It is also startling to see how quickly Obama’s senatorship has been
woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts
official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded
and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and
hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen
Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the
Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA
and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation’s manufacturing
sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama’s
top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland &
Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for
Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs
and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and
Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from
telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a
“leadership PAC,” a vehicle through which a member of Congress can
contribute to other politicians’ campaigns—and one that political
reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which
congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising
their own political profiles. ...Ken Silverstein, "Barack Obama, Inc.", in Harpers, 11/06
_____________________
Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth
about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely
spoken: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing
a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most
powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." The
blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial
crisis "own" the U.S. Congress -- according to one of that
institution's most powerful members -- demonstrates just how extreme
this institutional corruption is.
...The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials. Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:
Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist
Goldman Sachs' new top lobbyist was recently the top staffer to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., on the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Frank.
... That Congress is fully owned and controlled by a tiny sliver of narrow, oligarchical, deeply corrupted interests is simultaneously so obvious yet so demonized (only Unserious Shrill Fringe radicals, such as the IMF's former chief economist, use that sort of language) that even Durbin's explicit admission will be largely ignored. Even that extreme of a confession (Durbin elaborated on it with Ed Schultz last night) hardly causes a ripple. ...Glenn Greenwald, in Salon, 4/30/09