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"Lobbyists are almost always former officials in
Congress or the executive branch
and thus friends of those who are still in
political office." - Glenn Greenwald
the revolving door
"The revolving door between Washington government
offices and lobbying firms is so lucrative and so established that anyone
pointing out that it is
institutionalized corruption is seen as
baying at the moon." -
Fareed Zakaria
"The same revolving door that exists between the
military establishment and defense contractors is also observed to exist
between the Washington based think tanks and US government
departments." - Rodrigue Tremblay1993 Wendy Gramm, Texas Senator Phil Gramm's wife, headed the
Commodity Futures Exchange
Commission.
At Enron's request Enron became exempt from Commodity Futures Exchange
Commission regulations.
Wendy Gramm resigned her position and 6
weeks later was appointed to the
Enron board of
directors.
"The lobbyists I met at Cassidy & Associates
and APCO were more than eager to help out. In exchange for fees of up to $1.5
million a year they offered to send congressional delegations to
Türkmenistan and
write and plant opinion pieces in
newspapers under the names
of academics and
think tank experts they would
recruit." - Ken Silverstein2000
William Jefferson Clinton
signs a bill with an amendment sponsered by Phil Gramm to entirely exempt
Enron from oversight thus
creating the private trading floor that lead to the
Enron trading schemes - Fat
Boy, Death Star, Get Shorty - leading to the California energy debacle which
eventualy, with the help of Arnold Schwarzenegger, lead to
quite a nice profit for
the Wall Street bond
brokers.
2003
Richard Norman Perle,
1st Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs for
Ronald Reagan and
chairman of Defense
Policy Board for George Walker Bush, advisor to Defense
Secretary Donald Henry
Rumsfeld, is employed as an advisor to
Global
Crossing, a major telecom with strong financial interest in lobbying
the DoD.
Richard Norman
Perle is paid a several hundred million dollar commission to procure
government approval of the sale of Global Crossing to Hutchison
Whampoa and Singapore Technologies Telemedia Pte.
March 21, 2003 New York Times article notes the
conflict of interest of Richard Norman
Perle forcing his resignation.
Of the major corporate melt downs at
the turn of the millennium Gary Winnick of Global Crossing alone remained
unscathed.
Andrew H. Card Jr. was General Motors vice president of
government relations.
Andrew H. Card Jr. represented General Motors on
matters of public policy before Congress.
Andrew H. Card Jr. became George Walker Bush's
White House Chief of
Staff.
Jacqueline Glassman was a senior
regulatory counsel at Daimler-Chrysler.
She became head of the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration.
Jeffrey A. Rosen was a senior partner at
Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm that has defended General Motors
in numerous product
liability suits.
Jeffrey A. Rosen became general counsel at the
Department of
Transportation.
2009"Those of us who
manage the public's dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform
bad habits and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we
restore the vital trust between a people and their government. We need to close
the revolving door
that lets lobbyists come into government freely. We are here as public servants, and
public service is a privilege. It's not about advancing yourself or your
corporate clients." - Barack Hussein Obama II,
January 20, 2009
On February 12
Raytheon lobbyist William J. Lynn
III (Pentagon comptroller during the
Clinton administration)
is overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate endorsing
Barack Obama's decision to waive
ethics regulations by putting a former revolving door defense
lobbyist/government servant in charge of day-to-day operations at the
Pentagon.
Jack Abramoff graduated high
school in Beverly Hills. Jack Abramoff was elected chairman of the College
Republican National Committee. Jack Abramoff spent
ten years in Talmudwood,
producing such movies as Red Scorpion, an anti-communist film made
in 1988 just after his term with the College Republicans ended.
Jack Abramoff: 'The whole system' is corrupt
Congressman Tom DeLay, former Majority Leader of the
House of Representatives, said during a New Year's trip to the Northern Mariana
Islands of Saipan in 1997, "... one of my closest and dearest friends, v
...".
After the trip, Jack Abramoff helped Tom DeLay craft policy that
extended exemptions from federal immigration and labor laws to Saipan
industries, even though the products were allowed to be labelled 'Made in the
USA' as part of the US Commonwealth.
Brian Ross at
ABC News for 20/20 on March 13,
1998 pointed out that factories in
Saipan have forced their
workers to have abortions in order to keep their jobs.
August 2005 Jack Abramoff works for
Tyco and is listed as
lobbying the White House.
