon.com.

You might not have heard, because almost nobody reported it, but new clean-energy projects attracted more global funding in 2008 than fossil-fuel projects did. For the first time ever, investors put more money in solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower than in fuels that must be burned, according to a U.N. report. And when venture-capital funding tanked in 2009 because of the recession, cleantech weathered the downturn better than any other sector. People with money to invest are choosing clean energy over dirty.

But lawmakers who shape energy legislation are not, quite possibly because they don’t don’t have a good understanding of the energy landscape. Because they spend their weekends with oil lobbyists. In Miami Beach…

via Why senators don’t see the clean energy boom | Grist.

Heh. Both of Michigan’s senators were there… Stabenow AND Levin. So… how was the Ritz Carlton in Miami Beach anyway? I’m sure neither of them care that as they wined and dined and rubbed elbows with the corporate mouthpieces under the Florida sun, their constituents in Ontonagon County are in survival mode (barely) with an unemployment rate of roughly 26.4% (officially)… unofficially, it’s probably double that number.

And we’re angry. Very angry.

Democracy requires at least three parts: Important decisions are made in the open. The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate and influence them. And those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters.

But these principles are in retreat. The Troubled Assets Relief Program began with a virtual blank check from Congress. Treasury officials then secretly decided which companies would receive hundreds of billions of dollars. Why these companies were chosen and not others remains a mystery. For months, the Treasury didn’t even disclose the identities of the major banks that the giant insurer American International Group repaid in full with its bailout money.

The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has gone far beyond its traditional role of setting short-term interest rates. It has bought up massive amounts of debt — -mortgage debt, Treasury bills, and debt instruments from quasi-public agencies. No one outside the Fed knows the ultimate beneficiaries, the criteria used by the Fed for making these commitments, or even how much debt the Fed is buying.

Even if the economic emergency justified such secrecy — and it’s hard to see exactly why it would — the emergency is over, yet closed-door decision-making continues. Will Treasury use what’s left of TARP to help stimulate more jobs and, if so, how? Will the Fed stop buying mortgage-backed securities? No one knows.

The same pattern is evident on other issues.

via What Happened to Democracy? | The American Prospect.

For the recreational-vehicle and trailer industry, which lost thousands of jobs during the recession, the push to send the units to Haiti is motivated by more than charity.

Bidding is under way in an online government-run auction to sell the trailers in large lots at bargain-basement prices — something the RV industry fears will reduce demand for new products. Some of the bids received so far work out to less than $500 for a trailer that would sell for about $20,000 new.

Lobbyists for the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association — which includes some major manufacturers in Elkhart, Ind., among them Gulf Stream — have been talking with members of Congress, the government and disaster relief agencies to see if it would be possible to send the trailers to Haiti instead.

“This isn’t really the best time for the RV industry to have very low-priced trailers put out onto the market,” said the group’s spokesman, Kevin Broom.

How much formaldehyde the trailers contain — or if they still have any at all — isn’t known. The auction site warns that the trailers may not have been tested for the chemical, and FEMA said buyers must sign an agreement not to use the auctioned trailers for housing. Broom contends the majority are “perfectly safe,” and “the handful of trailers that might have a problem” can be removed.

Though the formaldehyde fumes in the trailers may have lessened with time, Haiti’s hot, humid weather would boost the amount released, said Becky Gillette, the formaldehyde campaign director for the Sierra Club.

via Critics Slam Lawmakers, Trailer Industry For Wanting To Send Possibly Toxic FEMA Trailers To Haitian – cbs2.com.

Maybe Kevin Broom who thinks he’s an expert in the safety of those trailers, and Mississippi state Sen. Billy Hewes should move into a FEMA formaldehyde trailer for a few years. Heh. If it’s good enough for the victims of disasters, it should be good enough for them too. And no, we won’t have the trailers tested first either.

When it comes to Obama transparency, Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy attorney Kurt Opsahl points out that the chief executive told the American public one thing Wednesday night and a federal appeals court another just a few weeks ago.

