President Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina sent out an official reelection campaign video wherein he said talk of Mr. Obama having a billion dollar campaign war chest is “bullsh*t” because “we don’t take PAC money unlike our opponents. We fund this campaign in contributions of $3 or $5 or whatever you can do to help us.

Mr. Messina’s plea for Obama supporters to chip in “$3 or $5″ leaves the impression of a presidential campaign divorced from big money donors. Furthermore, the claim that Mr. Obama will not accept PAC money leaves the impression that his fundraising efforts are removed from the influence of lobbyists or Wall Street. Nothing could be further from the truth.

From the New York Times:

Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.At least 15 of Mr. Obama’s “bundlers” — supporters who contribute their own money to his campaign and solicit it from others — are involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies. They have raised more than $5 million so far for the campaign.

Because the bundlers are not registered as lobbyists with the Senate, the Obama campaign has managed to avoid running afoul of its self-imposed ban on taking money from lobbyists.

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From The Hill:

House Republicans released emails Wednesday that show a major fundraiser for President Obama discussed the $535 million loan guarantee for the solar company Solyndra during a meeting with White House officials.

George Kaiser, a “bundler” for Obama’s campaign whose foundation invested in Solyndra, said the issue “came up” during a spring 2010 meeting with White House officials. Ken Levit, executive director of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, also attended the meeting.

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Reuters ran a story last week that attempted to paint George Soros and his foundation’s donations as an organizing element of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations.  As much as this may be red meat to the right, I have to say that the story’s math was thin.

Here’s the equation: Soros’ Open Society Institute gave $3.5 million from 2007-2009 to the Tides Center.  In that same period, Tides gave $26,000 to Adbusters, the group that proclaims to have initiated the Wall Street occupation.

Sure, Soros has been said to be sympathetic to the “cause,” but is he orchestrating the demonstrations?  Probably not.  At least not in a coordinated, marching-order sense.

However, there are some interesting connections.

In the media reform space, which I follow closely, Soros and Tides, among others, have spent over $100 million this past decade funding the efforts of radical groups like Free Press (surprisingly, sitting atop of this pyramid is not George Soros; rather, it’s the Ford Foundation, which has given over $12 million to media reform activists in the last ten years alone).

One name that stands out among the “media reformers” as they’re connected to the OWS movement is Free Press’s Tim Karr.   To be sure, there is a firm connection between Soros and Tides to Karr’s employer.  Since 2003, Free Press has received $1.26 million from Soros’ Open Society Institute; and from 2005-2007, nearly $215,000 from Tides. (more…)

You may recall that Sodexo slapped the SEIU with a RICO suit in March, citing the labor union’s “blackmail, vandalism, trespass, harassment, and lobbying law violations designed to steer business away from Sodexo USA and harm the company.”  SEIU had filed a motion to dismiss the suit, but according to a press release just issued,  a United States District Judge has denied the SEIU’s motion and ruled that Sodexo’s case can proceed.

“The court has validated our decision to file this lawsuit using the federal racketeering statute,” said Sodexo General Counsel Robert Stern. “This ruling clears the path to discovery and trial, allowing us to present evidence the SEIU has conspired to extort Sodexo by threatening financial damage unless we cave in to its demands. The SEIU’s campaign was designed to illegally threaten our company. We will continue to challenge the SEIU’s illegal behavior until it ends.”

The food services corporation has accused the SEIU of engaging in nefarious activities intended to harm the company, some of which include:

• Hacking into a Sodexo education website, in knowing violation of federal computer crime laws, and posting a link to one of the union’s own websites where malicious and disparaging claims were made about Sodexo
• Infiltrating, under false pretenses, a prestigious medical conference and throwing plastic roaches onto the food being served by Sodexo
• Falsely claiming that the Company’s food production plants have “rodent problems” and scaring hospital patients by insinuating that Sodexo USA food contained bugs, rat droppings, mold, flies and maggots, and that Sodexo provided linens contaminated with the “remnants of someone else’s hospital waste”
• Harassing Sodexo USA employees by threatening to accuse them of wrongdoing

The complaint also describes, among many other things, activities that are similar to other instances of the SEIU’s exploitation of college students to manufacture outrage against Sodexo and opposition to the company’s food services on campus.

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In a column about the revolving door between big government and the lobbying world, here’s what the irreplaceable Tim Carney wrote about the waiver process for folks trying to escape the burden of government-run healthcare.

