The
candidate that claims to be the only presidential contender who doesn't
take money from lobbyists is in fact the biggest recipient of
lobby-related contributions. Barack Obama rakes in millions from law
firms serving the interests of Wall Street, including the financial
institutions that gave us the subprime lending crisis. Lawyers that
work for firms that earn hundreds of millions of dollars for lobbying
may technically not be lobbyists, but they share in their colleagues'
earnings as influencers of Congress - a legal loophole that allows
Obama to claim his hands are clean of lobby loot. "The top contributors
to the Obama campaign are the very Wall Street firms whose shady
mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and minority under
predatory loans."

Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or the
last plantation in America, has defied courts and the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for decades in its failure to hire blacks
as stockbrokers. Now it's marshalling its money machine to elect a
black man to the highest office in the land. Why isn't the press
curious about this?

Walk
into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you'll
see a self-portrait of upper management racism and sexism: women
sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy offices occupied by
predominantly white males. According to the EEOC as well as the recent
racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill
Lynch, blacks make up between 1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of
stockbrokers - this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and empty
promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.

The
first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black male
occupant in the oval office (having placed only five blacks in the U.S.
Senate in the last two centuries) appeared in February on a chart at
the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of the 20 top contributors to the Barack Obama
campaign, and it looked like one of those comprehension tests where you
match up things that go together and eliminate those that don't. Of the
20 top contributors, I eliminated six that didn't compute. I was now
looking at a sight only slightly less frightening to democracy than a
Diebold voting machine. It was a Wall Street cartel of financial firms,
their registered lobbyists, and go-to law firms that have a death grip
on our federal government.

Why is the "yes, we can" candidate in
bed with this cartel? How can "we," the people, make change if Obama's
money backers block our ability to be heard?

Seven of the Obama
campaign's top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the
same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public
and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made
mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some
of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see
eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors.
Those scars will last a lifetime.

These
seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs,
UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and
Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment
Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street. There are
five large corporate law firms that are also registered lobbyists; and
one is a corporate law firm that is no longer a registered lobbyist but
does legal work for Wall Street. The cumulative total of these 14
contributors through February 1, 2008, was $2,872,128, and we're still
in the primary season. 

But
hasn't Senator Obama repeatedly told us in ads and speeches and debates
that he wasn't taking money from registered lobbyists? Hasn't the press
given him a free pass on this statement?

Barack Obama, speaking in Greenville, South Carolina on January 22, 2008:

"Washington
lobbyists haven't funded my campaign, they won't run my White House,
and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am
president."

Barack Obama, in an email to supporters on June 25, 2007, as reported by the Boston Globe:     

"Candidates
typically spend a week like this - right before the critical June 30th
financial reporting deadline - on the phone, day and night, begging
Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs to write huge checks.
Not me. Our campaign has rejected the money-for-influence game and
refused to accept funds from registered federal lobbyists and political
action committees."     

The
Center for Responsive Politics website allows one to pull up the
filings made by lobbyists, registering under the Lobbying Disclosure
Act of 1995 with the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and
secretary of the U.S. Senate. These top five contributors to the Obama
campaign have filed as registered lobbyists: Sidley Austin LLP;
Skadden, Arps, et al; Jenner & Block; Kirkland & Ellis;
Wilmerhale, aka Wilmer Cutler Pickering.
    
Is it possible
that Senator Obama does not know that corporate law firms are also
frequently registered lobbyists? Or is he making a distinction that
because these funds are coming from the employees of these firms, he's
not really taking money directly from registered lobbyists? That thesis
seems disingenuous when many of these individual donors own these law
firms as equity partners or shareholders and share in the profits
generated from lobbying.

Far from keeping his distance from lobbyists, Senator Obama and his campaign seems to be brainstorming with them.

The political publication, The Hill,
reported on December 20, 2007, that three salaried aides on the Obama
campaign were registered lobbyists for dozens of corporations.  (The
Obama campaign said they had stopped lobbying since joining the
campaign.) Bob Bauer, counsel to the Obama campaign, is an attorney
with Perkins Coie. That law firm is also a registered lobbyist.

What
might account for this persistent (but non-reality based) theme of
distancing the Obama campaign from lobbyists? Odds are it traces back
to one of the largest corporate lobbyist spending sprees in the history
of Washington whose details would cast an unwholesome pall on the Obama
campaign, unless our cognitive abilities are regularly bombarded with
abstract vacuities of hope and change and sentimental homages to  Dr.
King and President Kennedy.

On
February 10, 2005, Senator Obama voted in favor of the passage of the
Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. Senators Biden, Boxer, Byrd,
Clinton, Corzine, Durbin, Feingold, Kerry, Leahy, Reid and 16 other
Democrats voted against it. It passed the Senate 72-26 and was signed
into law on February 18, 2005. Here is an excerpt of remarks Senator
Obama made on the Senate floor on February 14, 2005, concerning the
passage of this legislation:

"Every American deserves
their day in court. This bill, while not perfect, gives people that day
while still providing the reasonable reforms necessary to safeguard
against the most blatant abuses of the system. I also hope that the
federal judiciary takes seriously their expanded role in class action
litigation, and upholds their responsibility to fairly certify class
actions so that they may protect our civil and consumer rights...."

