Clearly, Obama’s team have read Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book “Throw Them All Out” as revealed by his reference of “campaign bundlers” and their practice of segueing from election-time bag-men to K Street lobbyists as smoothly as an FM disc jockey transitioning from an ABBA song to REO Speedwagon with just a quick mention of the local weather.

What’s most audacious about the president’s call for an end to lobbying by campaign bundlers is that the bulk of Schweizer’s book that deals with the campaign bundler situation focuses on the outrageous behavior of the White House handing out billions of dollars in stimulus funds to their campaign bundlers.  When it comes to being lobbied by bundlers, the Obama White House is Albert Pujols and Congress is Wilson Betemit. 

From Schweizer:

Indeed, at least 10 members of Obama’s finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting your money. At the same time, several politicians who supported Obama managed to strike gold by launching alternative-energy companies and obtaining grants. How much did they get? According to the Department of Energy’s own numbers … a lot. In the 1705 government-backed-loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.

It goes without saying that the President did not take time from his weekly address to also call for an end to the White House or cabinet agencies making decisions and granting funds to companies or industries who raised campaign funds for the president or his party.  Why should he?  He gets all the credit for railing against that corrupt Congress and their unholy practices all the while handing out billions in federal dollars to his cronies and campaign pimps like Solyndra and Ener1.

A Washington journalist once wrote a book about a Republican president entitled Hubris.  Perhaps said journalist should consider a sequel focused on Obama’s constant practice of sanctimoniously decrying others for the corrupt practices he has perfected.

That is exactly what is happening. The new “big success” automaker is spending millions hiring lobbyists to squeeze more millions out of state legislatures. As Justin Owen notes, GM has “turned to another, smaller government teat” by putting its hand out to the states. GM, Owen says, “has received another $1.7 billion in taxpayer-funded grants and tax abatements.”

This is no accident of timing, either. GM admitted to the Tennessee Watchdog that begging to the states for tax dollars is a concerted effort.

“We are increasing our activity with the states obviously, in the communities in which we operate. In doing this, we’ve invested more than $6 billion (throughout the states) during the last five years and brought 15,000 people back to work. So, the activity at the state level is important to us. Our lobbying is comparable to what our competitors are doing throughout the states,” said GM spokesman Greg Martin.

For the Watchdog, Christopher Butler found that GM has received more than $1.5 billion from Michigan, $7.5 million in tax incentives from Kentucky, over $10 million from Texas, and over $2 million from Indiana. Ohio and Maryland have given to the GM bailout fund, too, with tax incentives and other giveaways.

Naturally, as these lobbying efforts grow, GM has paid lobbying firms millions for their work, millions that are coming right out of the pockets of American taxpayers both federal and state.

Apparently, making cars is not a top priority for GM anymore. Owen says that, “turning taxpayers on their heads and shaking every penny from their pockets is a profitable corporate strategy for a quasi-public car company. As of last summer, GM sat on roughly $40 billion in reserves. Yet the ribbon-cutting ceremonies with state officials across the country continue like clockwork, with taxpayers footing a lofty bill.”

The main question here is, once all the facilities are open and humming, once all the tax dollars are safely in GM’s pocket, will there be demand for the products that all these new plants are turning out? Is it a good idea in this bad economy to massively expand using the false benefit of government handouts? What will happen if, after all this government aide runs out, GM finds that its sales still don’t justify all these new plants?

Are we taxpayers going to be expected to hand GM billions more because they are “too big to fail”?

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.

But registered or not, the bundlers are in many ways indistinguishable from people who fit the technical definition of a lobbyist. They glide easily through the corridors of power in Washington, with a number of them hosting Mr. Obama at fund-raisers while also visiting the White House on policy matters and official business.

As both a candidate and as president, Mr. Obama has vowed to curb what he calls the corrupting influence of lobbyists, barring them not only from contributing to his campaign but also from holding jobs in his administration. While lobbyists grouse about the rules, ethics watchdogs credit the changes with raising ethical standards in Washington.

But the prevalence of major Obama fund-raisers who also work in the lobbying arena threatens to undercut the president’s ethics push, raising questions about whether the campaign’s policies square with its on-the-ground practices, some of those same watchdogs say.

As for Mr. Obama’s popularity with Wall Street donors, contrary to his Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, the president has received more campaign contributions from Wall Street than all Republican candidates combined.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough says Team Obama’s rhetoric versus their fundraising reality is nothing less than audacious.

