Obama and McCain - coporate

Wall Street said -- vote for the bailout.
>
> Obama said -- vote for the bailout.
>
> McCain said -- vote for the bailout.
>
> Bush said -- vote for the bailout.
>
> The House Democratic leadership said -- vote for the bailout.
>
> The Republican Democratic leadership said -- vote the bailout.
>
> But in overwhelming numbers and with outrage, the American people said
> -- if you vote for this bailout, we will vote against you in November.
>
> And so, today the House voted 228 to 205 against the bailout.
>
> Do we have a pulse yet?
>
> Maybe yes.
>
> And if we do have a pulse, we're going to have to transfer that energy
> and outrage from Capitol Hill into the Presidential electoral arena.
>
> With denying the bail out the American people rose up and slapped down
> the two Wall Street controlled political parties.
>
> In October, we must keep up the energy.
>
> Look at your third party options and learn about them.
>
> They are Nader, McKinney, Barr
>
> - Obama is the front man for Robert Rubin. (look him up)
>
> - McCain is the front man for Phil Graham. (look him up)
>
> - That corporate debate was hardly a debate. The dems and repubs
> control the debates, that's why you don't know anything about the
> third party ideas.
>
> - 150 reporters have been killed in iraq. The white house controls
> war footage - they say to the journalists, "if you don't let use show
> what we want on TV then we wont protect you."
>
> - The dems starting taking lobbyist money in 1984 to keep up with the
> republicans. They used to be the "party of the people", now they
> can't say that with a straight face.
>
> - Howard Dean said, that you can't win an election if you don't take
> money from the military industrial complex. It is why Obama wants to
> keep troops in the middle-east. Your man is bought out.
>
> - Did you notice how Obama flip-flopped on the wiretapping bill and
> then AT&T sponsored the DNC?
>
> - The Washington Post said that it will not cover stories about third
> party candidates because "they will not win".
>
> - Ralph Nader sold out, SOLD OUT, Madison Square Garden in 2000 and
> the New York Times didn't even cover it.
>
> - Ron Paul, a republican, won't even endorse McCain.
>
> - today in NYTIMES.com Obama pushing the bailout plan again!
>
>
> Spin in the media - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vl2t3n74SM
>
>
> www.accuracy.org
> www.votepact.org
> www.npr.org
> www.votenader.org
> www.votetruth08.com
>
> Rupert Murdoch - republican agenda d-bag - owns Myspace, Fox,
> Washington post - list here http://www.ketupa.net/murdoch1.html
>
> Educated yourself. If you vote for emotion you will surely be
> betrayed! There is a reason these two corporate own people front
> runners are the main candidates.
>
> Which of the lesser of the two evils are you voting for this year?
>
> -----------
> -----------
>
> Bankrolling a Presidential Campaign
>
> The Obama Bubble Agenda
>
> Pam Martens
> May 5, 2008
>
>
> The Obama phenomenon has been likened to that of cults, celebrity
> groupies and Messiah worshipers. But what we're actually witnessing is
> ObamaMania (as in tulip mania), the third and final bubble
> orchestrated and financed by the wonderful Wall Street folks who
> brought us the first two: the Nasdaq/tech bubble and a
> subprime-mortgage-in-every-pot bubble.
>
> To understand why Wall Street desperately needs this final bubble, we
> need to first review how the first two bubbles were orchestrated and
> why.
>
> In March of 2000, the Nasdaq stock market, hyped with spurious claims
> for startup tech and dot.com companies, reached a peak of over 5,000.
> Eight years later, it's trading in the 2,300 range and most of those
> companies no longer exist. From peak to trough, Nasdaq transferred
> over $4 trillion from the pockets of small mania-gripped investors to
> the wealthy and elite market manipulators.
>
> The highest monetary authority during those bubble days, Alan
> Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, consistently told us that
> the market was efficient and stock prices were being set by the
> judgment of millions of "highly knowledgeable" investors.
>
> Mr. Greenspan was the wind beneath the wings of a carefully
> orchestrated wealth transfer system known as "pump and dump" on Wall
> Street. As hundreds of court cases, internal emails, and insider
> testimony now confirm, this bubble was no naturally occurring
> phenomenon any more than the Obama bubble is.
>
> First, Wall Street firms issued knowingly false research reports to
> trumpet the growth prospects for the company and stock price; second,
> they lined up big institutional clients who were instructed how and
> when to buy at escalating prices to make the stock price skyrocket
> (laddering); third, the firms instructed the hundreds of thousands of
> stockbrokers serving the mom-and-pop market to advise their clients to
> sit still as the stock price flew to the moon or else the broker would
> have his commissions taken away (penalty bid). While the little folks'
> money served as a prop under prices, the wealthy elite on Wall Street
> and corporate insiders were allowed to sell at the top of the market
> (pump-and-dump wealth transfer).
