"Still undecided are three key provisions ... [the] populist amendment that would require banks to spin off their derivatives desks ... it looks like some scaled back version of Lincoln's provision will be included in the final bill. Also likely to be included: the tough so-called Volcker rule ... Finally, the fate of a House provision that would create a $150 billion fund to pay for the cost of dealing with bankrupt financial institutions, paid for with new fees on firms worth more than $50 billion, remains undecided. Bankers are eyeing this week with some trepidation..."
But NYT reports Volker Rule in trouble because of lobbyists,
"The three main changes under consideration would be a carve-out to exclude asset management and insurance companies outright, an exemption that would allow banks to continue to invest in hedge funds and private equity firms, and a long delay that would give banks up to seven years to enact the changes ... they have the support of Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut ...
Bloomberg reports that the lobbyists are ready for a stealth fight through regulatory agencies if the bill passes,
"If the bill passes in roughly the form being negotiated by House and Senate lawmakers, regulators will be directed to write hundreds of new rules, conduct dozens of studies, combine two banking agencies and bring industries such as mortgage brokers under federal oversight for the first time. The process will take place in an arena where technical knowledge and relationships with regulators take precedence over old-fashioned legislative arm-twisting."
(Note, the "Volcker Rule" restricts banks from certain trades if they are not on behalf of their customers, prohibiting them from owning and investing in "alternative" funds.
Citibank doesn't care. Several outlets are reporting that the bank is raising $3 billion just for this purpose.
"Citi must be comfortable enough that whatever happens, even in the extreme version, they'll be able to move ahead with these businesses," said Steven Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who studies the private-equity industry. "I don't think any of these bills envisioned not being able to manage someone else's money. It's the bank capital that's still an open question."
You would think that having won some of the key battles in financial reform in spite of destroying the world economy with their greed that bank lobbyists would be counting themselves lucky and relaxing a little. But they believe it is their God-given right to win every single legislative battle and run all things finance-related with no oversight, regulations, barriers, or fairness to other economic sectors. And because they are so completely used to getting their way in all things, the idea that they might possibly, actually lose a few of these legislative fights is making them frantic.
Elizabeth Warren gave a (great, if I hear right) speech to the House Democratic caucus yesterday, rallying the troops to pass a bill with real muscle in terms of consumer protection, derivative regulations, and putting money back into the main street economy with such provisions as regulating credit card swipe fees. Joe Stiglitz did a press conference for Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) where he raised hell about derivatives and pushed that issue forward. AFR has put together a remarkable lobbying operation focused on the House and Senate conferees (which you can find here if you want to know who the targets are to give them a call). An exciting new consumer-business coalition has come together around the Durbin amendment on swipe fees, which I'm proud to be consulting on. You can check out a new ad on the issue here. Good things are happening on our side, but the bankers are spending money like drunken sailors because they don't like to lose. They are hiring lobbyists all over town at rates of $50,000 a month or more. They are paying PR lobbyists huge money, and then spending tens of millions in advertising. They are giving politicians massive amounts of PAC dollars- Greg Meeks, who is a key conference committee negotiator on the swipe fee issue, for example, has raked in over $90,000 in campaign contributions from big banks in recent months. The big banks have also made good friends with state treasurers like Shane Osborn from my beloved home state of Nebraska to shill for them, and with credit unions who have come to town today to lobby on the bank's behalf on the swipe fee issue even though the issue doesn't impact the credit unions much. (Side note here, just because I am annoyed with these guys for selling out to the bankers: credit unions, according to a report from the Tax Foundation, have a $31.3 billion tax break, so they can serve low-income people, even though the vast majority of their clients are now middle income or wealthy folks. I just had a new idea for cutting the deficit.) The question on financial reform is very simple: do the big banks, which have more concentrated money and power than any industry since the giant monopoly trusts of the 1890s, win on all these key issues in conference committee? Or do consumers, homeowners, and main street businesses?
Politicians like to talk about how complicated everything is, and some issues do get pretty wonky, it's true. But the age-old which side are you on question remains pretty simple. Let's hope the Democrats understand they need to be on the opposite side of the guys on Wall Street.