Obama seems capable of effortlessly floating between demonizing Wall Street gambling one day and profiting from it the next. The audacity is breathtaking.

The president has raised more money from Wall Street through the Democratic National Committee and his campaign account than any politician in American history. This year alone, he has raked in more cash from bank employees, hedge fund managers and financial services companies than all Republican candidates combined.

Even poor Mitt Romney was outraised by the Obama money machine at his former employer, Bain Capital, by a margin of 2 to 1.

It is a campaign operation whose wheels are greased by Wall Street bundlers like MF Global former chief, Jon Corzine. These financiers are so good at what they do that the Center for Responsive Politics reports that Obama’s Wall Street fundraising will “far surpass 2008 in terms of raw dollars and as a percentage of what he raises overall.”

That’s saying a lot considering that Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign in 2008 raised more money from the financial community than any other politician in American history.

We are tired of regulations that stifle job creation.  We’re tired of the Obama administration blocking domestic oil production even while oil spikes to over $100 a barrel and we are continually reliant on foreign countries for our energy needs.  We’re tired of the failure of the career politicians to cut $1.2 trillion over the next year 10 years and balance our federal budget – that’s only 2% of the entire budget over that time.  We don’t have a revenue problem but a spending problem so getting our country’s finances and debt under control is our generation’s greatest priority, and we must either have the courage to cut our government’s spending and lower taxes — or have the courage to put the leaders in Washington who will break this culture of business as usual.

The problem is that Washington is simply out of touch.  The Beltway Bubble culture of elected officials, bureaucrats, special interests and lobbyists that look after one another while ignoring the real world’s concerns.  Once we send them to DC, they tend to change and are usually there for life; moving from staff, to Member of Congress to lobbyist.  Often serving for stretch of a time in an Administration.  It isn’t so much a revolving door as musical chairs. And when the music stops we lose.

This cozy relationship is laid out in detail in a newly published book by Hoover Institute Fellow Peter Schweizer, Throw Them All Out.  Schweizer details the sweetheart deals special interests get from the taxpayers and the ways Members of Congress and staff can use their position to enrich themselves.

Two egregious examples are:

1.      In the spring of 2008, when Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House, her husband, Paul, made a big play on Visa and acquired their shares shortly after the introduction into the House of legislation that, if passed, would adversely affect Visa’s business. Visa makes money by licensing its name to banks (which in turn issue the cards and charge customers interest) and by charging “swipe fees” to merchants who accept the card as payment.  These fees paid by retailers range from 1 percent to 3 percent of the purchase amount every time a Visa card is used.  The proposed 2008 law would have allowed retailers to negotiate lower fees with the major credit-card companies, who, gaining billions from those fees, predictably opposed the measure.  By the time Congress did finally act on the issue, as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the value of Pelosi’s IPO shares had more than doubled, while the market as a whole had shown a double-digit decline.

2.      Then there are the green energy loans. You’ve probably heard about Solyndra, the “green energy” company that got $500 million from taxpayers has it was hurtling towards bankruptcy.  One of the company’s chief backers was George Kaiser, and Oklahoma billionaire and, coincidentally, a major donor to Obama.  But, Solyndra is the tip of the iceberg.  As Schweizer details, of the $20 billion taxpayers put into ‘green energy’ companies, over $16 billion went to prominent Obama supporters and major donors.

The worst of it all?  This is perfectly legal.  If any of us regular citizens made the kind of investments and stock trades that Congressmen or their staff makes, we would be investigated by the SEC and sentenced to possible jail time.  But, these rules don’t apply to Congress!  The details in Schweizer’s book are so shocking that Congress has been forced to act.  Just this past week the Senate held hearings on new legislation that would make insider trading by members of congress and staff illegal.  And today the House will hold a hearing to consider similar legislation.  Even if Congress were to pass this bill, it would only be a small step towards fixing what’s broken in Washington.

Washington isn’t going to fix itself, we have to fix it. That’s why I’m running for Congress.  We have to stop the musical chairs.  Washington is good at working for itself, its time it worked for us the taxpayers.

But actually it wouldn’t be so bad if politicians merely treated the American economy like an ATM, even if they made fairly large withdraws. What’s really killing jobs is the red tape that causes a massive slowdown by jamming the gears of the advanced, multi-functional machine that is the free market.

