There’s nothing “wrong” with protests built around placard-hoisting and park-squatting, but Occupy the SEC is definitely doing something right with its radically different tack. The OWS-offshoot has submitted a 325-page letter to federal financial regulatory agencies on the Volcker Rule, a controversial measure designed to prohibit banks from proprietary trading, or making investments with their [...]
Lobbying
Hollywood loves a good yarn about pirates on the high seas. Piracy online? Not so much. Every day, people around the world effectively steal countless movies, songs and other copyrighted content through websites offering illegal downloads. The big movie and music studios have fought this thievery for years, with some success. They hounded Napster out [...]
At the height of the Tom DeLay-era, Jack Abramoff was probably Washington’s most influential and lucratively paid lobbyist. He was brash and brazen, displaying a Hollywood swagger long before they made a movie about him. Then Abramoff was exposed as a fraud, a liar and a creep of the first order–someone who effectively stole millions [...]
Tax reform, you will soon hear, can be good for everybody. But few will benefit more than those who write the legislation. On the same day that House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., got picked to join the 12-member Congressional super-committee that is charged with deciding the country’s spending and taxation fate, his [...]
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported on the latest innovation in Washington’s shameful influence-peddling industry. Read the story for details, which involve former Democratic Congressman Earl Pomeroy, who supported the health care industry in Congress and then, after losing his seat last fall, went right into a job promoting the industry’s interests in [...]
In the final debt limit compromise, Republicans and Democrats agreed to swap out the hostages. Gone is the threat of defaulting on U.S. bonds by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. In its place: Medicare providers and defense contractors. If Democrats and Republicans do not agree to another $1.5 trillion in cuts later this year, [...]
The case of Syed Fai has turned over the rock under which foreign influence peddlers and members of Congress usually shelter together, protected by the darkness of our loophole-riddled lobbying rules. Fai was arrested on Tuesday and charged with acting as a foreign agent for the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, Pakistan’s spy service, without registering under [...]
A spokeswoman for the cable giant Comcast says the company only approached Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who’s just announced she’ll join the company as senior vice president of government affairs for NBC-Universal, about a potential job as a lobbyist in mid-April. Baker then alerted FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick, and recused herself from further [...]
