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from the copyright owner.
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am
making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic,
democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided
for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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from the copyright owner.
Obama Economic Controller
Is Skull And Bones Member
Austan 'The Ghoul' Goolsbee, Yale '91
By Webster Tarpley
2-4-8
OBAMA'S TRIFECTA: FOREIGN POLICY LINE IS RUN BY TRILATERAL FOUNDER
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI -OBAMA''S WIFE LINKED TO COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
WASHINGTON DC -- Barack Obama's top economics adviser is a member of the super-secret
Skull & Bones society of Yale University, of which George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and
John Kerry are also members, reliable sources confirmed tonight. Goolsbee is widely reported
to have told Obama not to back a compulsory freeze on home mortgage foreclosures to help the
struggling middle class in the current depression crisis, as demanded by former candidate John
Edwards. Hillary Clinton has advocated a one-year voluntary freeze on foreclosures. Obama has
offered counselors to comfort mortgage victims as they are dispossessed, citing the 'moral
hazard' of protecting the public interest from Wall Street sharks.
By adding the infamous Skull & Bones secret society to his campaign roster, Obama, who bills
himself as the candidate of change and hope, has attained a prefect trifecta of oligarchical and
financier establishment backing for his attempt to seize the nomination of the Democratic
Party for 2008. Obama's main overall image adviser and foreign policy adviser is Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the co-founder of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission, and the mastermind
of the disastrous Carter administration. Obama's wife Michelle is reputed to be closely linked
to the Council on Foreign Relations. Behind the utopian platitudes dished up by the Illinois
senator, the face of the Wall Street money elite comes into clearer and clearer focus.
George Will, in an October 2007 Washington Post column saluted Goolsbee's "nuanced
understanding" of traditional Democratic issues like globalization and income inequality; he
"seems to be the sort of fellow -- amiable, empirical, and reasonable--you would want at the
elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be," wrote the arch-oligarchical apologist
Will.
From Wikipedia: 'Austan D. Goolsbee is an economist and is currently the Robert P. Gwinn
Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is also a
Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation[1], Research Associate at the National
Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the Panel of
Economic Advisors to the Congressional Budget Office. He has been Barack Obama's economic
advisor since Obama's successful U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois. He is the lead economic
advisor to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.'
SAMUEL HINCKLEY AND SARAH SOOLE
So far, no sign he's related to Hillary
September 9, 2007
BY SCOTT FORNEK Political Editor
It sure would be an awkward family reunion. But, believe it or not, Barack Obama is related to
both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
OK, distantly related: Obama and Bush are 11th cousins.
That's because they share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great
grandparents -- Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole Hinckley of 17th century Massachusetts.
Barack Obama is distantly related to former President George H.W. Bush and President
George W. Bush.
(AP file)
Barack Obama is distantly related to Vice President Dick Cheney.
(AP file)
That means Obama and former President George Herbert Walker Bush are 10th cousins once
removed.
Obama is related to Cheney through Mareen Duvall, a 17th century immigrant from France.
Mareen and Susannah Duvall were Obama's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
great grandparents and Cheney's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents.
That makes Obama and Cheney ninth cousins once removed.
Cheney and Bush are related to one another by a completely different common ancestor.
We leave it to you to figure out their relationship.
Obama’s Money Cartel
Posted By admin On February 23, 2008 @ 5:04 pm In Race for the Nomination | 16 Comments
Pam Martens
ZSpace
February 23, 2008
Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or the last plantation in
America, has defied courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for
decades in its failure to hire blacks as stockbrokers. Now it’s marshalling its money machine
to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. Why isn’t the press curious about this?
Why is the “yes, we can” candidate in bed with Wall Street brokerage firms?
Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you’ll see a self-portrait of
upper management racism and sexism: women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy
offices occupied by predominantly white males. According to the EEOC as well as the recent
racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between
1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of stockbrokers - and this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and
empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.
The first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black male occupant in the oval
office (having placed only five blacks in the U.S. Senate in the last two centuries) appeared this
month on a chart at the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of the 20 top con
tributors to the Barack Obama campaign, and it looked like one of those comprehension tests
where you match up things that go together and eliminate those that don’t. Of the 20 top
contributors, I eliminated six that didn’t compute. I was now looking at a sight only slightly
less frightening to democracy than a Diebold voting machine. It was a Wall Street cartel of
financial firms, their registered lobbyists, ! and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our
federal government.
