Booz Allen Hamilton sees a HUGE difference btwn Dems and Repubs

[nashville_brook]

Followed a link earlier to the Influence Explorer data on Booz Allen Hamilton and couldn't believe what I saw.
Judging from their campaign contributions, BAH has quite a preference for Democrats generally and Obama in particular.

Also notice, as you go down thru the years, there's consistent interest in the presidential races. They obviously believe the president is where their investment is best spent.

But, given that, there's some strange speculations on their part. Why so little money to Bush Jr.? Why the heavy preference for Obama over Hillary? It's not like she's been unfriendly to defense.

Then check out the pre-9/11 contributions. The most they spent was $6,750 on Bill Bradley. That's compared to the $101,781 they spent on Obama in 2008. Holy crap that's a significant change in their campaign spending.

http://influenceexplorer.com/organization/booz-allen-hamilton/8c260a7c04c24e4187b7fa0dfcf5d384?cycle=-1

h/t David Sirota


Here's their highest campaign contributions for all years 1989-2013:







Here's their highest campaign contributions for the 2012 presidential cycle -- notice how much of a premium the put on the presidential race:







Here's their highest campaign contributions for the 2008 presidential cycle -- they were nearly TWICE as invested in Obama as they were in Hillary: What gave Obama the competitive advantage over Hillary?







Going back to 2004 it starts to get more interesting -- why are they not so bullish on Bush? What sense does that make?








And, this for me is the kicker...Gore only received $1000 from them in 2001:

[cantbeserious]

1. Makes One Wonder Who Is Carrying The Water For Whom - Rest Assured It Is Not The American Citizens

eom

[nashville_brook]

2. this just really blows my mind.

[cantbeserious]

4. As Is Always Said - Follow The Money - Not The Distracting Side Stories

eom

[angstlessk]

42. Republicans are NATURAL supporters..it takes MONEY to change an opponent

but I agree we need to hold Democrats feet to the fire..and wonder who voted the 'wrong' way based on financial support :GRR

[cantbeserious]

43. I Am At The Point That Most Politicians Are Corrupted By The Surveillance State Threat And Money

I would prefer to think otherwise; however, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

[angstlessk]

44. I totally agree..and I am sure the money spent by Booze Allen

was WELL SPENT!...and got the expected outcome...Democrats are as corrupt or maybe more so (they pretend to be for the workers) then repubugs

[DirkGently]

3. Follow. The. Money. (nt)

[Vinnie From Indy]

5. It could be that the ability to have total information awareness

skewed their contributions political outlook. Maybe they just ran the whole shebang through their hueristic matrices and Obama's name was spit out.

[nashville_brook]

7. this data indicates to me that Obama and Hillary were competing for $$

And something made BAH come down on the side of Obama.

I wonder what that could have been. What was his competitive advantage?

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. I know, I KNOW... his vote to shield the TELCOS

while a Senator.

[nashville_brook]

20. interesting. hmmm.

[Jarla]

29. Maybe Obama received more simply because he won the primary.

It would be interesting to see how much of difference there was in contributions during the primary races.

[Aerows]

6. Cui Bono

Always necessary.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

8. Yet some here try to make Snowden, not the NSA or BAH, the villain of the piece.

[nashville_brook]

10. when you're operating on this level, is anyone not a villain?

i've seen some mighty corrupt shit in places i've worked, and the urge to blow to the whistle feel a lot like the need to take a shower. you want to get the shit off of you.

most folks just change jobs. but i imagine when your whole career is in THIS, you can't change jobs to get away from it. you either change the whole system or live with knowing you've contributed to it.

[Fumesucker]

9. Hold your friends close, your enemies closer

I see that as perfectly natural, Republicans are already in their pockets just because they are cool with spying, Democrats on the other hand need a little more juicing in order to climb on the gravy bandwagon but climb I bet they did.

[nashville_brook]

12. in the case of Bush v Kerry, the numbers are too disparate

otherwise i'd agree.



on edit -- see post below -- might be a competition with Halliburton.

[Fumesucker]

15. I'm fond of the "tip of the iceberg" theory, if you see something obvious there's probably more

These fuckers are nothing if not devious, if they aren't up to more no good that we haven't seen yet I'll eat my oldest pair of socks.