Congress imposes mandates on other entities, but gives bureaucrats the power to waive those mandates. To get such a waiver, you hire the people who used to administer or who helped craft the policies. So who’s the net winner? The politicians and bureaucrats who craft policies and wield power, because this combination of massive government power and wide bureaucratic discretion creates huge demand for revolving-door lobbyists. It’s another reason Obama’s legislative agenda, including bailouts, stimulus, ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, tobacco regulation, and more, necessarily fosters more corruption and cronyism.

This seemed so familiar that I wondered whether Tim was guilty of plagiarism. But he’s one of the best journalists in DC, so I knew that couldn’t be the case.

Then I realized that there was plagiarism, but the politicians in Washington were the guilty parties. As can be seen in this passage from Atlas Shrugged, the Obama Administration is copying from what Ayn Rand wrote – as dystopian parody – in the 1950s.

Nobody professed to understand the question of the frozen railroad bonds, perhaps, because everybody understood it too well. At first, there had been signs of a panic among the bondholders and of a dangerous indignation among the public. Then, Wesley Mouch had issued another directive, which ruled that people could get their bonds “defrozen” upon a plea of “essential need”: the government would purchase the bonds, if it found proof of the need satisfactory. there were three questions that no one answered or asked: “What constituted proof?” “What constituted need?” “Essential-to whom?” …One was not supposed to speak about the men who, having been refused, sold their bonds for one-third of the value to other men who possessed needs which, miraculously, made thirty-three frozen cents melt into a whole dollar, or about a new profession practiced by bright young boys just out of college, who called themselves “defreezers” and offered their services “to help you draft your application in the proper modern terms.” The boys had friends in Washington.

This isn’t the first time the Obama Administration has inadvertently brought Atlas Shrugged to life.

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There’s a great scene in Sudden Impact, the second Dirty Harry film, in which Harry Callahan “handles” all the criminals.  But one bad guy, in the climax of the scene, decides to use a waitress as a human shield.

“Go ahead, make my day,” Harry tells him.  The criminal thought better and didn’t meet the fate of his counterparts.

Today, teachers unions have grabbed their own human shields.  They are using children in an attempt to stifle reform and preserve their pay and benefits.

The Carolina Journal reports State Rep. Mike Stone received a hand-written note from his 8-year old daughter asking him to “put the buget (sic) higher dad.”

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Google’s growing influence with government is beginning to pay dividends for the company while leaving consumers and taxpayers on the short end of the stick.

Since donating over $1 million to the president’s campaign and building its online presence and fundraising base, the company has reaped continued returns on their investment, so much so, that Google’s former CEO is rumored to be on the shortlist to be the nation’s new Secretary of Commerce.

In order to pad its bottom line, Google made a conscious effort to grow its influence in Washington by hiring insiders and placing Google executives in the Administration. In a short period of time, Google has been rewarded with over 25 contracts with government agencies including the NASA, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency.

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When you think about a highly aggressive cartel teaming up with politicians to pass protectionist laws that kick entrepreneurs out of work, you probably don’t think about interior designers.

But you should.

The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) represents less than 3 percent of all designers, but its members have designated themselves as spokespeople for the entire industry. ASID has spent over 30 years and millions of dollars lobbying from coast to coast for interior design licensing schemes.  Not surprisingly, the schemes they propose would force all interior designers to have the exact same credentials as required for membership in ASID.

The group has worked relentlessly to enlist state legislatures in its campaign for total industry cartelization. The Institute for Justice has documented these efforts in a study titled “Designing Cartels.”

Florida is ground zero right now in this epic battle.

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After years of being harassed by the purple people beaters, one company has finally said ENOUGH.

In a press release issued Thursday, Sodexo USA announced that the company has filed a civil lawsuit against the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act., accusing the union of engaging in an “illegal campaign of extortion.”  The lawsuit representing Sodexo is Hunton & Williams – the same firm SEIU and its allies have accused of launching a “dirty tricks” campaign against them in retaliation for their anti-Chamber of Commerce campaigns. (more on that after the jump)

One of the largest food services and facilities management companies in the world, Sodexo is the provider of choice for most schools, universities, companies, hotels, prisons and other facilities that outsource their cafeteria and food catering operations, and for those that outsource industrial cleaning services.  SEIU has been incessantly battering Sodexo since 2007, in its desire to unionize some of its nearly 400,000 employees, many of them hotel and food service workers.  Exacerbating the tensions was a longstanding turf war between SEIU and UNITE HERE over hotel and casino workers, which often spilled over into SEIU’s antics prior to the settlement the warring unions reached this past summer.