Three
days before Senator Obama expressed that fateful yea vote, 14 state
attorneys general, including Lisa Madigan of Senator Obama's home state
of Illinois, filed a letter with the Senate and House, pleading to stop
the passage of this corporate giveaway: The AGs wrote: "State attorneys
general frequently investigate and bring actions against defendants who
have caused harm to our citizens... In some instances, such actions
have been brought with the attorney general acting as the class
representative for the consumers of the state. We are concerned that
certain provisions of S.5 might be misinterpreted to impede the ability
of the attorneys general to bring such actions...."

The Senate also received a desperate
plea from more than 40 civil rights and labor organizations, including
the NAACP, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Human Rights
Campaign, American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Justice and
Democracy, Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education
Fund), and Alliance for Justice. They wrote as follows:

"Under
the [Class Action Fairness Act of 2005], citizens are denied the right
to use their own state courts to bring class actions against
corporations that violate these state wage and hour and state civil
rights laws, even where that corporation has hundreds of employees in
that state. Moving these state law cases into federal court will delay
and likely deny justice for working men and women and victims of
discrimination. The federal courts are already overburdened.
Additionally, federal courts are less likely to certify classes or
provide relief for violations of state law."

This legislation, which dramatically impaired labor
rights, consumer rights and civil rights, involved five years of
pressure from 100 corporations, 475 lobbyists, tens of millions of
corporate dollars buying influence in our government, and the active
participation of the Wall Street firms now funding the Obama campaign.
"The Civil Justice Reform Group, a business alliance comprising general
counsels from Fortune 100 firms, was instrumental in drafting the
class-action bill," says Public Citizen.

One of the hardest
working registered lobbyists to push this corporate giveaway was the
law firm Mayer-Brown, hired by the leading business lobby group, the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to the Center for Responsive
Politics, the Chamber of Commerce spent $16 million in just 2003,
lobbying the government on various business issues, including class
action reform.

According to a 2003 report from Public Citizen, Mayer-Brown's
class action lobbyists included "Mark Gitenstein, former chief counsel
to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a leading architect of the Senate
strategy in support of class-action legislation; John Schmitz, who was
deputy counsel to President George H.W. Bush; David McIntosh, former
Republican congressman from Indiana; and Jeffrey Lewis, who was on the
staffs of both Sen. John Breaux (D-La) and Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La)".

While not on the Center for Responsive Politics list of the top 20 contributors to the Obama presidential campaign, Mayer-Brown's
partners and employees are in rarefied company, giving a total of
$92,817 through December 31, 2007, to the Obama campaign. (The firm is
also defending Merrill Lynch in court against charges of racial
discrimination.)

Senator Obama graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
Given those credentials, one assumes that he understood the
ramifications to the poor and middle class in this country as he
helped gut one of the few weapons left to seek justice against giant
corporations and their legions of giant law firms. The class-action
vehicle confers upon each citizen one of the most powerful rights in
our society: the ability to function as a private attorney general and
seek redress for wrongs inflicted on ourselves as well as for those
similarly injured that might not otherwise have a voice.

Those
rights should have been strengthened, not restricted, at this dangerous
time in our nation's history. According to a comprehensive report from
the nonprofit group, United for a Fair Economy,
over the past eight years the total loss of wealth for people of color
is between $164 billion and $213 billion for subprime loans which is
the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern history:

"According
to federal data, people of color are more than three times more likely
to have subprime loans: high-cost loans account for 55 per cent of
loans to blacks, but only 17 per cent of loans to whites."     

If
there had been equitable distribution of subprime loans, losses for
white people would be 44.5 per cent higher and losses for people of
color would be about 24 per cent lower.  "This is evidence of systemic
prejudice and institutional racism."
Before the current crisis,
based on improvements in median household net worth, it would take 594
more years for blacks to achieve parity with whites. The current crisis
is likely to stretch this even further.

So, how should we react
when we learn that the top contributors to the Obama campaign are the
very Wall Street firms whose shady mortgage lenders buried the elderly
and the poor and minority under predatory loans? How should we react
when we learn that on the big donor list is Citigroup, whose former
employee at CitiFinancial testified to the Federal Trade Commission
that it was standard practice to target people based on race and
educational level, with the sales force winning bonuses called 
"Rocopoly Money" (like a sick board game), after "blitz" nights of
soliciting loans by phone? How should we react when we learn that these
very same firms, arm in arm with their corporate lawyers and registered
lobbyists, have weakened our ability to fight back with the
class-action vehicle?

Should
there be any doubt left as to who owns our government? The very same
cast of characters making the Obama hit parade of campaign loot are the
clever creators of the industry solutions to the wave of foreclosures
gripping this nation's poor and middle class, effectively putting the
solution in the hands of the robbers. The names of these programs (that
have failed to make a dent in the problem) have the same vacuous ring:
Hope Now; Project Lifeline.

Senator
Obama has become the inspiration and role model to millions of children
and young people in this country.  He has only two paths now: to be a
dream maker or a dream killer. But be assured of one thing: this
country will not countenance any more grand illusions.