"Undercover with D.C. Lobbyists for Hire" (Harpers Reporter exposes Dark Underbelly of DC)

[KoKo]

Their men in Washington:
Undercover with D.C.'s lobbyists for hire
TYPE Article
BY Ken Silverstein
PUBLISHED July 2007


Harper's Magazine's Washington Editor Ken Silverstein has spent years watching Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firms advocate in Congress on behalf of corrupt, dictatorial foreign regimes. He wondered: Exactly what sorts of promises do these firms make to foreign governments? What kind of scrutiny, if any, do they apply to potential clients? How do they orchestrate support for their clients? And how much of their work is visible to Congress and the public, and hence subject to oversight?

For answers, Silverstein went undercover as “Kenneth Case,” a consultant for “The Maldon Group,” a mysterious (and fictitious) London-based firm that claimed to have a financial stake in improving the public image of neo-Stalinist Turkmenistan.

In the brief excerpt below, “Kenneth Case” and his coworker “Ricardo” visit the grandest of the Washington lobby shops.
* * *

"Ricardo" and I headed to the offices of Cassidy & Associates, perhaps the most prominent of all the Washington lobby shops. It was founded thirty-two years ago by Gerald Cassidy, a former staffer for George McGovern, and for much of its existence was known as a strongly Democratic firm. Cassidy pioneered the practice of lobbying for earmarks—the polite term for pork—but also represents Fortune 500 corporations as well as foreign countries and businesses. Its current clients include Teodoro Obiang, who has ruled the small African nation of Equatorial Guinea since 1979, when he executed his uncle. Between 1998 and 2006, Cassidy was paid more than $235 million in lobbying fees, more than any other firm in Washington.

Cassidy occupies the entire fourth floor of its building, so that one enters the elegant offices upon exiting the elevator. A receptionist walked Ricardo and me into a large conference room with a beautiful wood table polished to a bright sheen. There were about twenty seats around the table, and eight settings had been laid out with a glass, each set atop a paper coaster embossed with the firm’s name. The table held an assortment of canned soft drinks, a pitcher of ice water with lemon slices, a cup of sharpened pencils, and a pile of yellow legal pads.

A phalanx of six Cassidy officials soon entered the conference room, all dressed in elegant business attire of varying shades of black, gray, and navy blue. There was Chuck Dolan, a former senior P.R. consultant for the Kerry-Edwards campaign; Gordon Speed, the firm’s pudgy, baby-faced director of business development; tall, thin Gerald Warburg, a former Hill staffer and company vice president; Christy Moran, who during the meeting told me she had previously worked for Saudi Arabia and helped boost its image with an “allies program” that sent visitors to the country; and David Bartlett, another P.R. specialist whose firm biography said he had helped corporate CEOs “face the nation’s toughest journalists.”


more at........

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/0081591