McCain Neck-Deep in K Street Sewer

Earlier this year, John McCain tried to defend the fact that his presidential campaign was jam-packed with lobbyists:

[T]hey’re honorable people, and I’m proud to have them as part of my team.

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The right to represent interests of groups of Americans is a constitutional right. There are people that represent firemen, civil servants, retirees, and those people are legitimate representatives of a variety of interests in America.x50

But the lobbyists holding top spots in McCain’s campaign do not represent firemen, civil servants and retirees. Rather, they represent big corporations and foreign governments. Of McCain’s many lobbyists, here are three prime examples:

• McCain’s top national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has lobbied for such corporations as Lockheed Martin and BP, and has pulled in $2 million from corporations that have given significant money to McCain. Scheunemann was a board member of PNAC, the neocon think tank that came up with the policy of knocking off disfavored regimes by military invasion.x51x52 In 1998 he helped write the law that declared regime change in Iraq as U.S. policy and sent $98 million from the U.S. treasury to con man Ahmed Chalabi’s group, which posed as the Iraqi government in exile.x53 And in 2002 he helped with the marketing campaign for President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Another policy Scheunemann pushed is expanding NATO into former Soviet states, such as the country of Georgia, which has paid $800,000 to Scheunemann’s two-man lobbying company.x54 For over a year, Scheunemann was getting paid for advice by McCain’s campaign, while his firm was getting paid by Georgia. McCain has championed Georgia’s issues, sponsoring a resolution to get Georgia into NATO, and totally taking Georgia’s side against Russia in the warfare between the two that started two weeks ago in Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia.x55 After Russia invaded Georgia, McCain said he spoke with Georgia’s president Saakashvili and told him “the thoughts and the prayers and support of the American people are with that brave little nation” and “that I know I speak for every American when I say to him, ‘Today we are all Georgians.’”x56 But McCain left out the fact that Georgia started the warfare by attacking South Ossetia, where most persons have Russian citizenship, and killing many hundreds, including some Russian peacekeeping soldiers.x57

• McCain’s top campaign strategist, Charlie Black, is also a top Republican lobbyist, who has worked for such corporate clients as Lockheed Martin, GE, AT&T, Blackwater and Rupert Murdoch, and such foreign dictators as Marcos of the Phillipines, Siad Barre of Somalia and Mobutu of Zaire.x58x53 He has pulled in $30 million from corporations that have given significant money to McCain.x51 Black was Ahmed Chalabi’s main escort through the corridors of Washington, as the con man dished out lies to support the coming Iraq invasion. Black was also a big mover in getting AT&T and Verizon off the hook for helping Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

• “I respect no one more in America on issue[s] of economics than I do Phil Gramm,” said McCain.x59 Gramm is McCain’s top economic adviser, but he had to lie low for a while after blaming U.S. economic woes on a “mental recession” and calling America “a nation of whiners”.x60 As a Senator, Gramm pushed through the “Enron loophole” exempting computer energy market trading from oversight, and enabling Enron’s market manipulation and accounting crimes.x61 As Congress was wrapping up business in December 2000, Gramm slipped into the budget another act removing oversight, effectively creating the “shadow banking system” that has led to the current mortgage crisis.x62 “Foreclosure Phil” now lobbies the U.S. Government for UBS, a big Swiss bank for the wealthy, where he pulls down a seven-figure salary.x53

The sorry record of his top advisers shows that a McCain presidency would strive to continue the Bush years of disastrous foreign and economic policy—and government that serves those big corporations and foreign politicos that shell out to the sleaziest cronies on K Street.