Not many people know that General Electric has been a huge beneficiary of recent bank bailouts via its financial subsidiary GE Capital, which would be America’s eighth largest bank measured by total assets. Regulators changed banking rules to guarantee $340 billion in GE Capital debt, and the bank received $16 billion in cheap emergency loans from the Federal Reserve, according to Fed data released in December. All the while GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, was on the board of the NY Fed (along with another former GE executive) and a member of Obama’s economic advisory board. The conflicts of interest are obvious and, as one Fed historian put it to the NY Times, “ugly”.

Immelt and Obama talking business in a GE factory

After $40 million in lobbying last year, more than any other company, the returns on GE’s political investments are still flowing. Immelt was with Obama in India a few months ago when he negotiated a $10 billion export deal benefitting GE, and Obama stood at a GE plant in New York as he named Immelt to lead his new economic advisory council, which looks like it will focus on making America’s laws, taxes, and labor force even more business-friendly.

Interestingly, the deep conflicts surrounding Obama’s promotion of Immelt have provoked the strongest criticism from libertarian think tank FreedomWorks, which has close ties to the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are energy moguls notorious for their financing of dozens of free-market political forces, from free-market think tanks to Tea Party affiliates. Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article about the Koch brothers shows how their influence through political and nonprofit financing is both unequalled and self-interested. The Kochs are fiercely opposed to bank bailouts, economic stimulus, and climate regulation. Immelt has been a high-profile supporter of all of these — perhaps because they’ve profited GE — and GE’s campaign contributions have leaned Democratic in recent years. That’s probably why he’s so close to Obama, and why the Koch brothers and groups like FreedomWorks want him to go away.

FreedomWorks and the NCPPR, another free-market think tank, have launched a campaign to “dethrone” Immelt from GE, calling him the “king of crony capitalism”, and are running ads attacking Immelt’s conflicts of interest as a blatant sign of corruption. “It’s time to break up the unethical romance between government and big business,” said FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe in a statement. “For too long, corporate elites have lobbied to profit from the size and growth of government at the expense of hard-working Americans.”

FreedomWorks has it wrong. It’s not the size and growth of government that ensured minimal financial regulations and generous bailouts for well-connected banks like GE Capital, it’s the size and growth of finance and its influence over government. Relative to expanding financial markets, regulations and regulatory bodies are not growing, they’re shrinking. Still, FreedomWorks can apparently exploit anger about Obama’s dirty dancing with bailed-out corporate elites to rally support for further dismantling of government oversight and regulation.

The beast of corporate power is feeding off its own corruption.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court issued a major decision against the banks on the issue of foreclosure fraud earlier today. In US Trust vs. Ibanez, the court ruled that the banks in the case did not have standing to foreclose when they failed to assign the mortgage prior to foreclosure. The case carries significant implications, as many foreclosures may be declared invalid in Massachusetts, and the ruling could influence other state courts. The decision has already sent bank stocks down.

Now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has identified a fundamental problem with the mortgage securitization and foreclosure process, Wall Street bankers and their friends in Washington may have a harder time working hand in glove to stamp out the foreclosure fraud firestorm.

Obama adviser David Axelrod and Bank of America PR strategist Anne Finucane, arm in arm at the height of the foreclosure fraud scandal.

Last October, when foreclosure fraud started capturing national headlines, the Obama administration joined the banks’ PR offensive and helped spin illegal foreclosure as a minor clerical issue. At a critical point in the process, White House adviser David Axelrod appeared on Face the Nation to say that he regretted that there was “uncertainty” in the housing market, that the administration was working closely with financial institutions, and that they hoped the issue would be resolved quickly.  He also said that the administration opposed a nationwide moratorium due to the fact that some foreclosures were valid.

At the time, Yves Smith said that the comments revealed “astonishing” priorities on the part of the Obama administration.

We do not know whether Bank of America wrote Axelrod’s talking points, but we do know that he was partying with the bank’s top public relations strategist a few days later. Axelrod attended an epilepsy research fundraiser in Boston later that week that was co-chaired by Bank of America executive Anne Finucane. The other co-chair, along with Finucane’s husband? Axelrod’s wife, Susan, a co-founder of Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy. Other prominent attendees are listed here.

In one picture from the event, David is standing next to an amused Finucane, a huge, clownish smile on his face, trademark moustache and brow in full effect, with one arm extended as if he is about to shake the hand of the photographer.

Obama’s point man on foreclosure fraud could not possibly look like a bigger corporate tool, arm in arm with Bank of America’s top public relations strategist at the height of the foreclosure fraud mess.

The “foreclosure fraud as inconsequential clerical error” argument has always been a lie, put forward by Wall Street with help from government cronies like David Axelrod. Zero Hedge calls these folks the “kleptocratic banker mafia syndicate,” and they come together at events like the Axelrod-Finucane fundraiser to further strengthen their social ties. But did they forget to invite the judge?

When the foreclosure fraud scandal hits the front pages again, and threatens to hurt powerful financial institutions — rather than just the foreclosed, unemployed, and powerless — will the syndicate keep pushing the paperwork lie?  Will Obama dispatch another Wall Street stooge to the Sunday circuit, to say that the issue needs to be resolved quickly? And will talking points matter when court cases keep piling up?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

The US Chamber of Commerce has done battle with the Obama administration over the course of the past two years on some significant issues, and has been described by one observer as “one of the most determined and well-funded foes of Obama’s agenda.” So the news that Obama may be tapping a Chamber insider as his chief of staff should come as a surprise to those following the food fights between the two power blocs.