The issue at hand surrounds lobbying. “It’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or Congress,” the president said during his televised address.

But, before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month, the Justice Department argued that it should not have to disclose the names of telecommunication industry lobbyists. Those companies successfully lobbied Congress and President George W. Bush in 2008 to approve legislation that provided their companies with retroactive immunity to lawsuits accusing them of funneling, without warrants, all domestic electronic communications to the National Security Agency.

That legislation killed the EFF’s case against the telecommunication companies. The EFF then sued the government, seeking the lobbyists’ identities. A California federal judge agreed, and then the Obama administration appealed.

“There is no public interest in the compelled disclosure of the representatives’ identities” (.pdf), the administration told the federal appeals court in San Francisco Dec. 14.

Opsahl points out that there is no national security concern with disclosing the information.

via Obama Speaks Transparency, Practices Subterfuge | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Last year, the EPA issued a long awaited set of guidelines on regulating large, stationary sources of CO2. The rules, known as the “Endangerment Finding,” used the authority granted to the agency through a Supreme Court ruling that found CO2 to be a pollutant that the EPA could regulate. While environmentalists, especially those skeptical of Congress’ ability to regulate CO2, rejoiced, some industry groups protested, filing a lawsuit. Today, 16 states and New York City joined the lawsuit on behalf of the government.

Coal and mining companies Massey Energy Co., National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and Alpha Natural Resources Inc. are behind the lawsuit. Fighting them, citing the threat of climate change and the need for action, are Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

Most of these same states were part of the Massachusetts vs. EPA case that resulted in the EPA’s new authority. The Court said that the Clean Air Act should extend to greenhouse gases, but Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas are pushing for an amendment to debt legislation that would take away EPA’s rights to regulate.

Both Murkowski and Lincoln have been linked to oil and gas lobbyists who have donated generously to each Senator’s political campaigns.

via States Step Up to Defend Endangerment Finding : TreeHugger.

Under-performing banks that are politically connected received more bailout funds, according to a study by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

According to the report (.pdf), banks located in districts with House members serving on financial committees had a 26 percent increase in the funding they received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Likewise, bank executives holding a board seat at a Federal Reserve Bank increased their likelihood of receiving bailout money by 31 percent.

Applications for the largest TARP initiative, the Capital Purchase Program, are reviewed by the Federal Reserve–presenting a potential conflict of interest when bank executives are on the board. CPP aided 681 financial institutions with $204 billion as of September 2009.

The study also found that banks that made campaign contributions and spent more money on lobbying received more money from the government bailout.

via Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group.

And average citizens, who really deserve to be bailed out, get nothing. Nothing!

There are many reasons for the progressive division on the health care bill.  There are differences over the narrow question of health care policy, with some believing the bill does more harm than good just on that ground alone.  Some of it has to do with broader questions of political power:  if progressives always announce that they are willing to accept whatever miniscule benefits are tossed at them (on the ground that it’s better than nothing) and unfailingly support Democratic initiatives (on the ground that the GOP is worse), then they will (and should) always be ignored when it comes time to negotiate; nobody takes seriously the demands of those who announce they’ll go along with whatever the final outcome is.

[...]

As I’ve written for quite some time, I’ve honestly never understood how anyone could think that Obama was going to bring about some sort of “new” political approach or governing method when, as Kilgore notes, what he practices — politically and substantively — is the Third Way, DLC, triangulating corporatism of the Clinton era, just re-packaged with some sleeker and more updated marketing.  At its core, it seeks to use government power not to regulate, but to benefit and even merge with, large corporate interests, both for political power (those corporate interests, in return, then fund the Party and its campaigns) and for policy ends.  It’s devoted to empowering large corporations, letting them always get what they want from government, and extracting, at best, some very modest concessions in return.

[...]

One finds this in far more than just economic policy, and it’s about more than just letting corporations do what they want.  It’s about affirmatively harnessing government power in order to benefit and strengthen those corporate interests and even merging government and the private sector. In the intelligence and surveillance realms, for instance, the line between government agencies and private corporations barely exists.  Military policy is carried out almost as much by private contractors as by our state’s armed forces.  Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle between the public and private sectors so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded.  Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations.  At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable.

