In 2008, economist Nouriel Roubini popularized the term “shadow banking system” to describe the non-bank financial institutions that eventually helped spur the collapse of the financial system: highly-leveraged hedge funds, investment banks, and the like. This shadow system fueled Wall Street profits for years before eventually necessitating massive bailouts of the financial sector.

These days, a “shadow bank lobby,” has played a prominent role in shaping the financial reform process, pushing amendments that will weaken consumer protections, water down regulation of the Wall Street casino, and increase the likelihood of continuing fraud and future bailouts. I discuss this “shadow bank lobby” in Big Bank Takeover, the report on the big banks’ army of lobbyists released yesterday by the Campaign for America’s Future.

Read more…

When Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) announced last January that he would not seek reelection, some media outlets declared that Dodd’s retirement would actually increase the chances that robust financial regulatory reform would be enacted (for example, see articles by The Washington Post and BusinessWeek). Such analyses demonstrate a near total ignorance of the processes of lobbying and campaign financing that dominate Congress. In reality, Dodd’s announcement likely signaled that the aggressive reform of the finance industry widely called for at the height of the crisis will not become law; at least not while Dodd remains Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

The notion that the decision to retire “freed” Dodd from political pressure, allowing him to concentrate on drafting legislation that would become his legacy, greatly underestimates the strength of the ties between Wall Street and Senators like Dodd.  During his many years in the Senate, Dodd cultivated his ties to Wall Street and the industry’s K Street lobbyists to the extent that he essentially has two constituencies: the citizens of Connecticut, and the finance industry. Having freed himself from accountability to the former, he can now focus on serving the latter.

Read more…

The New York Times revealed today that over 40 members of Congress read statements on the floor that parrotted talking points prepared for them by lobbyists for pharmaceutical giant Genentech. As sundin notes, the story is a must-read and perhaps “all too believable,” given the way Washington works.

But the Times misses a key piece of the puzzle: two of the Genentech lobbyists at the firm that wrote the pharma-friendly talking points are ex-staffers to Anna Eshoo and Joe Barton, co-sponsors of a key measure in the bill designed to benefit Big Pharma.

Read more…

This morning Democracy Now! interviewed Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is vowing to withhold support from any health care reform bill lacking a strong public option. Amy Goodman asked Grijalva about the significance of the revolving spinning door between the industry and Senator Baucus’ staff, citing research first published on Eyes on the Ties:

AMY GOODMAN: Congress member Grijalva, I also want to ask you about Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus and his close ties to the healthcare industry. Yesterday, the White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Baucus had distributed his healthcare plan to lobbyists on K Street prior to sharing the plan with other members of the committee.

Meanwhile, the watchdog website LittleSis.org has revealed Senator Baucus’s chief health adviser, Elizabeth Fowler, is a former executive for the insurance giant Wellpoint. Fowler has been called the “chief operating officer” of the healthcare reform process. Baucus’s previous chief health adviser, Michelle Easton, now lobbies for Wellpoint.

LittleSis.org also reports that another Senate staffer working on Baucus’s healthcare bill, Cathy Koch, is a former lobbyist for health insurance and pharmaceutical interests, including an insurance industry front group. Koch worked as the director of global government affairs at the drug company Amgen until early 2007. Before that, she worked at Ernst & Young, where she lobbied on behalf of a number of large insurance and pharmaceutical companies, including Aetna, Blue Cross, Eli Lilly and Pfizer.

What is your response, considering how central Max Baucus is to determining what Congress will come up with?

Read more…

Friday ended our first ever analyst challenge, and we here at LittleSis couldn’t be happier with the results. In just a few weeks, our analysts identified 450 former congressional-staffers-turned-healthcare-lobbyists! And we certainly could not have hit that number without the work of our contest winners: @ddwriter, @Priscilla and @Reed.Young.  These three analysts went above and beyond and to reward them, their prizes are in the mail!

So what did we find?  The trends the LittleSis database identified were pretty interesting.
Read more…

Senator Max Baucus’s chief health adviser, Elizabeth Fowler, has been called the “chief operating officer” of the healthcare reform process by Politico — the staffer who sets legislative deadlines, coordinates with the White House on policy, and is understood to speak for Baucus on health policy issues. Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein has called her the most influential health staffer in the Senate.

Fowler, as it turns out, is also fresh off a lucrative stint working for the insurance industry: from 2006 to 2008, she was VP of public policy for Wellpoint, the insurance giant.

That’s right, an insurance industry hack is the quiet name directing the healthcare reform process on Capitol Hill.

It gets worse. Baucus’s chief health advisor prior to Fowler, Michelle Easton, currently lobbies for Wellpoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, & Young.

Read more…

As the health care fight intensifies, a wide range of research and journalism initiatives are taking a closer look at the special interests seeking to influence upcoming legislation. One of the more innovative efforts is the Health Care Investigative Unit, a project of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. We’re pleased to announce that starting this week, LittleSis will be partnering with the HCIU as it follows the money in the healthcare debate and tracks lobbyists’ connections to Congress.

The HCIU is mobilizing a team of citizen journalists to dig deeper on the key players in the healthcare debate:

The true influence of lobbyists, health care companies, and special interest groups is unprecedented as this historic battle looms. The Health Care Investigative Unit’s large-scale, citizen-powered effort will cover this influence from new perspectives and unearth new facts about how Congress really makes decisions.

Read more…