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LittleSis is expanding its investigation into the networks of money and influence behind efforts to gut Social Security. Join the Social Security Looters research group if you want to get involved.

The most generous bank bailout in history has amplified Wall Street’s considerable political influence, and the economic implications of this democratic calamity go well beyond bloated bonuses. Over the past year, the financial propaganda machine has set its sights on Social Security, launching a massive assault on one of the nation’s most important economic programs. But rather than push back against the flawed economic assumptions of the nation’s financial elite, President Barack Obama appears to be advancing their arguments, and is now poised to repeat George W. Bush’s politically perilous efforts to gut Social Security.

A decade of wars, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the fallout from Wall Street’s housing bubble have almost tripled U.S. public debt since 2001, from $5 trillion to $14 trillion. Big, scary numbers like this, along with carefully timed downgrade warnings from Wall Street’s obedient rating agencies and continuing worries about the financial collapse of Greece, Portugal and other nations have changed the political climate in Washington, breathing new life into decades-old schemes to slash Social Security and Medicare entitlements.

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When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

–”A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life,” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

During his now-infamous Oval Office interview with Bloomberg Businessweek Obama named FedEx CEO Frederick Smith as one of his favorite business executives. Smith is an unlikely choice to say the least. He raised more than $100,000 for the McCain campaign and was co-chair of his finance committee. He is also “fiendishly anti-union,” in the words of Doug Henwood; he has been engaged in a long-running battle with the labor movement over allowing the company’s workers (who are classified as independent contractors) to unionize. Unions were key allies of Obama during his presidential campaign.

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Via Bloomberg, we learned yesterday that President Obama buys in to the Wall Street delusion that bankers actually deserve really high salaries.  Speaking about JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein, he said this:

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

Krugman’s reaction, in a blog post titled “Clueless,” pretty much sums it up: “Oh. My. God.”

The quotes paint a picture of a president who is hopelessly out of touch with the economic reality and with the public’s perceptions of Wall Street.  He also seems to be experiencing some amnesia regarding the massive, taxpayer-funded bailouts that have sustained the institutions run by these businessmen.

The White House has already started attempting to walk back the comments in a remarkable blog post that purports to clear up what the president “actually” said during the interview.  While offering up lengthy presidential quotes about the bonuses, say-on-pay, and so forth that put some of his words in context, the post leaves out what I see as the most important quote in the Bloomberg piece, where he says (about Blankfein and Dimon):  “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.”

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Last Thursday, inspired by the release of White House visitor logs, we launched a new project to compile information on visitors to the Obama White House.

In less than a week, analysts Priscilla, sundin, ellenp, and destructor have built and updated profiles for over 100 individuals who have met with the president or one of his top advisers (so far, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and chief economic adviser Larry Summers).  We profiled visitors that met with one of these individuals in a small group setting (ten or less total people).

Here are some initial observations about the types of people that get to meet with top White House officials (specifically the president, Summers, and Emanuel):

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It’s been almost one year since Obama’s inauguration — and one year since LittleSis launched. At this time last year we were scrambling to add up-to-date data about the past two presidential administrations, and the incoming one, in preparation for launch. We built lists like this, this, and this (with lots of help from our friends), and managed to include some presidential data at a time when the American presidency naturally had everyone’s attention.

It seems appropriate, approaching this anniversary, to return to this project of collecting and updating data on the Obama administration.  The release of White House visitor logs, and the awesome new tool Sunlight Foundation put together to help research the visitors (which cross-references names in the logs with LittleSis data), also seem like invitations to improve our data on the administration.

Starting today, we’ll be spotlighting Inside the Obama administration, the LittleSis research group focused on compiling accurate and up-to-date information on the current administration. Priscilla has led the group over the past few months, doing a tremendous job updating profiles for Treasury and White House officials. But there is lots more to be done, especially now that we have the visitor data to work with — we need your help!

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The White House’s most recent monthly release of visitor records was extraordinary in that it included a comprehensive dump of records for the second half of September 2009. Previous releases were limited to records for names specifically requested by reporters and other watchdogs; this one includes every single visitor record. Kudos to the White House for releasing the data (still wondering about that tunnel, though).

At 30,000 records, the data set is bulky, so I used a spreadsheet to pare it down a bit (eliminating 20,000 records for people who toured the White House), then uploaded some select records into a Google Calendar for easy viewing.

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The Chamber of Commerce has led the fight against the financial reform bill making its way through Congress.  The business lobby opposes the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, enhanced oversight of derivatives, and other key parts of the reform package, and it won many concessions on the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives.

Though the White House and the Chamber have been at loggerheads, recently, at least two members of President Obama’s inside circle teamed up with the Chamber in its efforts to fight financial reform.

Mellody Hobson, president of the mutual fund company Ariel Investments, and JP Morgan executive William Daley are both affiliated with the Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness.  Both Daley and Hobson served on the Center’s predecessor committee and signed a letter from the Center urging the Obama administration to adopt Wall Street-friendly regulatory reform.  Hobson and Daley were two of the only Democrats to sign the letter, judging from campaign finance data; it’s an overwhelmingly Republican bunch.

As I noted in my previous post about Representative Melissa Bean’s ties to the Obama fundraisers, Daley and Hobson are both very close to the president.  Hobson has been raising money for him since 1995, is business partners with one of the first family’s closest friends, and campaigned side-by-side with Michelle Obama.  Daley was an adviser to the Obama transition and co-chair of the Obama inauguration.

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