Sodexo USA has filed the lawsuit in an attempt to halt the over-the-top harassment from SEIU, alleging that many of the acts are very serious and outside of the normal realm of union tactics, including acts of ” SEIU blackmail, vandalism, trespass, harassment, and lobbying law violations designed to steer business away from Sodexo USA and harm the company.” [emphasis added]

Aside from some of its usual corporate smear campaign tactics, certain organizers in the SEIU subscribed to some especially nasty, and frankly repulsive, tactics:

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From the 1^st quarter through the 4th quarter of 2010, GM’s lobbying expenses more than doubled from $1.8 million to $3.89 million – a 113% increase.  After all, when the government is your largest shareholder, your company execs will inevitably be spending an inordinate amount of time cozying up to Washington politicians.

Moreover, GM’s lobbyist team reads like a who’s who of the government bailout business.  And why wouldn’t it?  When you’re lobbying Washington to privatize gains for your clients and socialize their losses among taxpayers, you hire those firms with the most experience representing other notorious companies that received massive bailouts by U.S. taxpayers — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Goldman Sachs, AIG and others.

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Republicans are considering ways to trim the federal budget — and the funds that go toward public broadcasting are on the chopping block. Now it appears that certain public radio stations may be violating federal law to convince listeners to lobby Congress to stop these cuts.

Reps. Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) already staged a silly press conference this week with Elmo, Grover and Big Bird dolls, along with someone in an Arthur the Aardvark costume, to try to embarrass Republicans into continuing to pay for public broadcasting. Of course, using these characters was probably not a good marketing idea to begin with, given the money-making powerhouse that Sesame Street represents and the enormous profits that have been earned through merchandising these characters.

Now public radio stations such as KCRW 89.9 in Santa Monica are sending out press releases with detailed information about the recommended spending cuts from the House Appropriations Committee in H.R. 1, the Full Year Continuing Appropriation Act. KCRW’s message comes from Sarah Spitz at kcrw.org and urges listeners to “take action in support of public broadcasting” by visiting another website. That website allows you to “Click Here to Write Congress” and asks visitors to “contact your representatives in Congress now and urge them to stand up for public broadcasting funding.”

What KCRW is doing, however, may violate the federal Anti-Lobbying Act. 18 U.S.C. § 1913 provides that “No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall, in the absence of express authorization by Congress, be used directly or indirectly to pay for any personal service, advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation, whether before or after the introduction of any bill, measure or resolution proposing such legislation, law, ratification, policy or appropriation.”

Under a prior version of the statute as it was interpreted by at least one court decision, this anti-lobbying provision applied only to federal officers and employees. But the law was amended in 2002 and now applies to anyone who receives federally appropriated funds including recipients of federal grants such as NPR. Such grants cannot be used to lobby Congress directly or indirectly, which would include trying to persuade NPR listeners to lobby Congress on NPR’s behalf. So if any of the funds received by KCRW from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were used to pay Sarah Spritz’s salary in writing this lobbying appeal or to fund the facilities used to broadcast her message on behalf of the radio station, then KCRW has violated federal law.   And if any federal funds were used to pay for this website, that is also a violation of the law.

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The internal revenue code is nightmarishly complex, as illustrated by this video. Americans spend more than 7 billion hours each year in a hopeless effort to figure out how to deal with more than 7 million words of tax law and regulation.

Why does this mess exist? The simple answer is that politicians benefit from the current mess, using their power over tax laws to raise campaign cash, reward friends, punish enemies, and play politics. This argument certainly has merit, and it definitely helps explain why the political class is so hostile to a simple and fair flat tax.

But a big part of the problem is that tax lawyers dominate the tax-lawmaking process. Almost all the decision-making professionals at the tax-writing committees (Ways & Means Committee in the House and Finance Committee in the Senate) are lawyers, as are the vast majority of tax policy people at the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

This has always rubbed me the wrong way. Yes, some lawyers are needed if for no other reason than to figure out how new loopholes, deductions, credits, and other provisions can be integrated into Rube-Goldberg monstrosity of existing law.

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While Americans across the country have entered the political game to save our country, moving that proverbial ball of freedom towards the end zone, we’ve been sacked. Blindsided. We’ve been so focused on legislative elections (and rightly so) that most Americans don’t even know they’ve been hit – and hit hard.

But not by some big, burly monster like voter fraud or corruption. No, we’ve been knocked flat by the ignorance of the conservative electorate and cute little puppies licking our stunned, what-the-heck-just-happened faces.

Well, I’ll tell you what just happened.

It’s called the Humane Society of the United States cowardly hiding behind animal cruelty, lying to our citizens and taking our constitutional rights away – one state at a time.

This radical animal rights organization (HSUS), who spends less than 0.5% of its $100M + budget on actually helping animals, is using the referendum process to slowly, systematically eliminate food production in the United States.