The “Ten Thousand Commandments” of federal regulations, as my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Wayne Crews calls them in his annual study, costs the U.S. economy billions of dollars a year.  And some regulations even put outright bans of the very activities politicians say they want businesses to engage in.

Since the financial implosion and banks bailouts, the Obama administration and other politicos have been hectoring lenders to make loans to small business. Yet some financial institutions that haven’t even asked for a bailout and are desperately seeking to make more small business loans are statutorily barred from doing so.

These are the credit unions.

Credit unions are cooperative financial institutions owned by member depositors who receive excess funds in the form of dividends. Members can also take out loans from the credit union for items such as cars and homes, often on better terms than at banks.

But if a credit union member wants to borrow money to start or expand a small business, he or she will likely run headlong into a decade-old rule that clipped credit unions’ wings and is holding back economic growth. In 1998, bank lobbyists looking to halt competition succeeded in getting Congress to put in place a rule limiting the amount of business lending a credit union may engage in to just 12.25 percent of its assets.

There is no credible research to show that the 12.25 percent cap does anything to contribute to credit unions’ safety and soundness, and in fact, this arbitrary cap actually creates lending risk for these institutions. The cap, which is separate and aside from reserve requirements, puts limits on business lending that don’t exist for other types of credit union lending, such as mortgages and car loans. There is nothing inherently safer about these types of loans over business lending. This rule not only discourages beneficial lending to small business; it may encourage a dangerous concentration in other types of loans such as mortgages, which we all know could often be anything but safe.

The good news is there is bipartisan legislation ease this barrier to small business growth. The Small Business Lending Enhancement Act – sponsored as S. 509 by Mark Udall (D-CO) and H.R. 1418 by Ed Royce (R-Calif.) — raises the government’s current cap on the amount of business loans credit unions can make from 12.25 percent to 27.5 percent of a credit union’s assets.

The Credit Union National Association has estimated that this measure would create billions in new loans and more than 100,000 jobs in its first year of enactment, and it has been endorsed by trade groups from the National Association of Manufacturers to the National Association of Realtors — as well as policy groups from free market stalwarts such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform to the left-leaning League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) – as a way to make credit more available for entrepreneurs.

But though both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the Obama administration initially expressed support for a similar measure in the last Congress, they ended up preventing the measure from coming to a vote as an amendment to a larger bill, with the lame old excuse that there just wasn’t enough time to debate its merits. Yet the administration and last Congress always  found plenty of time to rush through stimuluses and bailouts to “save the economy,” even though this cost-free step of simply lifting the barriers to business lending by credit unions will probably “save and create” more jobs and businesses than all those spending bills put together.

Bank lobbyists have been ferociously opposing any increase in the credit union business lending cap that would give more borrowing options to small businesses. They complain of “unfair subsidies” to the credit unions. An “action alert” of the American Bankers Association warns about “the expansion on unfair credit union competition in business lending.” The alert intones, “Credit unions were given a tax exemption to serve people of modest means, not to aggressively go after business loans.”

But it’s a bit rich for the banking industry, which has received more than $1 trillion from TARP and other measures, to complain about unfair subsidization. Yes, credit unions have an exemption from taxation at the corporate level because they are member-owned cooperatives that don’t have the many means that banks have to raise money such as the issuance of shares of stock.

Credit union members, however, are fully taxed on the dividends on their accounts, and are taxed at the “ordinary income” rate for interest and not the lower rate for dividends. Conservatives and libertarians have long argued that business income should only be taxed once, and credit unions provide a successful example of single taxation. They should also argue for expanding this structure, rather than for unduly restricting credit union activity simply because the tax system for all businesses hasn’t yet been reformed.

One free market-leaning politician who was a fan of credit unions was Ronald Reagan. In Presidential Proclamation 5211 in 1984, Reagan said: “Credit unions are uniquely democratic economic organizations, founded on the principle that persons of good character and modest means, joining together in cooperative spirit and action, can promote thrift, create a source of credit for productive purposes, and build a better standard of living for themselves. Because credit unions exemplify the traditional American values of thrift, self-help and voluntarism, they have carved a special place for themselves among the Nation’s financial institutions.”

