Obama's White House is for Sale Just like All the Others
In June 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama told a New York crowd that much of the big money influence peddling in Washington is illegal and that he'd crack down on it once in office. Five months later in an Iowa speech he was even blunter. He warned corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington were over. The difference between what Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan and every occupant of the White House did and what the Obama White House does in showering perks on fat cat donors is that the other presidents knew enough to keep quiet about it. Obama didn't. He denounced the practice. It practically became his campaign mantra.
It's not political rocket science stuff to know that the White House has always been for sale to the highest bidders. Obama, or any other Oval Office occupant, would not have a prayer of getting to the White House without the tens of millions that lobbyists, PACs, corporations, Wall Street, and labor unions stuff into their campaign coffers. Even as Obama revved up the crowd in New York and Iowa with his promise to chase the money changers out of the White House, he cut deals in the Senate to back more industry friendly tariff suspension bills than all other presidential candidates in 2008 accept one. His oft made claim that his campaign was bankrolled by the nickels and dimes of the little people was part truth, and in bigger part hyperbole. The list of Obama's banking and corporate donors read like a who's who of corporate and Wall Street America; the same as other winning presidents.
A study by the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute smashed the myth that small donors oiled Obama's campaign. The Institute found that Obama had only marginally more small donors than Bush had in 2004 (Obama-26 percent, Bush-25 percent). Obama netted nearly eighty percent more money from large donors (those giving $1,000 or more total) than from small donors. He got a whopping $ 200 million plus from mega donors and bundlers. That's the dubious practice of combining small donations from special interests and the wealthy to skirt campaign financing limits.
Obama gets a faint flutter of criticism for ladling out special favors to the rich not only because he promised that the big money crowd would be banned in Boston from the White House, but because legions of voters actually voted for him because they believed he'd ban the wealth crowd. He talked so much about transparency, accountability, and a new way of doing business at the White House that it was hard not to really believe his pledge, especially considering the way his predecessor nakedly waved the White House for sale sign to corporate cronies.
Obama's spreading the welcome mat wide at the White House front door for big donors doesn't make him a hypocrite, con man, or duplicitous. It just points up the hard reality that politics is a hard, dirty, cash soaked game, and those with the most cash will always have the president's ear, no matter the president. This makes White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs sound silly when he tried to pretty up Obama's big donor tryst by claiming that thousands of people have visited the White House and they haven't given thousands. True, but those thousands don't use the executive bowling alley, slap high fives with the president while eyeballing the Super bowl with him at the White House movie theater, bag special invitations to White House dinners, luncheons and banquets, and favored spots on the dais at his Inaugural.
None of the thousands who Gibbs said has visited the White House donated $500,000 to Obama's campaign and then were invited to play golf with the president. Swiss bank UBS is Obama's half million dollar golfing partner. This is the same bank that was accused of aiding and abetting felony tax evasion schemes. A potential indictment against USB was quashed by the Treasury and State Departments.
It's even more ludicrous for Gibbs to make out that public disclosure of the donor favors is proof that Obama means what he says about making transparency the watchword in his administration. The only reason that the donors and the amounts they gave is known is because a politically hostile newspaper snooped around and got the goods on the White House largesse to the rich.
In a much heralded speech to an AFL-CIO convention in April 2008, Obama thundered that he was the only candidate who didn't take a dime from Washington lobbyists, and that the lobbyists and special interests would not run his administration. Factually he's correct. He hadn't taken a dime directly from them but the favored few wealthy donors who scoff down eats at White House dinners and receptions and bowl and watch TV with the president don't have an L scribbled on their backside. They do have money and influence, and represent industries that want and demand favors from the president. Judging from the looks of things they're well positioned to make sure they get what they want.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January, 2010.
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Mr. Hutchinson,
That which you rail against is your fault...an
Regards,
Miles "Grasp of the Obvious" Long
If Kucinich decides to run again, how many of you will vote for him?
OK. so now we are starting to recognize the stench of 'filthy lucre' wafting up from 1600 Penn-Ave. What now? ....Signed dazed and confused.
I never understood why anyone bought the business about influence peddlers. His bundled doners represented loads of lobbyists. He blocked access to those bundled lists for much longer, too, than any other candidate.
Obama was, indeed, transparent by voting time. Nobody should be surprised that he is, indeed, the insider guy.
When the USA's power elite, aka establishment, annointed then Sen Obama as the Democrats candidate for POTUS in April, 2008-that was a signal that BHO had sold out to the establishment & could be bought. The establishment had anointed BHO as POTUS #44 back in April, 2008. Is anybody surprised that Pres Obama, for suitable inducments, still does the bidding of the USA's power elite. Earl & HP bloggers will document Pres Obama's doing what big money wants.
I see that comments that HP has posted deplore what Earl has said. I'm not going to call all of Earl's critics troll. Regular users of HP recognize the prose of trolls.
