Lobbying

Occupy the Regulatory Open Comment Period!

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 …

Jack Abramoff: Still Detestable

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 of …

Dave Camp Cashes in on Super Committee Assignment

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 …

A Washington Tale: The Pakistani Agent Who Tried to Befriend Congress

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 …

Without a Hitch, the Revolving Door Still Spins at the FCC

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 …