Why is the “yes, we can” candidate in bed with this cartel? How can we, the people, make
change if Obama’s money backers block our ability to be heard?
Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consist of officers and employees of the same
Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in
originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left
thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to
see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a
lifetime.
Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consist of officers and employees of the same
Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in
originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.
These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG,
Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is
also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to
Wall Street. There are five large corporate law firms that are also registered lobbyists; and one
is a corporate law firm that is no longer a registered lobbyist but does legal work for Wall
Street. The cumulative total of these 14 contributors through February 1, 2008, was
$2,872,128, and we’re still in the primary season.
But hasn’t Senator Obama repeatedly told us in ads and speeches and debates that he wasn’t
taking money from registered lobbyists? Hasn’t the press given him a free pass on this
statement?
Barack Obama, speaking in Greenville, South Carolina, on January 22, 2008:
“Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign, they won’t run my White House, and they
will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president”.
Barack Obama, in an email to supporters on June 25, 2007, as reported by the Boston Globe:
“Candidates typically spend a week like this – right before the critical June 30th financial
reporting deadline – on the phone, day and night, begging Washington lobbyists and special
interest PACs to write huge checks. Not me. Our campaign has rejected the money-for-in
fluence game and refused to accept funds from registered federal lobbyists and political action
committees”.
The Center for Responsive Politics’ website allows one to pull up the filings made by lobbyists
registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 with the clerk of the U.S. House of
Representatives and secretary of the U.S. Senate. These top five contributors to the Obama
campaign have filed as registered lobbyists: Sidley Austin LLP; Skadden, Arps, et al; Jenner &
Block; Kirkland & Ellis; Wilmerhale, aka Wilmer Cutler Pickering.
Is it possible that Senator Obama does not know that corporate law firms are also frequently
registered lobbyists? Or is he making a distinction that because these funds are coming from
the employees of these firms, he’s not really taking money directly from registered lobbyists?
That thesis seems disingenuous when many of these individual donors own these law firms as
equity partners or shareholders and share in the profits generated from lobbying.
Far from keeping his distance from lobbyists, Senator Obama and his campaign seems to be
brainstorming with them.
The political publication, The Hill, reported on December 20, 2007, that three salaried aides on
the Obama campaign were registered lobbyists for dozens of corporations. (The Obama
campaign said they had stopped lobbying since joining the campaign.) Bob Bauer, counsel to the
Obama campaign, is an attorney with Perkins Coie. That law firm is also a registered lobbyist.
What might account for this persistent (but non-reality based) theme of distancing the Obama
campaign from lobbyists? Odds are it traces back to one of the largest corporate lobbyist
spending sprees in the history of Washington whose details would cast an unwholesome pall on
the Obama campaign, unless our cognitive abilities are regularly bombarded with abstract
vacuities of hope and change and sentimental homages to Dr. King and President Kennedy .
On February 10, 2005, Senator Obama voted in favor of the passage of the Class Action
Fairness Act of 2005. Senators Biden, Boxer, Byrd, Clinton, Corzine, Durbin, Feingold, Kerry,
Leahy, Reid and 16 other Democrats voted against it. It passed the Senate 72-26 and was signed
into law on February 18, 2005.
Here is an excerpt of remarks Senator Obama made on the Senate floor on February 14, 2005,
concerning the passage of this legislation:
“Every American deserves their day in court. This bill, while not perfect, gives people that day
while still providing the reasonable reforms necessary to safeguard against the most blatant
abuses of the system. I also hope that the federal judiciary takes seriously their expanded role
in class action litigation, and upholds their responsibility to fairly certify class actions so that
they may protect our civil and consumer rights..”.
Three days before Senator Obama expressed that fateful yea vote, 14 state attorneys general,
including Lisa Madigan of Senator Obama’s home state of Illinois, filed a letter with the Senate
and House, pleading to stop the passage of this corporate giveaway. The AGs wrote: “State
attorneys general frequently investigate and bring actions against defendants who have caused
harm to our citizens… In some instances, such actions have been brought with the attorney
general acting as the class representative for the consumers of the state. We are concerned
that certain provisions of S.5 might be misinterpreted to impede the ability of the attorneys
general to bring such actions…”
The Senate also received a desperate plea from more than 40 civil rights and labor
organizations, including the NAACP, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Human
Rights Campaign, American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Justice and Democracy, Legal
Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), and Alliance for Justice. They
wrote as follows:
“Under the [Class Action Fairness Act of 2005], citizens are denied the right to use their own
state courts to bring class actions against corporations that violate these state wage and hour
and state civil rights laws, even where that corporation has hundreds of employees in that state.