>
> Why did people buy into this mania for brand new, untested companies
> when there is a basic caveat that most people in this country know,
> i.e., the majority of all new businesses fail? Common sense failed and
> mania prevailed because of massive hype pumped by big media, big
> public relations, and shielded from regulation by big law firms, all
> eager to collect their share of Wall Street's rigged cash cow.
>
> The current housing bubble bust is just a freshly minted version of
> Wall Street’s real estate limited partnership frauds of the '80s,
> but on a grander scale. In the 1980s version, the firms packaged real
> estate into limited partnerships and peddled it as secure investments
> to moms and pops. The major underpinning of this wealth transfer
> mechanism was that regulators turned a blind eye to the fact that the
> investments were listed at the original face amount on the clients'
> brokerage statements long after they had lost most of their value.
>
> Today's real estate related securities (CDOs and SIVs) that are
> blowing up around the globe are simply the above scheme with more
> billable hours for corporate law firms.
>
> Wall Street created an artificial demand for housing (a bubble) by
> soliciting high interest rate mortgages (subprime) because they could
> be bundled and quickly resold for big fees to yield-hungry hedge funds
> and institutions. A major underpinning of this scheme was that Wall
> Street secured an artificial rating of AAA from rating agencies that
> were paid by Wall Street to provide the rating. When demand from
> institutions was saturated, Wall Street kept the scheme going by
> hiding the debt off its balance sheets and stuffed this long-term
> product into mom-and-pop money markets, notwithstanding that money
> markets are required by law to hold only short-term investments. To
> further perpetuate the bubble as long as possible, Wall Street
> prevented pricing transparency by keeping the trading off regulated
> exchanges and used unregulated over-the-counter contracts instead.
> (All of this required lots of lobbyist hours in Washington.)
>
> But how could there be a genuine national housing price boom propelled
> by massive consumer demand at the same time there was the largest
> income and wealth disparity in the nation's history? Rational thought
> is no match for manias.
>
> That brings us to today's bubble. We are being asked to accept on its
> face the notion that after more than two centuries of entrenched
> racism in this country, which saw only five black members of the U.S.
> Senate, it's all being eradicated with some rousing stump speeches.
>
> We are asked to believe that those kindly white executives at all the
> biggest Wall Street firms, which rank in the top 20 donors to the
> Obama presidential campaign, after failing to achieve more than 3.5
> per cent black stockbrokers over 30 years, now want a black populist
> president because they crave a level playing field for the American
> people.
>
> The number one industry supporting the Obama presidential bid, by the
> start of February, -- the crucial time in primary season -- according
> to the widely respected, nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics,
> was "lawyers/law firms" (most on Wall Street’s payroll), giving a
> total of $11,246,596.
>
> This presents three unique credibility problems for the
> yes-we-can-little-choo-choo-that-could campaign: (1) these are not
> just "lawyers/law firms"; the vast majority of these firms are also
> registered lobbyists at the Federal level; (2) Senator Obama has made
> it a core tenet of his campaign platform that the way he is going to
> bring the country hope and change is not taking money from federal
> lobbyists; and (3) with the past seven ignoble years of lies and
> distortions fresh in the minds of voters, building a candidacy based
> on half-truths is not a sustainable strategy to secure the west wing
> from the right wing.
>
> Yes, the other leading presidential candidates are taking money from
> lawyers/law firms/lobbyists, but Senator Obama is the only one
> rallying with the populist cry that he isn't. That makes it not only a
> legitimate but a necessary line of inquiry.
>
> The Obama campaign's populist bubble is underpinned by what, on the
> surface, seems to be a real snoozer of a story. It all centers around
> business classification codes developed by the U.S. government and
> used by the Center for Responsive Politics to classify contributions.
> Here's how the Center explained its classifications in 2003:
>
> "The codes used for business groups follow the general guidelines of
> the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes initially designed
> by the Office of Management and Budget and later replaced by the North
> American Industry Classification System (NAICS) ... "
>
> The Akin Gump law firm is a prime example of how something as mundane
> as a business classification code can be gamed for political
> advantage. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Akin Gump
> ranks third among all Federal lobbyists, raking in $205,225,000 to
> lobby our elected officials in Washington from 1998 through 2007. The
> firm is listed as a registered federal lobbyist with the House of
> Representatives and the Senate; the firm held lobbying retainer
> contracts for more than 100 corporate clients in 2007. But when its
> non-registered law partners, the people who own this business and
> profit from its lobbying operations, give to the Obama campaign, the
> contribution is classified as coming from a law firm, not a lobbyist.
>
> The same holds true for Greenberg Traurig, the law firm that employed
> the criminally inclined lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. Greenberg Traurig
> ranks ninth among all lobbyists for the same period, with lobbying
> revenues of $96,708,249. Its partners and employee donations to the
> Obama campaign of $70,650 by February 1 -- again at that strategic
> time -- appear not under lobbyist but the classification lawyers/law
> firms, as do 30 other corporate law firm/lobbyists.
