Free Republic

China's lobbying efforts yield new influence, openness on Capitol Hill By John Pomfret Saturday, January 9, 2010; A01 Ten years ago, U.S. lawmakers publicly accused the China Ocean Shipping Co. of being a front for espionage and blocked plans to expand its Long Beach, Calif., port terminal over fears that Chinese spies would use it to snoop on the United States. By last year, Congress was seeing the state-owned Chinese behemoth in a far kinder light. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) authored a resolution applauding the company for employing thousands of Americans and helping keep the waters of Alaska clean....

Did Hedgies lose out on their investment — or help dump — Dodd? January 6, 2010 at 7:02 pm by Teri Buhl When U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) announced Wednesday he wouldn’t run for a 6th term, folks in the financial world behind the Dump Dodd campaign were rejoicing, but some big name hedgies likely realized they’d just taken a huge loss on their political investment. Greenwich resident Bruce Rose, founder of Carrington Capital, appears to be the biggest loser. This summer Maurna Desmond of Forbes.com broke the news that the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee was acting as...

U.S. taxpayers are spending more than $40,000 per month on office space, staff, cell phones and a leased SUV for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, even as he works as a lobbyist for private corporations and foreign governments. The payments are perfectly legal under a federal law that provides five years of benefits for former speakers — but only if Hastert never makes use of his government-funded perks in the course of his lobbying work. Ethics experts say that sort of separation is hard to maintain. Hastert “has to be meticulous in his schedule to make sure there is no...

Dems cleared in PMA lobbying scandal By Susan Crabtree - 12/18/09 04:49 PM ET At least three Democratic lawmakers have been cleared of any wrongdoing after an initial investigation into their ties to PMA Group, a now-defunct lobbying firm. Reps. John Murtha (Pa.), Jim Moran (Va.) and Norm Dicks (Wash.) recently received a letter from the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) informing them that it found no need for further inquiry into the PMA-related allegations. The board of the OCE on Nov. 30 voted unanimously to recommend that the full ethics committee dismiss the charges, according to a letter to...

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) and the Alliance for Worker Freedom (AWF) formally requested an investigation by the acting United States Attorney Channing D. Phillips, Esq., into the potentially illegal lobbying activities of the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) President Andy Stern. In a letter hand delivered to the U.S. Attorney’s office, the Senate Secretary and the House Clerk, ATR President Grover Norquist and AWF Executive Director Brian Johnson wrote: By this letter, we urge you to investigate the activities of Mr. Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), regarding meetings and other lobbying contacts with...

Career Politicians Rely on Lobbying For Reelection: Founding Fathers Foresaw This Problem Op-Ed by John Cox John Cox is a highly successful businessman. Cox ran in the Illinois GOP U.S. Senate Primary in 2004 and was a presidential candidate in 2008. Marty Russo was my Congressman many years ago. He is correct; the Constitution does give us the right to address our grievances and lobbying on issues does serve a good purpose. The problem is not with the lobbyists; it is with the career politicians we elect who agree to be bought. Why? Because they want to get re-elected and...

Lobbyists are quitting the business at a record pace, according to a study released Monday. Over 1,400 lobbyists "deregistered" with Congress in the second quarter of 2009, according to a study conducted jointly by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) and OMB Watch. Typically, only a few hundred lobbyists quit each quarter. The giant spike in resignations came just after the Obama administration instituted strict new rules on lobbyist activity. The White House banned employees from receiving gifts from lobbyists and announced that any lobbyist hired by the executive branch could not work on the same issues on which he...

AT&T's top lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, sent a letter to all of the telecom giant's 300,000 employees on Sunday, urging them to express their concerns over a net neutrality proposal under consideration by the Federal Communications Commission. Check out his letter and comments on the Actuarian Outpost Web site. The letter was the latest move in a lobbying frenzy days before the FCC votes on a proposal to create new net neutrality regulations. High-tech giants wrote to the agency to support the rules, while dozens of lawmakers from both parties have protested the rules as potentially dangerout to economic growth. "We...

Commentary: Ethics Reform Under Scrutiny Brittany Fortier, October 16, 2009 During his campaign last year, President Obama said that he was “running to tell the lobbyists in Washington that their days of setting the agenda are over.” With numerous questionable Cabinet appointees, 32 czars (and counting) who do not have to answer to Congress, and scandals involving organizations affiliated with the President (e.g., Acorn), how effective has Obama been at keeping his promise? Norm Eisen, Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform at the White House, spoke about President Obama’s sweeping ethics reform plan at the Center for American Progress...