The legislative process is irritating and exhausting. Its two steps forward and one step back - on a really good day. The last couple of days have been relatively good days. The two steps forward were on the Defense Authorization bill: Don't Ask Don't Tell is blessedly about to become history, and we got a big boost for the idea of buying American and preserving America's industrial base with the passage of the Fair Defense Competition amendment, which directs the Department of Defense to consider unfair competition from foreign companies when awarding defense contracts. The step backward was on the "jobs" bill, where the deficit hawks are turning the bill into blue smoke and a mirror or two (Reminder to the deficit hawks, from my time as a Clinton advisor: the best way to get rid of deficits is to create a strong economy with full employment).
The biggest legislative news, though, is now behind the scenes: the conference committee negotiations over the banking bill. I am very concerned about a dynamic developing, and I want to beg every progressive activist and writer to stay deeply engaged in this fight. I'm getting the feeling form a lot of people I'm talking to and a lot of posts I'm reading that people are seeing the fight over this bill as pretty much done. The posts I'm reading have a retrospective quality, people speaking in past tense about how the bill is pretty good versus those who say it didn't go far enough, etc. This fight is a very long way from being over, however.
Congress returns from its April recess this week with financial reform at the top of its to-do list. With millions of Americans still bearing the brunt of the worst recession in 80 years, Congress needs to start protecting our economy from Wall Street excess, and repair the shredded social safety net that has allowed the Great Recession to exact a devastating human cost.
Big banks are an economic parasite
In an excellent multi-part interview with Paul Jay of The Real News, former bank regulator William Black explains how the financial industry has transformed itself into an economic parasite. Black explains that banks are supposed to serve as a sort of economic catalyst-financing productive businesses and fueling economic growth. This was largely how banks operated for several decades after the Great Depression, because regulations had ensured that banks had incentives to do useful things, and barred them from taking crazy risks.
The deregulatory movement of the past thirty years destroyed those incentives, allowing banks to book big profits by essentially devouring other parts of the economy. Instead of fueling productive growth, banks were actively assaulting the broader economy for profit. None of that subprime lending served any economic purpose. Neither do the absurd credit card fees banks charge, or the deceptive overdraft fees they continue to implement.
As Matt Taibbi explains in an interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now!, banks didn't just cannibalize consumers. They also went directly after local governments, bribing public officials to ink debt deals that worked wonderfully for the banks, and terribly for communities. In Jefferson County, Ala., J.P. Morgan Chase helped turn a $250 million sewer project into a $5 billion burden for taxpayers. The deal generated nothing of value for either citizens or the economy, but J.P. Morgan Chase was still able to line the pockets of its shareholders and executives. This kind of behavior was illegal, but the transactions involved were complex financial derivatives, which are not currently subject to regulation. To this day, nobody at J.P. Morgan Chase has been prosecuted for bribery or corruption.
Congress set to avoid tough regulations
There is a clear need for Congress to enact some firm restrictions against risky and predatory bank activities. But at the behest of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Congress is doing its best to avoid inserting any hard terms in legislative language, instead leaving the specifics to federal regulators to work out. As Tim Fernholz emphasizes for The American Prospect, this is an exercise in futility. Regulators already have the power to impose more stringent rules on nearly every arena of Wall Street business that matters (derivatives are a very noteworthy exception). If they wanted to fix things, they could do it without Congressional help. The trouble is, the financial sector has polluted most of the regulatory agencies, so that many regulators now act more like lobbyists for the banks they regulate, rather than law enforcers. Indeed, as I note for AlterNet, the top bank regulator in the U.S. spent over a decade lobbying for the nation's largest banks before taking up his current job. If Congress doesn't establish firm rules, regulators under future administrations would be free to simply undo any measures that the current agencies actually implement.