Moving these state law cases into federal court will delay and likely deny justice for working
men and women and victims of discrimination. The federal courts are already overburdened.
Additionally, federal courts are less likely to certify classes or provide relief for violations of
state law”.
This legislation, which dramatically impaired labor rights, consumer rights and civil rights,
involved five years of pressure from 100 corporations, 475 lobbyists, tens of millions of
corporate dollars buying influence in our government, and the active participation of the Wall
Street firms now funding the Obama campaign. “The Civil Justice Reform Group, a business
alliance comprising general counsels from Fortune 100 firms, was instrumental in drafting the
class-action bill”, says Public Citizen.
One of the hardest-working registered lobbyists to push this corporate giveaway was the law
firm Mayer-Brown, hired by the leading business lobby group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Chamber of Commerce spent $16 million
in just 2003, lobbying the government on various business issues, including class action reform.
According to a 2003 report from Public Citizen, Mayer-Brown’s class-action lobbyists included
“Mark Gitenstein, former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a leading
architect of the Senate strategy in support of class-action legislation; John Schmitz, who was
deputy counsel to President George H.W. Bush; David McIntosh, former Republican
congressman from Indiana; and Jeffrey Lewis, who was on the staffs of both Sen. John Breaux
(D-La) and Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La).”
While not on the Center for Responsive Politics list of the top 20 contributors to the Obama
presidential campaign, Mayer-Brown’s partners and employees are in rarefied company, giving
a total of $92,817 through December 31, 2007, to the Obama campaign. (The firm is also
defending Merrill Lynch in court against charges of racial discrimination.)
Senator Obama graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude and was the first black president of
the Harvard Law Review. Given those credentials, one assumes that he understood the ramifica
tions to the poor and middle class in this country as he helped to gut one of the few weapons
left to seek justice against giant corporations and their legions of giant law firms. The class-
action vehicle confers upon each citizen one of the most powerful rights in our society: the
ability to function as a private attorney general and seek redress for wrongs inflicted on
ourselves as well as for those similarly injured that might not otherwise have a voice.
Those rights should have been strengthened, not restricted, at this dangerous time in our
nation’s history. According to a comprehensive report from the nonprofit group, United for a
Fair Economy, over the past eight years the total loss of wealth for people of color is between
$164 billion and $213 billion, for subprime loans which is the greatest loss of wealth for people
of color in modern history:
“According to federal data, people of color are three times more likely to have subprime loans:
high-cost loans account for 55 per cent of loans to blacks, but only 17 per cent of loans to
whites”.
If there had been equitable distribution of subprime loans, losses for white people would be 44.5
per cent higher and losses for people of color would be about 24 per cent lower. “This is
evidence of systemic prejudice and institutional racism.”
Before the current crisis, based on improvements in median household net worth, it would take
594 more years for blacks to achieve parity with whites. The current crisis is likely to stretch
this even further.
So, how should we react when we learn that the top contributors to the Obama campaign are
the very Wall Street firms whose shady mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and
minority under predatory loans? How should we react when we learn that on the big donor list
is Citigroup, whose former employee at CitiFinancial testified to the Federal Trade Commission
that it was standard practice to target people based on race and educational level, with the sales
force winning bonuses called “Rocopoly Money” (like a sick board game), after “blitz” nights of
soliciting loans by phone? How should we react when we learn that these very same firms, arm
in arm with their corporate lawyers and registered lobbyists, have weakened our ability to fight
back with the class-action vehicle?
Should there be any doubt left as to who owns our government? The very same cast of
characters making the Obama hit parade of campaign loot are the clever creators of the
industry solutions to the wave of foreclosures gripping this nation’s poor and middle class,
effectively putting the solution in the hands of the robbers. The names of these programs
(that have failed to make a dent in the problem) have the same vacuous ring: Hope Now;
Project Lifeline.
Senator Obama has become the inspiration and role model to millions of children and young
people in this country. He has only two paths now: to be a dream maker or a dream killer
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web
pages.