I will continue to trust Mr Hutchinson's words. He's pathologically honest & candid. That isn't a bad thing.
Thank you, sir, aka EOH.
What could Obama, or any president, accomplish if he or she refused to play this Washington game? Zero. Nada. Zippo.
and by playing the Washington game, instead of re-writing the rules as he said he would do, what can you accomplish? Zero, Nada, and Zippo.
We need a law making it absolutely criminal for any financial institution or corporation to contribute to any political campaign whatsoever. Of course, these special interest criminals will look for any loophole and probably do something like give millions to an individual to contribute, but this law needs to have the same punishment for wherever this money can be traced.
This crime should be fought against with the same deliberate determination that the Secret Service has when they go after counterfeiters. In fact, it should absolutely be within the jurisdiction of the Secret Service, the Treasury Department.
Decision making of our laws should be held in a “Sacred Manner” because they affect the lives of sometimes millions of people. The corruption of contributions have been like money changers in our temple of prosperity, compromising our true sense of liberties and freedom.
America will never again be a truly free country until we remove all the undue influence and begin an elections process that is protected for and by the people. NOT CORPORATIONS OR INSTITUTIONS.
.
Too late! The Supreme Court has already decided that the sky is the limit for the Corps. Might violate their right to free speech to rule otherwise. Get used to it, we have become a plutocracy(100%).
I am beginning to become quite a fan of Mr Hutchinson. You are one of the few who writers on this paper who has always resisted walking in lockstep with the Obama PR apparatus.
Long may it continue.
Mr. Hutchinson has done more than resist walking in lockstep with President Obama. He is consistently critical of everything Obama does. This gives him no more credibility than he would have if he walked in lockstep with Obama.
the solution to that problem is very simple and is in use in most western democracies. If a political representative has taken money from a particular interest they cannot vote on any issue that effects that interest. End of story. What you guys have down there is nothing more than legalised corruption and the weight of it is crushing the country.
D@mn Straight!
Outlaw ALL contributions as the Bribery they are!
free prime time and travel expenses for all the candidates on the ballot.
This whole last 2 years has convinced me that getting bribery out of government is the ONLY issue.
Right now the USA is functionally a Plutocracy. A government for sale to the highest bidders.
From you're mouth to God's ear Earl..!
An none of us are happy to see it, but I saw the light only a few months in with all this Banking jazz..!
The lack of infrastructure spending, and then these meetings with the Insurance companies and Pharma...
The Obama brand was slickly sold the the American public and we fell for it head over heels after the nighmare of Bush. Unfortunately, we can all now see that our so-called "representatives" are not our representatives at all - and really have never been. Always follow the money! All of the interest groups. i.e., healthcare, Pharma, military industrial complex, wall st, etc. call the shots. Obama is just a puppet - put there to make us believe we have a choice. WE DON"T. I do not see how any of this is ever going to change without radical measures. The first and foremost is publicly funded elections! Nothing will change until we stop the bribery of Mafia capitalism. The good of the many must come first over the good of the 5% of the population who can never get enough money or power.
The first and foremost, it seems to me, is for Americans to stop voting for the person with the most money, and stop treating the two parties as if they were sent down from heaven itself, and stop treating the Constitution as if it mandates a two party system.
There you go...'nuff said.
Oh buck up children. No one could ever be as good as we all hoped Obama would be. He is not Pharoh, Emperor, or King. He is just one player in a very ellaborate game. Guess what people...i
Buck up? Your post has more of a "wise up" tone to it. No, he's not perfect - I never thought he was. But golfing with UBS while Treasury quashes indictments against it? I don't know. It's pretty demoralizing.
Buck up.
Do you think the health care debate would have advanced, the wars be questioned, the civil rights expanded, in only one year, if you had not elected Obama?
"No one could be as good as we hoped"???
Really? I didn't hope for much. Just a President who would look out for the PEOPLE.... the folks who put him in the White House. I was hoping for a President like Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt, who truly operated on behalf of the everyday schmoe. But not Obama. He's a Harvard man, looking out for the rich dudes who helped him buy the office.
But I suspect you're right. It's naive to expect CHANGE in this country. All we can HOPE for now is that we slide into second-world status rather than third-world.
And Mr Hutchinson is absolutely right.
Obama proving himself to be incapable of leading us anywhere except down the toilet. When he surrounds himself with people like Gaithner, Summers and Rahm Emmanuel he loses credibility in his transparent government mantra. Like Gore Vidal said, Obama won't be reelected. He has let the people who totally believed in him down. Only problem is that we will probably be lead down that golden path again by some slick politician who claims he is here just for us. Right.
What O will find is that those individual donors who gave over 1,000 by the end of it all - some of them were 100% interested in getting OUT of Iraq.
Whatever company they may have worked at...they were giving based on their interests not the companies.
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