Megabanks equal mega risks
As Stacy Mitchell illustrates for Yes! Magazine, most of the problems in the financial sector are connected to the size of our banking behemoths. Big banks have enormous power-if they fail, the economy goes off a cliff. As a result, any responsible government wouldn't allow any of our megabanks to actually fail. But knowing that the government will protect them from any true catastrophes, big banks take bigger risks-if the risk pays off, they get rich, if it backfires, taxpayers will suck it up. That puts the interests of big banks at odds with the public interest, and creates an economy where bankers don't try to finance useful projects with a safe and steady return, but instead back crazy bets that just might pay off.
You can't fix that problem with regulations or idle threats of taking down a big bank when it gets itself in trouble-the markets won't believe it, and the banks will still take risks. The only solution, Mitchell notes, is to break up the banks into smaller institutions that can fail without wreaking havoc on the economy.
Economic inequality weakening the economy
All of this ties into rampant economic inequality in the United States. Since the 1970s, conservatives have waged a constant battle on the social safety net, shredding protections for ordinary people, while empowering corporate executives to take advantage of them. In an illuminating blog post for Mother Jones, Kevin Drum highlights the fact that average income has only rose from about $20 an hour in 1972 to $23 an hour today. This isn't because workers were slacking off-productivity has increased at roughly five times that rate. In other words, nearly all of the economic gains since the Nixon era have accrued to the wealthy.
When people don't have access to strong and improving income, they finance things with credit. But if wages never actually improve, that debt becomes a significant burden. When an entire society finds itself overly indebted, people stop buying things, and the economy tanks. The predation in the American financial sector makes this problem even worse.
But political theatrics are even trumping efforts to provide relief to those hit hardest by the recession. Sens. Jim Bunning (R-KY) and Tom Coburn (R-NE) have blocked the extension of unemployment benefits twice in the past month. As Kai Wright emphasizes for ColorLines, that recklessness puts up to 400,000 Americans at risk of losing their unemployment checks. That's a human tragedy-hundreds of thousands of people will have no way to pay the bills. It's also bad for business, since those people won't have any money to buy things that businesses produce. It is, in short, short-sighted economic insanity.
The economy is supposed to work for everybody, not just the rich, not just bankers. For that to happen, politicians have to establish meaningful regulations to make sure finance works for the greater good-- and safety nets to make sure that anyone who falls through the cracks doesn't see her life prospects permanently diminished.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
WASHINGTON, DC — In honor of Thomas Jefferson’s 267th birthday, the Green Party of Florida and the People’s Lobby Coalition for Public Funding Only of All Elections will hold a forum on the influence of corporate lobbies on US elections. The forum will take place at the National Press Club (http://npc.press.org) in Washington, DC, at 7 pm on Tuesday, April 13, 2010.
The speakers will discuss ‘Money Morality’ and the effect of corporate money on health care, energy, the economy, treatment of the poor, and other major issues, with an analysis of military expenditures in light of campaign contributions from defense contractors.
"We’ll talk about the correlation between the influence of the 13,000 special interest lobbyists and our elected officials’ voting trends in relation to these issues. And we’ll propose necessary changes to our election system to restore democracy," said Jennifer Sullivan, organizer of the event.
The event is open to the public, with doors opening at 7 pm. Admission is free for all members of the media with proper ID. General admission is a suggested donation of $10.00 or $15.00 per couple; no one will be turned away.
Refreshments will be served, with a variety of selected hors d’oeuvres, house specialty dips, gourmet chips, beverages, and a cash bar.
Guest speakers at the forum:
• Dr. Margaret Flowers, Congressional Fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program (http://www.pnhp.org), advocate for single-payer national health care, from Maryland
• Jesse Johnson, chair of the West Virginia Mountain Party (http://www.mtparty.org), twice-nominated candidate for the US Senate, the only third-party candidate to receive an endorsement from the Sierra Club in his 2008 race for Governor of West Virginia, and filmmaker (http://www.mtparty.org/nominations/2004/jesse/bio.html)
• Pat LaMarche, weekly columnist for the Bangor Daily News (http://www.bangordailynews.com), 2004 vice-presidential nominee of the Green Party of the United States, and advocate for the homeless
• Head-Roc, Hip-Hop artist and community organizer (http://www.head-roc.com), from Washington, DC
• Jennifer Sullivan, regional representative of the Green Party of Florida (http://www.floridagreens.org) and coordinator of The People’s Lobby
More speakers will be announced soon.
