Big Bank Takeover: Report Blames Revolving Door For 'Too Big To Fail' - HuffPo

[WillyT]

Big Bank Takeover: Report Blames Revolving Door For 'Too Big To Fail'
Arthur Delaney - HuffPo
First Posted: 05-11-10 10:09 AM | Updated: 05-11-10 02:26 PM

<snip>

How have big banks preserved their "Too Big To Fail" status? With giant bags of money and an army of lobbyists who used to work in government, says a report to be released Tuesday by the SEIU, Campaign for America's Future and the Public Accountability Initiative.

The six biggest banks -- Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo -- employ 243 former staffers and members of Congress as in-house lobbyists and via trade associations and boutique K Street firms. That total includes 33 chiefs of staff, 54 staffers from the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees, and 28 legislative directors.

"Many of the revolving door lobbyists were key architects of financial deregulatory legislation during their time as congressional staffers," the report notes, "including Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act."

The flipside of this phenomenon, which the report doesn't mention, is lobbyists taking jobs on the Hill. It's rampant: A HuffPost analysis of House Financial Services staffers found in December that 18 percent of current committee staff previously worked on K Street, mostly for banks -- and mostly Democrats. (After all, if people just went from the Hill to K Street, wouldn't it be more of a turnstile than a revolving door?)

Citi has hired 55 former staffers as lobbyists -- the most of the big six banks. Who are these people? The report, written by Kevin Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative, wants you to know: Click HERE: to see their names and faces. The Public Accountability Initiative runs LittleSis.org, best known as an involuntary Facebook for lobbyists.

<snip>

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/11/big-bank-takeover-report_n_570847.html

Full Report (.pdf file): http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/BigBankTakeover.pdf

:mad:

:argh:

:nuke:

[WeDidIt]

1. This report is getting into the nitty gritty of the nasty corruption that led to financial disaster

and the banksters didn't give a damn the entire time because they knew damned well and good when push came to shove the politicians would blink and make it all just go away.

Maybe somebody will actually be held accountable since the DOJ has scratched the surface, but it's shit like a revolving door between jobs on the hill and jobs at K Street that is the sick underbelly of the whole thing.

This is a cancer on democracy and only radical excision will fix the problem.

[WillyT]

2. I Agree...

It's the major impediment to fixing the things that truly need to be fixed.

:shrug:

:hi:

[moondust]

3. Dick Gephardt: Former House Majority Leader

"active consultant for Goldman Sachs."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Gephardt

[unkachuck]

4. "...18 percent of current committee staff previously worked on K Street..."

....it's nice to know that after a year and a half from melt-down and trillions of dollars later, nothing has changed....you'd have to be a real chump to get involved with the corporatists and their casinos....you'd have to be a real chump to put up with this from any government....

....they're like a plague of locust devouring our government and economy....can melt-down-II be far off?

[applegrove]

5. Deregulation always, always results in a few big corporations and lots of little ones. The mid sized

corporations get wiped out. Look at banking, the airline industry, etc. Deregulation needs to be changed somehow. Or every deregulated industry will have a few 'too big to fail' corporations.