[annabanana]

11. Are they our Halliburton?

Is that the REAL plum up for grabs in elections?

[nashville_brook]

13. that is a very good question. who is whose client.

[DirkGently]

16. They're selling "cyber security services" to Dubai. Maybe?

I was going to link to the Forbes story from yesterday, but that page has strangely disappeared.


Here's the Google nub:

NSA Contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Selling Cybersecurity Services ...
Forbes-Jun 13, 2013
Burj Khalifa, the world tallest tower, is silhouetted at sunset in Dubai. ... Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors to U.S. intelligence ...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jongalaviz/2013/06/13/nsa-contractor-booz-allen-hamilton-selling-cybersecurity-services-to-middle-east-governments/

...and what's left at the link:

4-0-
We can’t find the page you requested but please try:
Forbes Homepage
Most Popular Posts
Real-Time News
Our Sitemap

Interesting.

[kentuck]

17. That is spare change ...

for what they get in return.

[starroute]

18. Could it have something to do with James Woolsey?

In 2002, Neocon and PNACer James Woolsey joined Booz Allen Hamilton as head of their Global Strategic Security Practice, which had been created specifically to chase after War on Terror contracts in the wake of 9/11.

Woolsey had been CIA director under Clinton in 1993-95 -- but according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._James_Woolsey,_Jr.), the two of them never got along, and Clinton had chosen him only to pay back the neoconservatives who had supported his campaign.

Wikipedia states that "Woolsey has been known primarily as a neoconservative Democrat[13][14] — hawkish on foreign policy issues but liberal on economic and social issues. He endorsed Senator John McCain for president and served as one of McCain's foreign policy advisors.[15] He has called himself a "Scoop Jackson Democrat" and a "Joe Lieberman Democrat", with "social democratic" domestic views. He regards the label 'neoconservative' as a 'silly term'."

It wouldn't explain the BAH support of Obama in 2008, though.

[nashville_brook]

19. ah -- this is a decent explanation of the coolness toward Hillary

well done.

[starroute]

21. There's probably more to it than personal relationships, though

Last edited Sun Jun 16, 2013, 03:01 PM - Edit history (1)

One possibility, since the donation figures include employees and their families, is that BAH just employs a lot of computer geeks whose own sympathies lie with the techno-hawkish wing of the Democrats. It's also possible that the Democratic party is seen as more technology-friendly in general.

I did come up with an interesting ACLU article about BAH, written in 2006 when there were questions about them having been hired as an "independent" auditor of the CIA and Treasury Department's Terrorist Financial Tracking Program: http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/boozallen20060914.pdf

It's a good source of information about BAH's history of involvement in things like Total Information Awareness and their heavy lobbying for "increased information sharing, particularly between private corporations and the Federal government."

[Jim Lane]

23. I'm glad someone noticed that these are EMPLOYEE donations.

Booz Allen is a corporation. It's therefore prohibited from making contributions to federal campaigns. You should not picture the Board of Directors of Booz Allen meeting to assess the candidates and then voting to send corporate funds to any of them. Unless there's a loophole I don't know about, the total amount of corporate funds contributed to each of the candidates listed in the OP was zero.

When an individual makes a campaign contribution, the donor is asked to list his or her employer. This information is solicited in all cases and is mandatory over a certain threshold (I forget if it's $100 or $200). The purpose of this disclosure requirement is that contributions from a particular company or a wider industry can be aggregated and tabulated, but the total represent the choices of many individual employees.

A corporation is also allowed to run a PAC. Its employees (and, I think, members of their immediate families) may make contributions to the PAC, which may then make contributions to federal campaigns. Allocation of the PAC's funds would generally be the decision of the corporate leadership, directly or indirectly. (I say "generally" but even that's not ironclad. I think some PAC's allow and even encourage pass-through giving: If you, as an employee, want to make a contribution to Frieda Firebrand, please make it as an earmarked contribution to the PAC, which will then contribute to her campaign, even though non-earmarked PAC funds are being used for contributions to her opponent, Senator Sleepy. Corporations like to be able to go to whichever candidate wins and remind the Senator how much his or her campaign received from the PAC.)

The bottom line is that the aggregated figures in the OP probably tell us more about the breakdown of individual employees' choices than about what the CEO, other top officers, or the Board thought.