Is Skull And Bones Member
Austan 'The Ghoul' Goolsbee, Yale '91
By Webster Tarpley
2-4-8
OBAMA'S TRIFECTA: FOREIGN POLICY LINE IS RUN BY TRILATERAL FOUNDER
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI -OBAMA''S WIFE LINKED TO COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
WASHINGTON DC -- Barack Obama's top economics adviser is a member of the super-secret
Skull & Bones society of Yale University, of which George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and
John Kerry are also members, reliable sources confirmed tonight. Goolsbee is widely reported
to have told Obama not to back a compulsory freeze on home mortgage foreclosures to help the
struggling middle class in the current depression crisis, as demanded by former candidate John
Edwards. Hillary Clinton has advocated a one-year voluntary freeze on foreclosures. Obama has
offered counselors to comfort mortgage victims as they are dispossessed, citing the 'moral
hazard' of protecting the public interest from Wall Street sharks.
By adding the infamous Skull & Bones secret society to his campaign roster, Obama, who bills
himself as the candidate of change and hope, has attained a prefect trifecta of oligarchical and
financier establishment backing for his attempt to seize the nomination of the Democratic
Party for 2008. Obama's main overall image adviser and foreign policy adviser is Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the co-founder of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission, and the mastermind
of the disastrous Carter administration. Obama's wife Michelle is reputed to be closely linked
to the Council on Foreign Relations. Behind the utopian platitudes dished up by the Illinois
senator, the face of the Wall Street money elite comes into clearer and clearer focus.
George Will, in an October 2007 Washington Post column saluted Goolsbee's "nuanced
understanding" of traditional Democratic issues like globalization and income inequality; he
"seems to be the sort of fellow -- amiable, empirical, and reasonable--you would want at the
elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be," wrote the arch-oligarchical apologist
Will.
From Wikipedia: 'Austan D. Goolsbee is an economist and is currently the Robert P. Gwinn
Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is also a
Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation[1], Research Associate at the National
Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the Panel of
Economic Advisors to the Congressional Budget Office. He has been Barack Obama's economic
advisor since Obama's successful U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois. He is the lead economic
advisor to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.'
SAMUEL HINCKLEY AND SARAH SOOLE
So far, no sign he's related to Hillary
September 9, 2007
BY SCOTT FORNEK Political Editor
It sure would be an awkward family reunion. But, believe it or not, Barack Obama is related to
both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
OK, distantly related: Obama and Bush are 11th cousins.
That's because they share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great
grandparents -- Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole Hinckley of 17th century Massachusetts.
Barack Obama is distantly related to former President George H.W. Bush and President
George W. Bush.
(AP file)
Barack Obama is distantly related to Vice President Dick Cheney.
(AP file)
That means Obama and former President George Herbert Walker Bush are 10th cousins once
removed.
Obama is related to Cheney through Mareen Duvall, a 17th century immigrant from France.
Mareen and Susannah Duvall were Obama's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
great grandparents and Cheney's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents.
That makes Obama and Cheney ninth cousins once removed.
Cheney and Bush are related to one another by a completely different common ancestor.
We leave it to you to figure out their relationship.
Obama’s Money Cartel
Posted By admin On February 23, 2008 @ 5:04 pm In Race for the Nomination | 16 Comments
Pam Martens
ZSpace
February 23, 2008
Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or the last plantation in
America, has defied courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for
decades in its failure to hire blacks as stockbrokers. Now it’s marshalling its money machine
to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. Why isn’t the press curious about this?
Why is the “yes, we can” candidate in bed with Wall Street brokerage firms?
Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you’ll see a self-portrait of
upper management racism and sexism: women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy
offices occupied by predominantly white males. According to the EEOC as well as the recent
racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between
1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of stockbrokers - and this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and
empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.
The first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black male occupant in the oval
office (having placed only five blacks in the U.S. Senate in the last two centuries) appeared this
month on a chart at the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of the 20 top con
tributors to the Barack Obama campaign, and it looked like one of those comprehension tests
where you match up things that go together and eliminate those that don’t. Of the 20 top
contributors, I eliminated six that didn’t compute. I was now looking at a sight only slightly
less frightening to democracy than a Diebold voting machine. It was a Wall Street cartel of
financial firms, their registered lobbyists, ! and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our
federal government.
