Obama’s Money Cartel

Z Net reports:

Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consist of officers and em­ployees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originat­ing and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.

These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street. There are five large corporate law firms that are also registered lobbyists; and one is a corporate law firm that is no longer a registered lobbyist but does legal work for Wall Street. The cumula­tive total of these 14 contributors through February 1, 2008, was $2,872,128, and we’re still in the primary season.

But hasn’t Senator Obama repeatedly told us in ads and speeches and debates that he wasn’t taking money from reg­istered lobbyists? Hasn’t the press given him a free pass on this statement?

Barack Obama, speaking in Greenville, South Carolina, on January 22, 2008:

“Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign, they won’t run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president”.

Barack Obama, in an email to support­ers on June 25, 2007, as reported by the Boston Globe:

“Candidates typically spend a week like this – right before the critical June 30th financial reporting deadline – on the phone, day and night, begging Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs to write huge checks. Not me. Our campaign has rejected the money-for-in­fluence game and refused to accept funds from registered federal lobbyists and po­litical action committees”.

The Center for Responsive Politics’ website allows one to pull up the filings made by lobbyists registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 with the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and secretary of the U.S. Senate. These top five contributors to the Obama campaign have filed as registered lobbyists: Sidley Austin LLP; Skadden, Arps, et al; Jenner & Block; Kirkland & Ellis; Wilmerhale, aka Wilmer Cutler Pickering.

Is it possible that Senator Obama does not know that corporate law firms are also frequently registered lobbyists? Or is he making a distinction that because these funds are coming from the employ­ees of these firms, he’s not really taking money directly from registered lobby­ists? That thesis seems disingenuous when many of these individual donors own these law firms as equity partners or shareholders and share in the profits gen­erated from lobbying.

Saint Obama.