Note that Citizens United did not change rules about corporate campaign contributions, but rather addressed "independent" expenditures using corporate funds. Obviously, many of those expenditures are independent in name only. The point, here, is that they're not included in the figures in the OP, which (as I read the OP) addresses only direct contributions to campaigns.

[DirkGently]

25. Interesting that Booz Allen made its nut with no-bid gov't

contacts though. They seem to be at the center of the outsourcing of U.S. covert surveillance to private companies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/10/edward-snowden-and-the-nsa-leaks-what-you-need-to-know-about-booz-allen-hamilton/

A 2007 article by Post reporter Robert O’Harrow documented the rapid rise of Booz Allen, beginning with a $2 million no-bid contract in 2003 to “help the new Department of Homeland Security quickly get an intelligence operation up and running.”

Over the next year, the cost of the no-bid arrangement with consultant Booz Allen Hamilton soared by millions of dollars per month, as the firm provided analysts, administrators and other contract employees to the department’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection offices.

By December 2004, payments to Booz Allen had exceeded $30 million — 15 times the contract’s original value. When department lawyers examined the deal, they found it was “grossly beyond the scope” of the original contract, and they said the arrangement violated government procurement rules. The lawyers advised the department to immediately stop making payments through the contract and allow other companies to compete for the work.

I'd say there's probably some quid getting pro quo'd somewhere.

[Jim Lane]

27. But that was during the Bush administration.

As the OP pointed out, it's notable that the contributions attributed to Booz Allen were not particularly generous to Bush. You would think that a quid pro quo would have involved more money going to the Bush campaign.

[DirkGently]

28. This is Executive Branch stuff. Meet the new boss...

...holding the same purse strings as the old boss.

[DirkGently]

22. Aha. So Booz Allen *did* want to sell UAE it's own NSA

... but now maybe it can't because Snowden makes them look incompetent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/us/after-profits-defense-contractor-faces-the-pitfalls-of-cybersecurity.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON — When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.

(snip)

“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”

(snip)

Among the questions: Why did Booz Allen assign a 29-year-old with scant experience to a sensitive N.S.A. site in Hawaii, where he was left loosely supervised as he downloaded highly classified documents about the government’s monitoring of Internet and telephone communications, apparently loading them onto a portable memory stick barred by the agency?

The results could be disastrous for a company that until a week ago had one of the best business plans in Washington, with more than half its $5.8 billion in annual revenue coming from the military and the intelligence agencies. Last week, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, whom Mr. McConnell regularly briefed when he was in government, suggested for the first time that companies like Booz Allen should lose their broad access to the most sensitive intelligence secrets.

Wait, but before this, a private U.S. contractor was going to give a foreign company it's own version of the NSA?

[nashville_brook]

24. how can it be okay to sell a version of the NSA to the UAE?

[DirkGently]

26. Well that almost sounds like a conflict of interest,

... doesn't it? One could almost wonder what the frak a private, profit-driven company is doing running our frakking domestic surveillance program, when obviously they're going to do things like SELL IT TO OTHER COUNTRIES.

[nashville_brook]

32. this is why national security should never be for profit...one reason, at least

[DirkGently]

39. Nothing supposedly about life & death should be.

Profit motive is fine for making good widgets. Keep on makin' them widgets, profiters. But you can't put human life and limb into the equation. Not in a prison. Not in a hospital.

And you most certainly can't do it in security matters. Not only do we know for a fact that outside contractors don't do it better (thanks for those troop-electrocuting showers, Halliburton) but they do it for a lot more money, and find new ways to screw everyone besides.

[Jarla]

30. But look at contributions of the Carlyle Group, who are the OWNERS of BAH,

As someone mentioned above, this data on BAH just shows the contributions of the employees of the company.

The majority shareholder of BAH is the Carlyle Group. Their numbers look quite different.

[markiv]

31. you Booz, you lose nt

[WillyT]

33. K & R !!!

[tritsofme]

34. You keep using "they" and "their" as if the corporate treasury wrote out a check. You do realize

that these are individual contributions by employees?

[Jim Lane]

37. Agreed, but some were probably through a corporate-controlled PAC

See my post #23. The OP's figures include PAC money. If Booz Allen has a PAC, which it probably does, then employees might contribute to the PAC, with the allocation of PAC contributions being controlled by "they" (the corporate leadership).

