After meeting privately Monday with the nation’s top bankers, President Obama publicly discussed the disconnect between banks and their paid lobbyists.
There was a “big gap” he said, between stated positions of the CEOs and the actions of banking lobbyists who are doing everything in their power to prevent financial regulatory reform.
Obama said this without cracking a smile.
Lobbyists, as everyone on Pennsylvania Avenue, Wall Street and K Street knows, do the bidding of their bosses.
Banks that accepted billions of dollars in federal bailout money are now spending millions to block tighter government regulation, including a consumer protection agency that would oversee financial transactions.
Statistics compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that the commercial banking industry has spent nearly $37 million this year. Leading the pack is the is the American Bankers Association, spending more than $6 million.
Other big spenders are JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
Mortgage bankers are also paying millions to lobby Washington. The center reports that their lobby expenses in 2009 top $11 million.
While the biggest financial companies and trade groups have in-house lobbyists to do most of the ear-bending and arm-twisting, they also farm out work to many of D.C.’s biggest lobby shops, shown around the perimeter of the Muckety map above.
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1 Comments
#1. C Lavant 12.16.2009
The recession has looked like a put-up job from the very beginning. That would be the case if bankers themselves bought the derivatives on their bank’s loans, and kept increasing the risks until the system was on the verge of going bust. That would be like someone betting against their team and then throwing the game. Congress ensured that the banks would be able to pay off their gambling debts, and the fat cats have grown fatter and fatter.
In collusion, bankers can bring labor to its knees. They can drive businesses out of business, and thereby create monopolies. In a jobless recovery, once workers receive no more government aid, they will become desperate enough to take as salary and benefits whatever the business monopoly offers. If the bankers are working to bring labor to its knees, they will be against anything and everything that makes workers less desperate to take pittance for their work.
A lending institution which pays huge bonuses surely extracts from each recipient a promise to make certain political contributions - the oil which will keep the machine working smoothly.
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