Last November, weeks after bailing out Wall Street and while pushing a $34 billion bailout for U.S. automakers, President George W. Bush, signed an agreement with other world leaders proclaiming, “we underscore the critical importance of rejecting protectionism and not turning inward in times of financial uncertainty.”Read the whole thing here.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed declaration that greenhouse gases pose a health danger will ratchet up pressure on Congress and the burgeoning climate-change lobby to pass new limits on emissions.
Whole Foods was a little like Microsoft — before Congress and the Federal Trade Commission made a whipping boy of Bill Gates. Until last year, Whole Foods had never hired a lobbyist and never lobbied the federal government. And, as with Gates, the catalyst seems to have been aggressive federal intervention in Mackey’s business.Read the whole thing here.
The AIG bonuses, alienating our allies, that Special Olympics crack on "The Tonight Show there's certainly plenty of competition, but this was probably the worst week of President Obama's nascent administration.Read it here.The problem wasn't just bad decisions followed by rash reactions and changing stories. The mistakes, oversights, cover-ups, and bad press of this past week all hit Obama in the most sensitive spots, undercutting the pillars on which he had built his rare transpartisan appeal.
Michelle Obama is planting a vegetable garden on White House grounds, but her husband may be salting the fields of small farmers with a food-safety bill. My Examiner explains.
Read the whole thing here.President Barack Obama made some foodies’ hearts melt on the campaign trail by referring to writer Michael Pollan, who has helped spark a revival in local, unprocessed food. But Obama’s push for strict new federal food-safety regulations could drive organic food and farmers markets into the back alleys.
The Food Safety Modernization Act, touted as a consumer protection bill, is backed by the giants of the affected industries, such as General Mills and the National Restaurant Association, while posing possibly lethal threats to smaller market players like family farms and local produce.
Yes.Early numbers suggest that the first quarter of 2009 has seen lobbying in the nation’s capital spike by nearly 22 percent over last year, which would be the largest ever increase in lobbying activity — and a strong indication that President Barack Obama has helped usher in a Golden Era for K Street.Read the whole thing here.
Read the whole thing here.The bonuses provide an early glimpse of an administration that is not offering the kind of change people were waiting for. The technocratic competence symbolized by the Ivy League degrees has proved a farce in practice. The honest and transparent government represented by ambitious-sounding executive orders has proved to be more smoke than substance.
Worst of all, this episode has dashed hopes that Obama would, in his words, “govern for all the people, not just the interests of the wealthy and well-connected.”
Read the whole thing here.As money is to New York City, the old analogy goes, so power is to Washington, DC. But these days, the District seems to be faring better on both fronts.
Sure, we're feeling the recession down here, too. We have net job losses, and we see our stores and restaurants going out of business. But compared to New York - well, let's just say that our Big City envy has melted away.
Starting with the Bear Stearns bailout last March, the balance of power has shifted, accelerating through the summer with AIG's collapse and government rescue, peaking with the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, and not really slowing down since. The giants of finance, the heart of New York's economy, have come to the brink of extinction. And the only reason Wall Street still exists is because of Washington.
Mandatory animal tagging and tracking follows a pattern we’ve seen before in many consumer-safety laws: Politicians, claiming to safeguard the people and spurred by self-proclaimed consumer-protection groups, advance regulation favored by industry giants who understand that the regulations’ burden may crush smaller competitors.Read the whole thing here.
Read the whole thing here.Somehow, in Obama’s rhetoric, fulfilling the funding requests from these industry lobbyists counts as getting politics out of science.
Throughout its brief history, the embryonic stem cell industry has always been supremely political. It has been busy not warding off regulations — recall, this research has never been banned — but seeking taxpayer money at the federal and state level.
Obama’s strategy of pushing for rapid action on an array of spending and subsidy policies such as stimulus spending, financial industry bailouts, health care costs and energy policies is driving wedges between business groups and congressional Republicans as traditional alliances splinter.
Just as the oil industry got its way in the Bush Administration, the abortion and stem-cell industries appear likely to get their way in the administration of President Barack Obama.Read the whole thing here.
Obama’s nomination of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services is a boon for the big business of abortion and the government-dependant industry of using human embryos for stem-cell research.
While many companies hire lobbyists to win earmarks, General Electric’s unmatched lobbying force has secured a tax increase — or its equivalent — in President Barack Obama’s budget.Read the whole thing here.Labeled “climate revenues” and totaling $646 billion over eight years, this line item in Obama’s budget has inspired confidence in GE Chief Executive Officer Jeff Immelt. As Immelt put it in a letter this week, he believes that the Obama administration will be a profitable “financier” and “key partner.”
“I’m probably the least partisan person up here.” These are surprising words to hear from Sen. Tom Coburn, the freshman Republican senator from Oklahoma, who doesn’t exactly have a reputation as a moderate: In 2008, he earned a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union and a big zero from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action.Read the whole thing here.