You're right that none of this money came from the corporate treasury.

[tritsofme]

40. Certainly a possibility, I generally agree with all that, although the color code in the OP charts

seems to indicate that these are all individual contributions being represented.

[Jim Lane]

47. I interpreted the color code differently.

It says "Top Recipients" and then gives the colors for individuals and for PAC. Because a PAC may make contributions to another PAC, I thought the darker color was used to show a PAC that received a contribution. The absence of the darker PAC color meant that all the Booz Allen contributions went to individual candidates.

Under the color-code explanation but before the charts, it says, "Includes contributions from the organization's employees, their family members, and its political action committee."

My reading of that legend was that contributions from these different sources were all lumped together, which fits with the idea that colors were used to distinguish the different types of recipient.

[Catherina]

35. Rec'd and bookmarked. Thank you for finding this. n/t

[okaawhatever]

36. Can anyone do one minute's worth of research and stop the fu##$n anti-Obama, anti-Government,

anti-democrat bullshit. Let me explain it to all of you.
So why did this evil company give so much money to our hope and change President? Was it for the obvious political influence for their no-bid contracts? Was it so they could help the President spy on us and dance in glee while the Constitution was shredded? Nooo...it's much worse than that. First of all, the majority of the money came from one person. What? One person? Crazy talk I tell you. He contributed over $200,000 of that money to Obama directly and Obama pacs? And why did that person kick Hillary to the curb? Surely it is part of some nefarious plot because they knew she wouldn't get us into the wars that Obama would. Right?
So who is this evil doer with suspect motives? His name is Reginald Van Lee. He is the executive vice-President of Booz Allen Hamilton Holding where he overseas their healthcare and NON_PROFIT Groups.
Consulting magazine named Mr. Van Lee as one of the top 25 consultants in the world. He has been recognized as one of New York’s Finest Philanthropists and as one of the 2009 Washington Minority Business Leaders by the Washington Business Journal. Named Black Engineer of the Year.
Mr. Van Lee holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.
Trustee, Studio Museum in Harlem
Dir. and TRUSTEE, STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM
Co-chair, Howard Theatre Restoration Inc.
Chairman of the Board, National CARES Mentoring Movement
Chairman of the Board, New York International Ballet Competition, Inc.
Chairman Emeritus, Evidence, Inc.
Chairman of the Board, Washington Performing Arts Society
He is also a member of the President's Committee on the Arts & Humanities (with Yo Yo Ma, Forest Whitaker, Edward Norton)

Another $70 grand came from this gentleman:
Robert S. Osborne is an Executive Vice President of our company and our Executive General Counsel. Mr. Osborne joined our company in 2010 as a Senior Vice President after serving as Group Vice President and General Counsel of General Motors Corporation from 2006 to 2009

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Looks like our President keeps pretty good company.

[nashville_brook]

41. sometimes $170,000 is just $170,000

[Egalitarian Thug]

38. Government contracts are the primary cash cows for most major American corporations.

Go through the Fortune 50, most of them, without feeding at the government trough, would not be on the list at all. Carlyle bought Booze-Allen (and virtually all of their holdings, for that matter) specifically to get the government contract part and immediately dumped the rest for just this reason.

We desperately need to rein in these parasites as well as the so-called financial industry that feeds off of them. There should be no such thing, except in the most urgent and legislatively approved situations, as a no-bid contract. The government should be encouraging smaller organizations to flourish, as opposed to propping up those that already dominate an industry.

[nashville_brook]

45. BAH is actually trying to diversify into providing NSA capabilities to the UAE

no conflict of interest there. nosiree.

rein them in...? i think i'd rather see them go away entirely. bring back the commons. at least then there's some real oversight, and no profit motive.

[Egalitarian Thug]

46. You are of course absolutely correct. Unfortunately, I believe that this place is a fairly

representative model of America at large today, and there's simply not enough people that possess the willingness, or perhaps the capacity to see/acknowledge the inevitable end of this course, yet.

OTOH, it is an entertaining way to pass time when I'm stuck waiting for other, real life things to happen. Poking at the morality police and the conservadems never fails to illicit an amusing reaction.