WHAT: The People’s Lobby: Forum on the influence of corporate special interest money on public policy and the erosion of US democracy, Tuesday, April 13 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC
I have personally created several corporations in my time, and never once have I thought any of them to be separate "people" - if I had I would have been granting myself more than the "one man, one vote" concept of our Constitution and all related laws.
Now we have the Supreme Court allowing Corporations (and, yes, Labor Unions - also not separate "people") the ability to spend unregulated amounts of money on elections... because they are "people" within the law.
The man who admitted to gunning down Dr. George Tiller in church last May went on trial in Kansas on Friday. Tiller was one of a small number of doctors performing late term abortions in the U.S.
Scott Roeder admitted to shooting the Tiller, but he is pleading not guilty to murder, as Robin Marty reports in RH Reality Check. Yesterday, Judge Warren Wilbert shocked observers by allowing Roeder's lawyers to argue that their client is guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not premeditated murder.
Kansas law allows the accused to plead "imperfect self-defense" if he had an "honest but unreasonable belief" that deadly force was necessary to protect innocent third parties. Roeder says he killed to protect the unborn. Pro-choice activists are alarmed that the judge allowed Roeder to use this defense. If he beats the murder rap, Roder could face just five years in prison. In the unlikely event that his legal gambit is successful, the precedent could be tantamount to declaring open season on abortion providers.
No doubt Nidal Hussein sincerely believed that he was protecting innocent lives when he murdered 12 soldiers at Fort Hood last November. Somehow, I doubt the Army will be as deferential to Hasan's crazy religious ideas as Judge Warren Wilbert has been to Roeder's.
In other health care news, Robert Reich of TAPPED asks whether the rich or the middle class will pay for health reform:
There's only one big remaining issue on health care reform: How to pay for it. The House wants a 5.4 percent surtax on couples earning at least $1 million in annual income. The Senate wants a 40 percent excise tax on employer-provided "Cadillac plans." The Senate will win on this unless the public discovers that a large portion of the so-called Cadillacs are really middle-class Chevys-expensive not because they deliver more benefits but because they have higher costs.
Reich cites a shocking statistic: Less than 4% of the variation in the cost of insurance coverage is based on differences in benefits provided. Most of the difference in price is based on the perceived riskiness of the beneficiaries. So, if you're in a high risk pool comprised of, say, retired autoworkers, you're going to pay a lot more for the same benefits than someone in a younger, healthier risk pool. When you look at it that way, it seems unfair to pay for reform on the backs of people who are already paying more for the same thing due to circumstances beyond their control.
President Barack Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are meeting with top labor leaders on the "Cadillac tax," as Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports. Obama and Sebelius are trying to hash out a compromise that would be acceptable to the unions, who so far, have been implacably opposed to taxing expensive health care plans. The unions are reluctant to give any ground on this issue because so many of their members have accepted expanded health care benefits in lieu of wage increases over the years. Taxing those benefits now would effectively erase some hard-won gains by workers. Obama and the unions are reportedly discussing some kind of grandfather clause proposal that would exempt existing plans and only tax new plans.
Elsewhere in our high-deductible democracy, it turns out that health insurers secretly steered more than $20 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose health reform while publicly professing to support the effort, according to Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones. The bagman was America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). While AHIP was soliciting donations to run attack ads, AHIP's top lobbyist, Karen Ignagni penned an op/ed in the Washington Post assuring the public that AHIP supported reform.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly hopes that the scandal will give ammunition to Democrats in the last big push to pass health care reform: "Policymakers struggling to resolve differences on the final reform bill may want to keep a simple adage in mind: Don't let AHIP's duplicitous campaign win."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
By proposing financial reforms that won't curb Wall Street excess, U.S. policymakers have offered an unacceptably weak response to our enormous financial crisis. If voters don't demand that their elected representatives help workers and consumers instead of simply boosting corporate profits, the economic downturn will last for several more years and leave the economy vulnerable to another bank-induced meltdown.