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A top network neutrality advocacy group is weathering a flap over its sketchy lobbying disclosures after it was reported last week the group had taken numerous unreported meetings with senior aides at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Free Press, among the fiercest and better funded Beltway groups lobbying for the adoption of net neutrality rules, has taken great pains to criticize industry groups for holding off-the-record meetings with FCC officials. But the group’s staff had lobbied FCC officials on more than two dozen undocumented occasions since January 2009. Additionally, discrepancies were discovered between the group’s filings relating to lobbying.

Federal legislation mandates the disclosure of lobbying efforts directed at federal employees with regard to the formulation of federal rules and laws. According to recently-obtained ex-parte data, serious discrepancies were discovered between filings with the Internal Revenue Service–which are to disclose generic, grassroots lobbying expenses–and those figures reported under the Lobbying Disclosure Act–which is to monitor federal-specific lobbying expenses.

Between the years 2005 and 2010, Free Press LDA disclosures showed the group had spent little more than $150,000 on direct lobbying of legislators and federal employees. But tax filings with the IRS–only presently available up to the year 2008–revealed the organization had spent nearly $1 million on lobbying in little more than half that time.

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The “appearance of impropriety” is often considered the Washington standard for corruption and misbehavior. With that in mind, alarm bells began ringing in my head when I read this Washington Times report about Jacob Lew, Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget.

Why did Citigroup decide to hire a career DC political operator for $1.1 million? As a former political aide, lobbyist, lawyer, and political appointee, what particular talents did he have to justify that salary to manage an investment division? Did the presence of Lew (as well as other Washington insiders such as Robert Rubin) help Citigroup get a big bucket of money from taxpayers as part of the TARP bailout? Did Lew’s big $900K in 2009 have anything to do with the money the bank got from taxpayers?

Is it a bit suspicious that he received his big windfall bonus four days after filing a financial disclosure? Read this blurb from the Washington Times and see if you can draw any conclusion other than this was a typical example of the sleazy relationship of big government and big business.

President Obama’s choice to be the government’s chief budget officer received a bonus of more than $900,000 from Citigroup Inc. last year — after the Wall Street firm for which he worked received a massive taxpayer bailout. The money was paid to Jacob Lew in January 2009, about two weeks before he joined the State Department as deputy secretary of state, according to a newly filed ethics form. The payout came on top of the already hefty $1.1 million Citigroup compensation package for 2008 that he reported last year.

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The Left is far more organized than you might imagine, but a little investigation can turn up some fascinating examples of how they coordinate with front groups and the media to advance their policies.  Consider this New York Times editorial. The FCC is attempting to play musical chairs with regulatory authority until they find one that will let them regulate the Internet. A lot of Congressional Republicans and Democrats–in fact, a majority of them–have questioned that move.

On Tuesday, the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes itself as an organization working “to make government transparent and accountable”, released a strange bit of “research” showing that a few of the pro-net neutrality organizations didn’t spend as much money on lobbying the federal government as the companies who were being threatened with regulation.  They didn’t even attempt to figure out whether the money was being spent on net neutrality, or how much was spent by relevant organizations that weren’t at one particular meeting.  They didn’t mention, or calculate the value of, all the “behind closed door” lobbying that is being done by activist front-groups like Free Press.

Of course, the New York Times just regurgitated their sloppy advocacy. Sunlight used numbers! With decimals! So it must be facts!

But there is something else that the New York Times did not bother to check before writing this editorial about the influence of money in politics.

Who funds the Sunlight Foundation?

It turns out, the Sunlight Foundation’s “research” is funded by organizations who just happen to have a direct interest in net neutrality regulations.

Look at record:

Google, which strongly favors government “neutrality” regulation, has given Sunlight nearly $100,000 during the past two years. And Google executive Kim Scott sits on Sunlight’s board of directors.

But when Big Government exposed ethics violations by Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin, who came to the White House from Google and yet continued private email coordination with them about policies effecting the company – possibly violating federal archiving rules – did the Sunlight Foundation investigate?  Or even call for more transparency from the White House to prevent such abuses?

Sunlight did not say a word.

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As you know, we’ve been writing for some time about The Center for Community Self-Help and its financing affiliates Self-Help Credit Union, Self-Help Federal Credit Union, and Self-Help Ventures Fund.  As of late, the organization has been under increased scrutiny for its questionable lobbying activities, its former leader and soon to be CFPA Czar Eric Stein, and  its $15 million donation from disgraced hedge fund billionaire John Paulson.

According to the Self Help website, the organizations “provide financing, technical support, consumer financial services, and advocacy for those left out of the economic mainstream.”  Within that complex web of entities under the Self-Help umbrella exists about forty or so real estate development projects.  I thought it might be a productive exercise to start looking into some of Self-Help’s individual properties.