Hobby Lobby Brittany Fortier, October 15, 2009 Are lobbyists discouraging some of the best and brightest in the private sector from working for the government? The Center for American Progress (CAP) hosted a conference on September 14, 2009 to discuss the role that special interests have in shaping American policy and whether current laws are effective in restraining excessive abuses of the system. Bob Kaiser, Associate Editor and Senior Correspondent for the Washington Post and author of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, argued that the main purpose of today’s lobbyist is...

In the wake of the sensational ACORN video sting operation by two young investigators, an even more daring, dangerous and devastating undercover investigation – this one infiltrating the nation's most aggressive Muslim "civil rights" organization for six months – has resulted in stunning revelations about the supposedly "moderate" group, backed up by 12,000 pages of documents and 300 hours of covert video obtained during the secret op. As revealed in a new book detailing the operation and its findings, the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, is not the beneficent Muslim civil-rights group it claims to be. Rather,...

House Republicans accuse Muslim group of trying to plant spies By Jordy Yager - 10/14/09 11:01 AM ET Four House Republicans are accusing a Muslim advocacy group of trying to plant spies. Republican members of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus say the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), tried to plant “spies” within key national security committees to shape legislative policy in its favor. Reps. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) and Paul Broun (R-Ga.), and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) - citing the recently released book, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that's Conspiring to Islamize America” – called for the House...

Democrat's $1.65 million take from the financial services industry is nearly twice that of any other senator's Wall Street has showered nearly $11 million on the Senate since the beginning of the year, and more than 15 percent of it has gone to a single senator: Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York. Schumer’s $1.65 million take from the financial services industry is nearly twice that of any other senator's — and more than five times what the industry gave to any single Republican senator. While the industry has scaled back its political spending in the wake of last year’s economic...

The meeting with Bank of America executives came less than a year after American taxpayers rescued the institution with a $45 billion emergency bailout. The subject was derivatives, the complex securities that helped trigger Wall Street’s crisis and drag the country to the edge of an economic abyss. The guest of honor: Barney Frank. The bankers wanted to be sure that Representative Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, would not attempt to clamp down excessively on derivatives trading. Frank said he left the session pledging to keep in mind their “legitimate’’ concerns. “It was not lobbying politically,’’...

Here's your chance to find out who has been visiting the White HouseHere's your chance to help figure out who has been visiting the people's house during the early months of the Obama administration. Although President Barack Obama has announced that he will make public the names of visitors to the White House, there's a catch. Under the new White House policy, names of visitors during the first eight months of the administration will be released only if the requests include specific names to be checked against the visitor logs. In other words, if you don't know who visited, or...

It isn’t just U.S. companies or groups that push for their causes on Capitol Hill. Thousands of times each year, lobbyists for foreign governments and other overseas organizations reach out to members of Congress and other U.S. leaders to make their case on issues important to them.But counting up those thousands of contacts hasn’t been easy. Records detailing what foreign entities are lobbying, who they’re contacting and why are filed on paper forms, sometimes in handwriting that’s little more than a scrawl. After prodding from open-government groups, the Department of Justice put scanned copies of the forms on its Web...

Obama Staffer Speaks at Planned Parenthood Event, Urges Pro-Abortion Lobbying Washington, DC -- A top official with the administration of pro-abortion President Barack Obama spoke to gathering of Planned Parenthood activists last week. There, she promised leaders of the abortion business that Obama is a pro-abortion president and urged them to continue their pro-abortion lobbying efforts. See http://www.LifeNews.com/nat5267.html

General Motors reduced its lobbying spending in the second quarter by only 1.4% compared to the first quarter, even though the second quarter saw the company go bankrupt, be taken over by the government, and announce it was cancelling its outside lobbying contracts. In April, May, and June, GM spent $2,760,000 on lobbying according to its Q2 lobbying filing, compared to $2,800,000 in the first quarter.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has advised ethics officials to drop an investigation of whether a protest rally and other actions by the Diocese of Bridgeport constitutes lobbying, saying that the lobbying law is too broad and could violate freedom of religion in this instance. Blumenthal said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon that it's possible the church's activities fall under the lobby registration law — the diocese, for example, might have spent over the threshold of $2,000 booking buses to take parishioners to a rally at the Capitol in March to protest a bill that would have dramatically changed...

The Securities and Exchange Commission celebrated its 75th anniversary with lavish gala largely paid for by law firms and lobbyists. From the Politico By all accounts, it was an excellent evening. For the 75th anniversary of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC’s Historical Society — an independent, nonprofit organization — threw a lavish dinner for 950 at the National Building Museum. Critics, though, might gawk at the spectacle of a commission that’s been criticized as too close to industry celebrating itself in a dinner paid for largely by firms that have business before it.