"Obama's campaign was bending with fierce plutocratic winds fanned by giant global investment firms and corporations."
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 (Center for Responsive Politics 2007a).
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 (Center for Responsive Politics 2007b). Obama received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006 (Center for Responsive Politics 2007c). 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 (Sweet 2007).
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 (Center for Responsive Politics 2007a).
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."
"Obama's rise to national prominence and presidential viability, Helman discovered, depended significantly on PAC and lobbyist money."
As Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Morain explained, "some of the most influential
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 (Morain 2007).
An especially 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 (Helman 2007)<2>.
"‘Join the movement to end the war'...by caucusing for Barack Obama."
But for my money the worst example of Team Obama's taste for truly audacious deception is their effort to appropriate the spirit and support for the antiwar movement.
Listen to these two sentences from the cover of a shiny new mailing that I just got from the Obama campaign in Iowa: "From the very beginning, Barack Obama said No to the War in Iraq. Join the movement to end the war and chance Washington" (Obama for America 2007).
Yes, you read that correctly. "Obama ‘08" is equating caucusing for the junior senator from Illinois with joining the antiwar movement.
Never mind some basic facts of history. In late July of 2004, for example, Obama admitted to the New York Times that he did not know how he would have voted on the 2002 Iraq war resolution had he been serving in the United States Senate at the time of the vote. Here is the relevant Times passage: "In a recent interview
"Obama admitted to the New York Times that he did not know how he would have voted on the 2002 Iraq war resolution had he been serving in the United States Senate at the time of the vote."
Obama has never opposed the "war" (naked and one-sided U.S. imperial aggression) on the same terms as the actual antiwar movement. His much-ballyhooed "antiwar speech" in Chicago during the fall of 2002 followed much conventional wisdom in the foreign policy establishment by criticizing "dumb wars." It said absolutely nothing about the obviously criminal and imperial, oil-motivated nature of the great international and human rights transgression Cheney and Bush were preparing for Iraq and the world community
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=463&Itemid=34
edit to add link!!!!
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