Why is the “yes, we can” candidate in bed with this cartel? How can we, the people, make
change if Obama’s money backers block our ability to be heard?
Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consist of officers and employees of the same
Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in
originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left
thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to
see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a
lifetime.
Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consist of officers and employees of the same
Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in
originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.
These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG,
Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is
also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to
Wall Street. There are five large corporate law firms that are also registered lobbyists; and one
is a corporate law firm that is no longer a registered lobbyist but does legal work for Wall
Street. The cumulative total of these 14 contributors through February 1, 2008, was
$2,872,128, and we’re still in the primary season.
But hasn’t Senator Obama repeatedly told us in ads and speeches and debates that he wasn’t
taking money from registered lobbyists? Hasn’t the press given him a free pass on this
statement?
Barack Obama, speaking in Greenville, South Carolina, on January 22, 2008:
“Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign, they won’t run my White House, and they
will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president”.
Barack Obama, in an email to supporters on June 25, 2007, as reported by the Boston Globe:
“Candidates typically spend a week like this – right before the critical June 30th financial
reporting deadline – on the phone, day and night, begging Washington lobbyists and special
interest PACs to write huge checks. Not me. Our campaign has rejected the money-for-in
fluence game and refused to accept funds from registered federal lobbyists and political action
committees”.
The Center for Responsive Politics’ website allows one to pull up the filings made by lobbyists
registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 with the clerk of the U.S. House of
Representatives and secretary of the U.S. Senate. These top five contributors to the Obama
campaign have filed as registered lobbyists: Sidley Austin LLP; Skadden, Arps, et al; Jenner &
Block; Kirkland & Ellis; Wilmerhale, aka Wilmer Cutler Pickering.
Is it possible that Senator Obama does not know that corporate law firms are also frequently
registered lobbyists? Or is he making a distinction that because these funds are coming from
the employees of these firms, he’s not really taking money directly from registered lobbyists?
That thesis seems disingenuous when many of these individual donors own these law firms as
equity partners or shareholders and share in the profits generated from lobbying.
Far from keeping his distance from lobbyists, Senator Obama and his campaign seems to be
brainstorming with them.
The political publication, The Hill, reported on December 20, 2007, that three salaried aides on
the Obama campaign were registered lobbyists for dozens of corporations. (The Obama
campaign said they had stopped lobbying since joining the campaign.) Bob Bauer, counsel to the
Obama campaign, is an attorney with Perkins Coie. That law firm is also a registered lobbyist.
What might account for this persistent (but non-reality based) theme of distancing the Obama
campaign from lobbyists? Odds are it traces back to one of the largest corporate lobbyist
spending sprees in the history of Washington whose details would cast an unwholesome pall on
the Obama campaign, unless our cognitive abilities are regularly bombarded with abstract
vacuities of hope and change and sentimental homages to Dr. King and President Kennedy .
On February 10, 2005, Senator Obama voted in favor of the passage of the Class Action
Fairness Act of 2005. Senators Biden, Boxer, Byrd, Clinton, Corzine, Durbin, Feingold, Kerry,
Leahy, Reid and 16 other Democrats voted against it. It passed the Senate 72-26 and was signed
into law on February 18, 2005.
Here is an excerpt of remarks Senator Obama made on the Senate floor on February 14, 2005,
concerning the passage of this legislation:
“Every American deserves their day in court. This bill, while not perfect, gives people that day
while still providing the reasonable reforms necessary to safeguard against the most blatant
abuses of the system. I also hope that the federal judiciary takes seriously their expanded role
in class action litigation, and upholds their responsibility to fairly certify class actions so that
they may protect our civil and consumer rights..”.
Three days before Senator Obama expressed that fateful yea vote, 14 state attorneys general,
including Lisa Madigan of Senator Obama’s home state of Illinois, filed a letter with the Senate
and House, pleading to stop the passage of this corporate giveaway. The AGs wrote: “State
attorneys general frequently investigate and bring actions against defendants who have caused
harm to our citizens… In some instances, such actions have been brought with the attorney
general acting as the class representative for the consumers of the state. We are concerned
that certain provisions of S.5 might be misinterpreted to impede the ability of the attorneys
general to bring such actions…”
The Senate also received a desperate plea from more than 40 civil rights and labor
organizations, including the NAACP, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Human
Rights Campaign, American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Justice and Democracy, Legal
Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), and Alliance for Justice. They
wrote as follows:
“Under the [Class Action Fairness Act of 2005], citizens are denied the right to use their own
state courts to bring class actions against corporations that violate these state wage and hour
and state civil rights laws, even where that corporation has hundreds of employees in that state.