>
> Additionally, looking at Public Citizen's list of bundlers for the
> Obama campaign (people soliciting donations from others), 27 are
> employed by law firms registered as federal lobbyists. The total sum
> raised by bundlers for Obama from these 27 firms till February 1:
> $2,650,000. (There are also dozens of high powered bundlers from Wall
> Street working the Armani-suit and red-suspenders cocktail circuits,
> like Bruce Heyman, managing director at Goldman Sachs; J. Michael
> Schell, vice chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup; Louis Susman,
> managing director, Citigroup; Robert Wolf, CEO, UBS Americas. Each
> raised over $200,000 for the Obama campaign.)
>
> Senator Obama's premise and credibility of not taking money from
> federal lobbyists hangs on a carefully crafted distinction: he is
> taking money, lots of it, from owners and employees of firms
> registered as federal lobbyists but not the actual individual
> lobbyists.
>
> But is that dealing honestly with the American people? According to
> the website of Akin Gump, it takes a village to deliver a capital to
> the corporations:
>
> "The public law and policy practice [lobbying] at Akin Gump is
> integrated throughout the firm's offices in the United States and
> abroad. As part of a full-service law firm, the group is able to draw
> upon the experience of members of other Akin Gump practices --
> including bankruptcy, communications, corporate, energy,
> environmental, labor and employment, health care, intellectual
> property, international, real estate, tax and trade regulation -- that
> may have substantive, day-to-day experience with the issues that lie
> at the heart of a client's situation. This is the internal component
> of Akin Gump’s team-based approach: matching the needs of clients
> with the appropriate area of experience in the firm ... Akin Gump has
> a broad range of active representations before every major committee
> of Congress and executive branch department and agency."
>
> When queried about this, Massie Ritsch, communications director at the
> Center for Responsive Politics, says: "The wall between a firm's legal
> practice and its lobbying shop can be low -- the work of an attorney
> and a lobbyist trying to influence regulations and laws can be so
> intertwined. So, if anything, the influence of the lobbying industry
> in presidential campaigns is undercounted."
>
> Those critical thinkers over at the Black Agenda Report for the
> Journal of African American Political Thought and Action have zeroed
> in on the making of the Obama bubble:
>
> "The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated
> marketing machine in memory. That's not a good thing. Marketing is not
> even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is
> about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product
> and your target audience."
>
> And slick it is. According to the Obama campaign's financial filings
> with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and aggregated at the
> Center for Responsive Politics, the Obama campaign has spent over $52
> million on media, strategy consultants, image building, marketing
> research and telemarketing.
>
> The money has gone to firms like GMMB, whose website says its "goal is
> to change minds and change hearts, win in the court of public opinion
> and win votes" using "the power of branding -- with principles rooted
> in commercial marketing," and Elevation Ltd., which targets the
> Hispanic population and has "a combined experience of well over 50
> years in developing and implementing advertising and marketing
> solutions for Fortune 500 companies, political candidates, government
> agencies."
>
> Their client list includes the Department of Homeland Security.
> There's also the Birmingham, Alabama, based The Parker Group which
> promises: "Valid research results are assured given our extensive
> experience with testing, scripting, skip logic, question rotation and
> quota control ... In-house list management and maintenance services
> encompass sophisticated geo-coding, mapping and scrubbing
> applications." Is it any wonder America's brains are scrambled?
>
> The Wall Street plan for the Obama-bubble presidency is that of the
> cleanup crew for the housing bubble: sweep all the corruption and
> losses, would-be indictments, perp walks and prosecutions under the
> rug and get on with an unprecedented taxpayer bailout of Wall Street.
> (The corporate law firms have piled on to funding the plan because
> most were up to their eyeballs in writing prospectuses or providing
> legal opinions for what has turned out to be bogus AAA securities.
> Lawsuits naming the Wall Street firms will, no doubt, shortly begin
> adding the law firms that rendered the legal guidance to issue the
> securities.) Who better to sell this agenda to the millions of duped
> mortgage holders and foreclosed homeowners in minority communities
> across America than our first, beloved, black president of hope and
> change?
>
> Why do Wall Street and the corporate law firms think they will find a
> President Obama to be accommodating? As the Black Agenda Report notes,
> "Evidently, the giant insurance companies, the airlines, oil
> companies, Wall Street, military contractors and others had closely
> examined and vetted Barack Obama and found him pleasing."
>
> That vetting included his remarkable "yes" vote on the Class Action
> Fairness Act of 2005, a five-year effort by 475 lobbyists, despite
> appeals from the NAACP and every other major civil rights group.
> Thanks to the passage of that legislation, when defrauded homeowners
> of the housing bubble and defrauded investors of the bundled mortgages
> try to fight back through the class-action vehicle, they will find a
> new layer of corporate-friendly hurdles.
>
> I personally admire Senator Obama. I want to believe Senator Obama is
> not a party to the scheme. But corporate interests have had plenty of
> time to do their vetting. Democracy demands no less of we, the
> people.
>
> [This is the second of two parts. The first ran yesterday. Editors.]
>
> Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no securities
> position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article. She
> writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire. She can be
> reached at pamk741@aol.com.
>