The banks have unbelievable lobbying clout. In an interview with Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks, Heather Booth, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, describes how one-sided the Wall Street reform fight has been. Despite broad public support for a fundamental financial overhaul, going up against the bank lobby is, as Booth describes, "a David and Goliath fight." It's basically Americans for Financial Reform against every major corporation in the U.S.
Booth notes that the Chamber of Commerce has vowed to spend $100 million on a campaign to defend the "so-called free enterprise system"-you know, the "free market"-in which corporate lobbyists spend millions of dollars to write the rules of the economic game. Just seven financial lobby groups have spent a massive $147 million peddling influence over the past two years.
In fact, as Janine Wedel observes for Salon, the U.S. economic system is starting to look an awful lot like the clannish systems of government that looted Eastern European countries in the early 1990s. Today, the public good takes a backseat to the narrow interests of powerful corporations.
With the Obama administration working with advisers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, we're not just watching Wall Street write its own regulations. We're watching the financial sector re-write the official role of the government in the economy. In this new role, the government's top priority is securing profits for corporate America.
"The intertwined coterie of financial and policy deciders in the United States is creating not only the financial architecture of the future, backed by the power and billions of the state, but, more generally, new relationships between the bureaucracy and the market," Wedel writes.
GRITtv's Laura Flanders echoes this theme in an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and journalist Russ Baker. Lobbyists have so thoroughly hijacked the U.S. economy, Perkins argues, that the nation's government now resembles those of Latin American nations he worked with in the 1980s and 1990s.
"I don't think the U.S. president has much power these days, to be honest with you. . . . It's the big corporate executives who call the shots today, and let's face it, they financed Obama's campaign," Perkins says.
The very efforts the government deployed to save the financial system are being perverted to create another disaster. In a five-part interview with Paul Jay of The Real News, Jane D'Arista, an influential economist and author of The Evolution of U.S. Finance, explains how Wall Street destroyed itself over the past decade. By borrowing massive amounts of money, Wall Street was able to place bigger bets in the capital markets casino, resulting in huge profits when those bets paid off. But when the bets backfired, the losses were just as massive. Companies couldn't pay them off, so the government stepped in to support them.
One of those support mechanisms came from the Federal Reserve, which began making incredibly cheap loans to firms that engaged predominantly in speculative trading. The Fed used to lend exclusively to commercial banks, which used the money to make loans that helped grow the real economy. But now those loans are being used to support risky securities trading, so we're seeing big profits in the financial sector, without much help for workers and consumers. This is a major long-term problem-if the economy can't keep pace with the Wall Street casino, those speculative trades are going to backfire and we'll be right back to the chaos of September 2008, only with an even weaker economy.
All hope is not lost. As Perkins and Baker emphasize in their interview with Flanders, citizens have to demand corporate accountability and a government that actually serves the public good. For much of the past decade in Latin America, governments have been elected that stood up to major corporations and demanded that they stop pillaging their nation's resources at the people's expense.
In addition to demanding much stronger reforms for the financial sector, we have to demand that the government respond seriously to problems facing workers. With the unemployment rate at 10.2% and expected to go still higher, we need jobs. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama's economic stimulus package helped stave off total economic devastation. What we need now is another stimulus to get people back to work, not just slow the pace of job losses.
"A bold, ambitious jobs bill can make a huge difference-the stimulus got us out of the ditch, a new effort can get us going in the right direction again," Benen writes.
And the only argument against this plan is that we "can't afford it." That is-the government's fiscal deficit is too high, and we just can't spend money to help people in real economic trouble.
But as Christopher Hayes writes for The Nation, the deficit excuse is pretty pathetic. Economic stimulus bolsters economic growth, thus improving tax returns for the government in the future. And any spending on any project can be taken out of the budget from other measures. Hayes notes that our massive military spending is almost never included in discussions about "fiscal responsibility." If we were really worried about how much it would cost to fix the economy, we could stop spending so much money killing people.
