Catastrophe - Dick Morris [106]
That’s the expanded definition of what a “strategic adviser” does.
Ogilvy has plenty of clients who might be interested in the observations of Nugen, the firm’s well-connected nonlobbyist. Last year, the firm received $20 million in lobbying fees! Its clients included banks, hedge funds, and oil and pharmaceutical companies. Some of its illustrious clients, which will be seeking the support of the Obama administration, were:
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OGILVY GOVERNMENT RELATIONS
Source: “Ogilvy Government Relations,” Center for Responsive Politics, www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?lname=Ogilvy+Government+Relations&year=2008.
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As the above indicates, Ogilvy represents plenty of banking and credit card interests, pharmaceutical firms, oil companies, hedge funds, car manufacturers, and health care clients—to name just a few.
What are they looking for in a firm like Ogilvy?
The banks are constantly seeking handouts from the government; they’ll want to know what the administration is thinking. Hedge funds and private equity funds are hoping to keep Congress and Obama from taxing their investors like the rest of American workers, instead of letting them pay only 15 percent in taxes. (Did you notice how the Obama stimulus bill avoided that issue?) The French aeronautics firm Airbus is trying to make sure a huge U.S. government contract goes its way. The oil companies want to limit support for alternative energy sources. And so on.
Get the picture?
The nonlobbyists at Olgivy do. And you can bet they’ll keep the information flowing.
ACTION AGENDA
The first thing we must do is press for new legislation that requires all employees of lobbying firms who have any contact with a client—other than secretarial staff—to register as lobbyists and disclose who they are “advising,” just as the “official” lobbyists must do.
We need to know what these people are doing.
We should also require all members of Congress and all congressional staff to disclose all meetings with lobbyists and the purpose of the meeting. This can be done on a Web site established by each member and each committee.
New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand pledged to list her full schedule in detail on her Web site; it was an admirable promise, but some reports suggest she’s now listing only public meetings. That defeats the purpose: all such meetings, including private conferences, should be listed.
We pay our representatives to do the people’s work. We have the right to know what they’re up to.
III
HOW SPECIAL INTERESTS CAUSE CATASTROPHE
11
THE SHEER CHUTZPAH OF COUNTRYWIDE FINANCIAL EXECUTIVES
In his classic best seller The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defined the word “chutzpah” as:
gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible “guts,” presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to.356
Is there any better description for the astounding decision by a number of former high-level executives at Countrywide Financial to set up a new business, Private National Mortgage Acceptance Company, known as PennyMac—a joint venture with the investment management firms BlackRock and Highfields Capital Management? PennyMac is buying “delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.”357
PennyMac—even the name seems like a cruel insider joke. What does it stand for, Penny Mortgages After Countrywide?
Countrywide Financial, of course, is the company blamed by many for the subprime mortgage crisis that detonated the current global financial meltdown. As the largest mortgage company in the United States, Countrywide lost $1.6 million in the final months of 2007 because of the huge number of mortgage defaults on its creative mortgages, which left hundreds of thousands of people unable to pay. During that same period, the company paid megamillion-dollar bonuses to its top executives.
And now the former architects of the Countrywide debacle are buying distressed mortgages from