Moving these state law cases into federal court will delay and likely deny justice for working
men and women and victims of discrimination. The federal courts are already overburdened.
Additionally, federal courts are less likely to certify classes or provide relief for violations of
state law”.
This legislation, which dramatically impaired labor rights, consumer rights and civil rights,
involved five years of pressure from 100 corporations, 475 lobbyists, tens of millions of
corporate dollars buying influence in our government, and the active participation of the Wall
Street firms now funding the Obama campaign. “The Civil Justice Reform Group, a business
alliance comprising general counsels from Fortune 100 firms, was instrumental in drafting the
class-action bill”, says Public Citizen.
One of the hardest-working registered lobbyists to push this corporate giveaway was the law
firm Mayer-Brown, hired by the leading business lobby group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Chamber of Commerce spent $16 million
in just 2003, lobbying the government on various business issues, including class action reform.
According to a 2003 report from Public Citizen, Mayer-Brown’s class-action lobbyists included
“Mark Gitenstein, former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a leading
architect of the Senate strategy in support of class-action legislation; John Schmitz, who was
deputy counsel to President George H.W. Bush; David McIntosh, former Republican
congressman from Indiana; and Jeffrey Lewis, who was on the staffs of both Sen. John Breaux
(D-La) and Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La).”
While not on the Center for Responsive Politics list of the top 20 contributors to the Obama
presidential campaign, Mayer-Brown’s partners and employees are in rarefied company, giving
a total of $92,817 through December 31, 2007, to the Obama campaign. (The firm is also
defending Merrill Lynch in court against charges of racial discrimination.)
Senator Obama graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude and was the first black president of
the Harvard Law Review. Given those credentials, one assumes that he understood the ramifica
tions to the poor and middle class in this country as he helped to gut one of the few weapons
left to seek justice against giant corporations and their legions of giant law firms. The class-
action vehicle confers upon each citizen one of the most powerful rights in our society: the
ability to function as a private attorney general and seek redress for wrongs inflicted on
ourselves as well as for those similarly injured that might not otherwise have a voice.
Those rights should have been strengthened, not restricted, at this dangerous time in our
nation’s history. According to a comprehensive report from the nonprofit group, United for a
Fair Economy, over the past eight years the total loss of wealth for people of color is between
$164 billion and $213 billion, for subprime loans which is the greatest loss of wealth for people
of color in modern history:
“According to federal data, people of color are three times more likely to have subprime loans:
high-cost loans account for 55 per cent of loans to blacks, but only 17 per cent of loans to
whites”.
If there had been equitable distribution of subprime loans, losses for white people would be 44.5
per cent higher and losses for people of color would be about 24 per cent lower. “This is
evidence of systemic prejudice and institutional racism.”
Before the current crisis, based on improvements in median household net worth, it would take
594 more years for blacks to achieve parity with whites. The current crisis is likely to stretch
this even further.
So, how should we react when we learn that the top contributors to the Obama campaign are
the very Wall Street firms whose shady mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and
minority under predatory loans? How should we react when we learn that on the big donor list
is Citigroup, whose former employee at CitiFinancial testified to the Federal Trade Commission
that it was standard practice to target people based on race and educational level, with the sales
force winning bonuses called “Rocopoly Money” (like a sick board game), after “blitz” nights of
soliciting loans by phone? How should we react when we learn that these very same firms, arm
in arm with their corporate lawyers and registered lobbyists, have weakened our ability to fight
back with the class-action vehicle?
Should there be any doubt left as to who owns our government? The very same cast of
characters making the Obama hit parade of campaign loot are the clever creators of the
industry solutions to the wave of foreclosures gripping this nation’s poor and middle class,
effectively putting the solution in the hands of the robbers. The names of these programs
(that have failed to make a dent in the problem) have the same vacuous ring: Hope Now;
Project Lifeline.
Senator Obama has become the inspiration and role model to millions of children and young
people in this country. He has only two paths now: to be a dream maker or a dream killer
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Campaign for Justice
| Christopher Young (Democrat) |