"Fiscal conservatism and deficit concern is nearly always code speak in Washington for something else," Hayes writes. "Most often, when someone in Washington says they're concerned about the deficit, what they're really saying is, 'I would like to make sure we have a government that focuses maximally on blowing people up.'"
The government has to start saying 'no' to corporate America. Corporate profits are not the same thing as a strong economy. We need to demand an economic policy that answers to workers, not just bank balance sheets.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
More than 5,000 people are packing the streets of downtown Chicago this morning, chanting, marching and rallying against Big Bankers and financial institutions that have taken taxpayer money and are using it to give big bonuses to CEOs and to lobby against financial reforms that would ensure they don't go back on the public dole.
The crowd is marching to the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, site of the American Bankers Association meeting, to protest the banking industry's greed and irresponsibility that crippled our economy, leaving millions of workers behind.
After the house of cards they built collapsed, bankers and the financial industry took $700 billion in taxpayer funds for a bailout. But rather than reform their failed practices, they want to go back to business as usual-with the chance of again precipitating another financial collapse and need for taxpayer bailout in coming years.
To start with, PhARMA, the big pharmaceuticals lobby, is spending 12 million bucks right now on ads promoting the Baucus bill, and they've set aside a total of 150 million bucks for the rest of the campaign. This is part of the 80 billion that the industry has pledged over ten years to reduce pharmaceutical costs ( although how this 12 million reduces costs, I don't know... surely they will find a way to bill this expense to the consumer.)
"Don't bet against us. We are going to make this thing happen," said Barack Obama to reporters yesterday when he announced that he expected a Senate Health Plan to come out of Max Baucus' Finance Committee by the end of the week.
Obama is committed to having this plan out before Congress takes its August vacation (does it dawn on you that these guys take a lot of time off? I guess when you're collecting from insurance companies and other lobbyists you have to make appearances at their summer gatherings...), and time is running out.
When you wake up in the morning and rub the sleep out of your eyes are you surprised to find a great shadowy figure in the room? We are past the Fourth and the "let's celebrate America" holiday feeling only to find that the lobbyists continued to move forward while we were distracted by fireworks and speeches.
The Wapo points out this morning that a large number of former inner-office employees of Max Baucus and Charles Grassley and other active Congressional committee members are being snatched up by lobbying organizations:
David Sirota had an excellent post last night on Open Left on an L A Times' report that President Obama is planning to appoint Mark Gitenstein as head of the Office of Legal Policy, a position that vets all potential federal judges. To appoint Gitenstein to any post in the Justice Department requires a waiver, since he was a registered lobbyist from 2000 to 2008 for the US Chamber of Commerce. During that time he was the primary operator in pushing through legislation to gut consumer class actions in the federal courts. Public Citizen has prepared an extensive story about Gitenstein's career of horrors.
A little research turned up personal connections to Sen. Kaufman, Biden's stand-in. Gitenstein was apparently a Senate staffer with ties to Biden before he went over to the Dark Side. He's been a member of the Obama Presidential transition team. They ought to have super-strict independent review of potential appointments of transition team members to key positions.
This guy's career after he left the Senate staff is so bleak he's a prime target for push-back. His appointment would likely be disastrous.
In an article in today's New York Times, unnamed Obama advisers float a Tom Daschle trial balloon for Chief of Staff in an Obama administration; he's already been widely mentioned for other senior policy positions.
Appointing Daschle, who's pulls in around a million dollars a year as a "Special Policy Advisor" (not a lobbyist) for the law firm Alston and Bird, would be a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of Obama's pledge that lobbyists "will not run my White House" or his administration, one of the hallmarks of his platform and one of the main way he differentiates himself from John McCain's lobbyist-riddled campaign.
Although Daschle technically avoids lobbying requirements, here's how Bob Dole described the reasoning behind recruiting Daschle to join him to the Washington Post:
"He's got a lot of friends in the Senate, and I've got a lot of friends in the Senate, and, combined, who knows -- we might have 51," Dole joked. "It's going to work fine. You need some flexibility and diversity. I don't think any successful firm is all Democrat or all Republican."