So, I started with Barr Building, LLC, a Self-Help investment registered under its affiliate Self Help Ventures Fund.  The property is located at 910 17th Street NW, Washington, DC.

And wouldn’t you know, it happens to be home to one of our most frequent subjects:

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

This seemed especially curious, because it was only recently I’d discovered that SEIU, together with the AARP, is also the proud funder and agitator for one of the Center for Responsible Lending’s other advocacy projects – its state-specific lobbying websites targeted at regulating short-term loans in an effort to insulate its own predatory practices from any private industry competition.  For example, take a look at this site, from Arizonans for Responsible Lending.  It’s chock filled with all of the usual SEIU corporate campaign elements:  the menacing title and domain name, the array of photos depicting abused consumers who simply could not have known any better, the manufactured headlines, and of course – the staple of their strategy – the studies and the research (all funded and conducted by their own organization allies).

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Last week, in CFPA Czar or Fox in the Hen House? You Decide, I brought you more details about the people and structure of the ACORN-esque Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) and the Center for Community Self Help (CCSH) as part of a series of pieces we’ve been writing about the financial crisis and the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

The importance of the pieces in this series cannot be understated.  As Congress faces down a massive power-grabbing partisan financial reform bill this week, it seems to have lost sight of many of the causes of the financial crisis in the first place.  While we hear about the exemptions in the bill of institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stories we’ve been covering on CRL and CCSH further illustrate the dangers of unchecked entities and a government with too much intervention and far too much power.

At the peak of the subprime mortgage boom and the subsequent financial crisis, primary donors to CRL and CCSH basked in billions of dollars in pure profit, thanks in large part to that very intervention and power.

Next, we’re going to introduce you to the questionable lobbying activities of this complex organization.  But before we do, let’s review a few pertinent details from our previous posts about this organization:

• John Paulson is the largest single donor to the Center for Responsible Lending.  Paulson owns one of the world’s largest hedge funds, and most recently, the SEC has alleged “that Paulson & Co. paid Goldman Sachs to structure a transaction in which Paulson & Co. could take short positions against mortgage securities chosen by Paulson & Co. based on a belief that the securities would experience credit events.”
• Herb and Marion Sandler are the second largest donors to CRL, and together with Paulson appear to comprise the majority of the organization’s funding.  The couple owned GoldenWest Financial/World Savings bank, before selling it for over $2 billion to Wachovia, which tanked shortly thereafter
• Eric Stein, who once worked for Fannie Mae (an institution currently exempt from regulation in the financial reform bill), was also the longtime leader of CRL and Sr. Vice President of CCSH.  Today, Stein sits in Obama’s Treasury Department in charge of crafting the current financial reform legislation and the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

Now, onto the lobbying.

A complaint that was filed with the House, Senate, and the IRS alleges that CRL, CCSH, and its vast network of non-profit and for-profit companies may have committed serious violations of the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) and the Honest Leadership in Open Government Act (HLOGA).  The complaint was filed in the Fall of 2009 by the Consumers Rights League.

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Last week, we reported that Obama administration Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin –who headed up Google’s lobbying shop before joining the administration – had been ensnared in the Google Buzz privacy imbroglio when his Gmail contacts were made publicly available through his Google Buzz profile…and they revealed that McLaughlin’s most emailed Gmail contacts included more than two-dozen Google employees, including many of the company’s most senior lobbyists and lawyers.

Now, Consumer Watchdog has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the White House to obtain all e-mails and Buzz correspondence between Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin and his former employer, Google.

McLaughlin’s Google Buzz account also included correspondence directly to the Google Buzz development team soon after the launch of the service inquiring about how he could communicate privately with his Gmail contacts on Buzz.  In one enlightening post, McLaughlin inquired:

“How do I delete or block followers?  There are a bunch of random people showing up whom I don’t know, and who I don’t want to read my Buzz items.”

As we pointed out, none of this suggests impropriety on the part of McLaughlin per se.  It’s not necessarily unreasonable for McLaughlin to be communicating with his former friends and colleagues at Google, although it does seem odd that McLaughlin (a senior White House official) made repeated inquiries of the Google Buzz development team about how he could communicate with his Gmail contacts, many of whom are Google lobbyists and lawyers, privately over Buzz.

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As if Andy Stern and Anna Burger lobbying without being registered wasn’t enough for the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) to deal with, they are still trying desperately to pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Unsuccessfully, I might add.

However, they have developed a new tool of misinformation — “Language Tips on Employee Free Choice.”

SEIU EFCA Tip Sheet_Page_2 PDF –

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