Tyco claims Jack Abramoff has
been paid $1.7 million for an 'astroturf campaign' to create a 'grass roots
campaign' to oppose proposals to penalize American corporations registered
abroad for tax reasons.
Timothy Flanigan,
Tyco general council, states to
the Senate Judiciary Committee that Jack Abramoff
bragged he could help
Tyco avoid tax liability aimed at off-shore
companies because he "had good relationships with members of Congress."
January
3, 2006 Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to fraud, tax evasion and
conspiracy to bribe public
officials in a deal that requires him to
provide evidence about
members of Congress.
Randall Harold Cunningham aka Randy or 'Duke'
Cunningham was an F-4 Phantom Pilot, Navy Ace in
Vietnam. As a California
represenative in the House he voted in 2003 for the "Can Spam Act,"
which legalized spam and invalidated California's tough anti-spam law before it
could go into effect.
Randall Harold Cunningham resigned from the
House on November 28, 2005 after pleading
guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to commit
bribery,
mail fraud,
wire fraud, and tax evasion.
Bob Ney, an Ohio congressman,
pleaded quilty to charges of
bribery in October 2006. Bob Ney accepted several thousand dollars worth of
gifts from Jack Abramoff for legislative
'favors'.
"The reason there are tens of thousands of lobbyists is
because the ever-expanding US government creates ever-increasing opportunities
for abuse. The more the US government does, the more lobbyists there will be to
protect special interests at the expense of the common interest.
You
can't take a congressman to lunch for $25 and buy him a hamburger or a steak or
something like that. But you can take him to a fund-raising lunch and not only
buy him that steak, but give him $25,000 extra and call it a fund-raiser - and
have all the same access and all the same interactions with that congressman."
- Jack Abramoff
Lawrence A.
Franklin, formerly a colonel in the Air Force reserve and a former
Iran desk officer in the office
of the Secretary of Defense is sentenced to 12 years for turning classified
documents over to two lobbyists of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee.
Jan 12, 2012 Former Southwest Michigan congressman
Mark Siljander, accused of accepting stolen funds on behalf of
a Missouri charity with alleged
terrorism ties, was sentenced Wednesday to a year in federal prison.
Four co-defendants of Siljander, who served in Congress from 1981 until
1987, also were sentenced in U.S. District Court in Kansas City.
Sentences ranged from probation to nearly five years in prison for
Mubarak Hamed, the former executive director of the Columbia-based Islamic
American Relief Agency.
Prosecutors said Hamed conspired to hire
Siljander to lobby for the charity's removal from a government list of
charities suspected of funding international terrorism.
The charity
closed in October 2004 after being designated a global terrorist organization
by the US government.
Hamed, a naturalized US
citizen from Sudan, pleaded guilty in
June 2010 to illegally conspiring to transfer more than $1 million to Iraq and
obstructing the administration of laws governing tax-exempt charities.
Siljander, sentenced to 12 months and one
day in prison, pleaded guilty to
obstruction and acting as
an unregistered
foreign agent.
Prosecutors said Siljander received $75,000 from the
charity to push for its removal from the list, and that $50,000 of it was part
of unused grant money that was supposed to have been returned to the US Agency
for International Development after it terminated its grants for two relief
projects in Mali, Africa, with the charity
in 1999.
Of the $2 million the charity received, $85,000 was supposed
to have been returned to the agency and wasn't, according to Don Ledford, a
spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Western District of Missouri.
The indictment said Siljander and three charity officers agreed to
cover up the money's origins and use it on the lobbying effort.
Siljander was charged with conspiring to engage in
money laundering by transferring stolen USAID funds, and obstructing justice by
lying to a federal grand jury and
making false statements to FBI agents,
officials said.
Money was funneled to Siljander through nonprofits,
prosecutors said.
The original indictment alleged the charity sent
about $130,000 to help Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom the US designated a global
terrorist.
The money, sent to bank accounts in Peshawar, Pakistan, in
2003 and 2004, was masked as donations to an orphanage located in buildings
that Hekmatyar owned.
Authorities described Hekmatyar as an
Afghan mujahedeen leader who has participated in and supported terrorist acts
by al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Prosecutors said Siljander, who now lives
in Great Falls, Va., lied to the FBI about being hired to lobby for the
charity.
He told investigators that the money he received was a
donation to help him write a book about Islam and Christianity.
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