Obama Already a Corporate Shill
Obama makes the right 'progressive' noises
even as his campaign bends with
the fierce plutocratic winds
fanned by giant global investment firms
and corporations helping him join
leading corporate Clinton in setting
new electoral fund-raising records
Obama with Idris Deby, the President of Chad.
While he was in Africa on his way to visit
his father's home village in Kenya last year,
Senator Obama visited Chad officially to talk about Darfur.
However, he was also there as
an unofficial ambassador for Exxon Mobil,
who'd had their contract in Chad revoked
because they had a significant backlog of unpaid taxes
He pressured President Deby to reinstate the contract
The World Bank financed Chad-Cameroon pipeline
is still a vital asset in Africa for the West
Obama Is the Consummate Political Hustler [Original]
Not too long ago, having donated to Barack Obama’s campaign, I was at a fund-raising event for him at an astoundingly beautiful house in the Oakland hills.
It was attended by a perfect cross section of the Bay Area’s well-known progressives: a journalism professor from Berkeley chatting on the veranda
A member of the band Green Day loitering near the breadsticks. From the wisteria-strangled steps, Mr. Obama gave a loose and affable speech and then took questions, answering them all with great detail and a certain refreshing lack of polish.
Afterward, I found myself with a few donor-friends in an antechamber designated for photos with the candidate.
We all felt sort of out of place, like vegetarians at a Texas barbecue, but a voice in the room soon brightened the mood.
Who is that? we wondered. The accent was thick, Brooklyn-based, maddeningly familiar. Another man in line figured it out. You’re George Zimmer! he said.
It was George Zimmer, he of the suits and near-constant ads on the radio. When his turn came, Mr. Obama was equally entertained.
It’s you! he said, and his face exploded into that incomparable smile. And with that, the founder of Men’s Wearhouse bought himself a $2,300 photo.
This is, though, the original sin of politics: that once born into such a life, one has already sold and will always be required to sell (and usually for a depressingly small price) bits of him or herself, just about every day for the rest of one’s time seeking election and serving in office.
As a society we’ve created the problem, we’ve nurtured the addiction. Through a foggy and strained interpretation of the First Amendment, we have accepted that money is free speech, and that a candidate’s viability is measured first and foremost by his or her ability to get people to write checks.
Politics in the West is in the business of supporting, backing and encouraging capitalism. It is hardly surprising that the measure of a politicians success is directly related to the size of his/her campaign fund.
The powering of our 'democracy' on cash inevitably leads, and will always lead, to corruption and catastrophe.
We can try to clean it up, like oil spilled in a bay, but as long as we use the substance in the first place, it will ooze its way into every aspect of our lives.
There will be compromised decision-making abroad; there will be the growth and misappropriation of corporate influence; there will be the opting-out of millions of disillusioned youth, the void filled by the cynical and self-interested.
And, in the most hypocritical manifestation, there will be the 'man of hope' taking thousands of photos, with progressives who wish their support did not have a price tag, in exchange for the maximum personal donation allowed by law.
The 'Soft' Left Are Easily Conned by Obama [Original]
Last August, Obama audaciously told thousands of labor union members at Chicago’s Soldier Field that he was “running for president...because of you, not because of folks who are writing big checks”.
He made a big point of the fact that he “does not take money from corporate lobbyists,” unlike business-friendly Hillary Clinton.
He uttered his worker-pleasing words even as his campaign was bending with fierce plutocratic winds fanned by giant global investment firms and corporations that were helping him join leading corporate Democrat Clinton in setting new electoral fundraising records.
Ever wonder why the “progressive” (as he repeatedly describes himself) Obama dances for Wall Street on the (fake) Social Security “crisis?”
Or sounds like Mitt Romney and Rudy Guliani in decrying the specter of “government mandated” universal health care?
Curious about why the avowed environmentalist thinks that nuclear power should be considered part of the solution to America’s energy crisis and has recently joined Hillary in voting for the extension of the corporate-neoliberal North American Free Trade Agreement to Peru?
Follow the money. Obama’s presidential campaign has received nearly $5 million dollars from securities and investment firms and $866,000 from commercial banks through October of 2007.
Obama’s top contributor so far is Goldman Sachs (provider of $369,078 to Obama), identified by Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) investigators as “a major proponent of privatizing Social Security as well as legislation that would essentially deregulate the investment banking/securities industry.”
Eight of Obama’s top twenty election investors are securities and investment firms: Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros. (number 2 at $229,090), J.P. Morgan Chase and Co. (# 4 at $216,759), Citadel Investment Group (#7 at 4166,608), UBS AG ($146,150), UBS-America ($106,680), Morgan Stanley ($104,421), and Credit Suisse Group ($92,300). The last two firms are also known to be leading privatization advocates.
Meanwhile, Obama’s presidential run has been “assisted” by more than $2 million from the health care sector and nearly $400,000 from the insurance industry through October of 2007.
Obama received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006.
His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, was until a recently a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006.
And Obama’s sixth largest contributor is Exelon, the proud Chicago-based owner and operator of more nuclear power plants than any entity on earth.
Go figure.
As for his “lobbyist ban,” last August the Los Angeles Times reported that Obama “raised more than $1 million in the first three months of his presidential campaign from law firms and companies that have major lobbying operations in the nation’s capital.”
Campaign finance expert Stephen Weissman observed that this raised troubling questions about the practical relevance of Obama’s much-ballyhooed pledge to turn down donations from “federal lobbyists.”
As Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Morain explained “some of the most influential [lobbyist] players, lawyers and consultants among them, skirt disclosure requirements by merely advising clients and associates who do actual lobbying, and avoiding regular contact with policymakers. Obama’s ban does not cover such individuals.”
Thus, to give one example, Obama received $33,000 in the first quarter of 2007 from the Atlanta-based law firm Alston & Bird, which maintains a large lobbying division in Washington.
Obama’s $33,000 came bundled from a number of “consultants” employed by the firm.
Also deleted from Obama’s “ban” are state lobbyists. Obama took $2000 from two Springfield, Illinois lobbyists for Exelon, which spent $500,000 to influence policy in Washington in 2006 and gave $160,000 directly to Obama.
A big dent in the armor of Obama’s effort to sell himself as the noble repudiator of lobbyist, PAC, and special interest money generally was inflicted in early August of 2007.
That’s when the Boston Globe published a widely circulated article titled “PACs and Lobbyists Aided Obama’s Rise: Data Contrast With His Theme.” Globe reporter Scott Helman reviewed campaign finance records to find that a “more complicated truth” lurked “behind Obama's campaign rhetoric.”
Obama’s rise to national prominence and presidential viability, Helman discovered, depended significantly on PAC and lobbyist money, including large sums from “defense contractors, law firms and the securities and insurance industries” to his own powerful PAC “Hopefund.”
Of special interest was Helman’s determination that Obama was retaining close and lucrative funding relationships with leading Washington-based lobbyists and lobbying firms while technically avoiding direct contributions from those key campaign finance players.
Nice.