Through his chairman of the National Credit Union Administration, Edgar Callahan, Reagan lifted barriers to credit union modernization, such as allowing credit unions with different fields of memberships to merge. Upon Reagan’s death in 2004, an article from the website CreditUnions.com stated that “the Reagan legacy means that individuals can choose a cooperative form of financial services in most communities today.”

Incidentally, it was in the Reagan era that ATMs had their biggest spurt of growth – the number in operation more than tripled during the 1980s. But this decade was also a booming time for jobs, and this included jobs in the financial sector too. As my colleague Iain Murray has written, “From 1985 to 2002, U.S. banks added some 300,000 ATMs around the country, but also added 42,000 bank teller jobs.”

The difference today is that credit unions, banks, and the economy as a whole face shackling red tape. In addition to the lending cap, credit unions, like community banks, are faced with devastating losses in revenue that will result from the Durbin Amendment’s price controls on debit card transaction fees to retailers from the Dodd-Frank monstrosity.

Ironically, the effect of these price controls will be to raise ATM fees for consumers to possibly as high as $5 per transaction, as well as (as I have noted previously in BigGovernment) eliminate free checking and card rewards, as the costs of processing debit cards are shifted from retailers to consumers.  So because of the new fees, there may be less ATM usage and hence, fewer ATMs installed or maintained. Yet, for some reason, financial analysts aren’t predicting an influx of jobs from these costly mandates.

As the great libertarian writer Isabel Paterson put it in her classic book from 1943, freedom is the god of America’s economic machine. Remove from the red tape from the economy’s gears, and just watch the coinciding growth in jobs, ATMs, and other new marvelous machines!

For more information on the Small Business Lending Assistance Act, and on the history of Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of credit unions, go to FreetheCreditUnions.com, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s sister organization, Freedom Action.

Patent Reform is a long time dream of lobbyists for multinational corporations and Fortune 100 companies looking to get out of the burden of paying inventors for this innovative discoveries. To achieve this goal, the bill will change 250 years of American patent law by turning our constitutional system of “first to invent” into the European version of “first to file.” Under a “first to file” system, lawyers win. Under the American system, inventors and innovators win.

Conservatives have pushed back against this scheme. Phyllis Schafly and Ed Meese are leading the charge on the constitutional principles and last week the Supreme Court signaled their objections are valid. Writing for the Supreme Court in Stanford v. Roche, a patent infringement case Chief Justice John Roberts held that “[s]ince 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor.”

In addition to the push to “harmonize” our system with Europe (what’s next the metric system?), the bill contains a special interest handout available only to big banks and Wall Street firms. Section 18 of H.R. 1249 is another billion-dollar bailout for the biggest banks in the nation. Attacking the provision as “special interest legislation, pure and simple,” legal scholar Jonathan Massey argues that it would “shift the cost of patent infringement from financial services firms to the U.S. Treasury,” requiring the public to once again pick up the tab for the banks’ wrongdoing.

Finally, the legislation moves the Patent and Trademark office out of the discretionary spending column into the mandatory spending column. Rep. Paul Ryan has attacked this as a fiscally irresponsible move that will hurt efforts to get government spending out of control.

There is not much conservative about this bill. It’s being pushed by the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith who proudly proclaims the bill support from the big hitters of the PAC community – PHRMA, the American bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable.

It’s time the Republican Leadership stand up with Main Street against K Street. The battle lines are drawn. The fight begins today. Mr. Speaker, stop this bill.

On Tuesday of next week, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing titled “White House Transparency, Visitor Logs and Lobbyists.” The hearing comes after a report by the Center for Public Integrity detailing disclosure gaps in visitor records released by the White House.

In a memo describing the hearing, staff for the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee cite the Center’s report about the visitor records. They also list a number of questions for the Obama administration on how its disclosure policy has come to function.

“Have there been White House meetings with lobbyists and other interest groups about which information has not been released to the public?” the memo asks. “Have White House officials met with lobbyists and other interest groups outside of the White House in order to avoid generating records of such meetings?”

The White House decided in September 2009 to began voluntarily releasing its visitor records on a monthly basis. That policy came to be after the administration reached a court settlement with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which wanted the records released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The White House does not disclose every record under its policy. Exceptions are made for records that detail meetings with personal guests of the president or the vice president as well as sensitive meetings, such as those dealing with national security.

Read the whole thing here. Also, read this for Andrew Breitbart’s warning about the White House “Guess” Lists.