The health care bill is one of the most flagrant advancements of this corporatism yet, as it bizarrely forces millions of people to buy extremely inadequate products from the private health insurance industry — regardless of whether they want it or, worse, whether they can afford it (even with some subsidies). In other words, it uses the power of government, the force of law, to give the greatest gift imaginable to this industry — tens of millions of coerced customers, many of whom will be truly burdened by having to turn their money over to these corporations — and is thus a truly extreme advancement of this corporatist model.

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

That’s pretty much how I see it too.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street’s influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy — issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel — may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast that federal officials don’t have exact numbers for its size; the most recent estimates tally nearly 1,000 panels with total membership exceeding 60,000 people.

Under the policy, which is being phased in over the coming months, none of the more than 13,000 lobbyists in Washington would be able to hold seats on the committees, which advise agencies on trade rules, troop levels, environmental regulations, consumer protections and thousands of other government policies.

via New Obama policy bars lobbyists from federal advisory panels – washingtonpost.com.

If the lobbyists still want to sit on those panels and committees, they can always stop being lobbyists… but I seriously doubt they are willing to give up the money they get from lobbying to stand on principle. These are people whose goal is profit… without principles.

The nation’s bankers have much to be thankful for as they sit down to their turkey dinners on Thursday.

At this time last year, the American financial system was near collapse, rescued only by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Now the system has stabilized, and the industry is on the verge of a coup that many would have thought impossible a year ago: an escape from any major reform of financial regulations.

On Tuesday, the American Financial Services Association even held a conference call with reporters to update them on its efforts — successful so far — to torpedo plans for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would protect people from the sort of lending abuses that led to last year’s implosion.

The ASFA, a trade group of credit card issuers, auto-finance companies, mortgage lenders and others leading the fight against the CFPA, took the unusual approach on Tuesday of publicly celebrating the reform’s fading prospects.

via Bankers making turkeys out of taxpayers – washingtonpost.com.

Still, people inside and outside the bank say they were stunned when Richard D. Parsons, Citigroup’s chairman, enlisted the services last spring of Richard F. Hohlt, a longtime Washington insider with a history of aggressive advocacy for the banking industry.

Critics say that as a top lobbyist for the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, Mr. Hohlt blocked regulation of these institutions and played a pivotal role helping to prolong dubious industry practices that cost taxpayers $150 billion to clean up.

After that crisis passed, he faded from the public eye but continued advising clients, cementing his contacts in the news media and even surfacing as one among a handful of Washington insiders involved in the public outing of Valerie Wilson as a C.I.A. agent.

via Citigroup Calls In Richard F. Hohlt, Mr. Inside – NYTimes.com.

In just the last few months, the healthcare industry has spent $380 million on lobbying, advertising and campaign contributions. And — don’t bother holding onto your socks — a million and a half of it went to Finance Committee Chairman Baucus, the man who said he saw “a lot to like” in the two public option amendments proposed by Sens. Rockefeller and Schumer, but voted no anyway.

The people in favor of a public alternative can’t scrape up the millions of dollars Baucus has received from the health sector during his political career. In fact, over the last two decades, the current members of the entire finance committee have collected nearly $50 million from the health sector, a long-term investment that’s now paying off like a busted slot machine.

via Washington’s revolving doors are bad for your health | Salon .

Schmidt’s complaint stems from campaign literature in which Krikorian claimed she “has taken $30,000 in blood money from Turkish sponsored political action committees to deny the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children by the Ottoman Turkish government during World War I.”

via Turkey’s influence over lawmakers surfaces in Ohio hearing — Sunlight Foundation’s Real Time Investigations – Tracking Private Influences on Public Policy.

Also see:

Defense contractors join Turkish lobbying effort in pursuit of arms deals

and

‘American Conservative’ mag’s description of interview with previously-gagged FBI whistleblower as ‘explosive’ may prove to be a gross understatement