Notorious Republican Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who readily admits to his former corrupt activities, told Stahl, “I was actually thinking of writing a book — The Idiot’s Guide to Buying a Congressman — as a way to put this all down.

Notorious former lobbyist Jack Abramoff is a free man again, after serving three and a half years in prison for corruption and fraud. In an interview aired by CBS on Sunday, he told correspondent Leslie Stahl about the tricks of his former trade.

Abramoff, who readily admits to his former corrupt activities, told Stahl, “I was actually thinking of writing a book — The Idiot’s Guide to Buying a Congressman — as a way to put this all down. First, I think most congressmen don’t feel they’re being bought. Most congressmen, I think, can in their own mind justify the system — rationalize it — and, by the way, we wanted as lobbyists for them to feel that way.”

“I spent over a million dollars a year on tickets to sporting events and concerts and what not at all the venues,” Abramoff boasted. He insisted, however, that the very best way to buy the favors of a Congressional office is to offer the chief of staff a job.

“When we would become friendly with an office,” he explained, “and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, ‘You know, when you’re done working on the Hill, we’d very much like you to consider coming to work for us.’ Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to ‘em, that was it. We owned them.”

He told Stahl that he exercised that kind of influence in a hundred different Congressional offices and that many members of Congress could have been charged with crimes for the favors they did him.

“I think people are under the impression that the corruption only involves somebody handing over a check and getting a favor,” Abramoff explained. “And that’s not the case. The corruption — the bribery call it, because ultimately that’s what it is — that’s what the whole system is. … The truth is there were very few members who I could even name or could think of who didn’t at some level participate in that.”

Abramoff doesn’t put much faith in the reforms that have been enacted since his own downfall. He pointed out, “You can’t take a congressman to lunch for $25 and buy him a hamburger or a steak of something like that. But you can take him to a fundraising lunch and not only buy him that steak but give him $25,000 extra and call it a fundraiser. … The system hasn’t been cleaned up at all.”

It is not altogether clear from the interview, however, how truly repentant Abramoff is. When Stahl told him that the things he was describing made her “sick to my stomach,” he almost seemed to be laughing as he agreed, “Right. Evil. Yeah. Terrible. Shameful. Absolutely.”

This video is from CBS News, November 6, 2011.

http://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf

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Occupy Movement Reaches Into Tiny Towns Like Mosier, Oregon

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Occupy Wall Street Supporters Buy Television Ad Time

A commercial promoting the Occupy Wall Street movement has been running on mainstream TV stations this weekend.

The 30-second ad, which was filmed a month ago but is only now gaining wide exposure, is not intended to sell anything or to solicit donations but to improve the image of the movement. It shows a variety of cleancut, sincere occupiers, ranging from students to a man in a business suit and a worker in a hard hat, proclaiiming their desire for peace, democracy, and economic justice.

According to MSNBC, the ad is currently running on Bloomberg News, ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox News, and other networks. It was produced by filmmaker David Sauvage and funded by donations.

“It’s not that I want people to send money … not so much a call to action but a call to meaningful political engagement,” Sauvage says. “I want people to see it and say that the people that are protesting are real people with meaningful concerns that I can relate to.”

Sauvage has already filmed two more ads and is asking for donations to cover national ad buys for them. One is titled “Occupy Poetry.” The other, “Occupy the Streets,” depicts a protest march.

“I also have a fantasy not yet realized of getting a lobbyist to acknowledge the despicable nature of his career,” Sauvage remarks. Perhaps he ought to be in touch with Jack Abramoff.

This video was uploaded by Noillusionz to YouTube, October 9, 2011.

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Church leaders accuse bankers of losing their ‘moral moorings’

Story from the Telegraph of the UK

The Church of England has launched a fierce new attack on bankers accusing them of greed and having “slipped their moral moorings”.

A series of senior figures stepped up their attack on the City in an assault that comes a week after the Church refused to evict protesters from outside St Paul’s Cathedral in central London.

They spoke of a financial sector which sets a moral tone for a society which had become “scandalously unfair”.

The interventions included:

• A call in an article in The Sunday Telegraph today for fundamental reform of how the financial world works. It was made by Ken Costa, a former bank chairman and the Church’s newly appointed leader of an initiative to build links with the City;

• The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said executive salaries were creating a gulf between rich and poor that made “societies less cohesive” and called for an end to official honours for financiers;

• Dr Giles Fraser, the cleric who quit as canon chancellor of St Paul’s over plans to evict protesters, said there was “financial injustice” that had to be addressed;

• A report written by Dr Fraser on behalf of a think tank endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is to be published tomorrow, claiming the City’s reliance on technology was dehumanising its values.

The rhetoric used by senior clerics and Church advisers will further deepen a rift with the financial sector and could backfire by discouraging the City donors who significantly fund St Paul’s.

Mr Costa, the former chairman of investment bank Lazard International, has been appointed by Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, to head a commission to build bridges between anti-capitalist protesters and the City.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Costa said: “It will look at how the market has managed to slip its moral moorings, and explore pragmatic ways of uniting the financial and the ethical.”

Separately, Dr Sentamu launched his own attack on executive pay, saying that FTSE-100 company chief executives were doing a disservice to society with their remuneration.

“It is hard to imagine a more powerful way of telling someone that they are of little value than to pay them one-third of 1% of your salary,” he said.

“Among the ill effects of very large income differences between rich and poor are that they weaken community life and make societies less cohesive.”

He said that “Queen’s honours” – meaning peerages, knighthoods and other official honours – should not be given “to those who have already rewarded themselves handsomely”.

Meanwhile Dr Fraser, whose resigned from the Chapter of St Paul’s as clerics fell out over how to deal with the Occupy London protesters camped outside, returned to the public eye by criticising what he said were underlying injustices caused by “the financial system”.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day on Saturday, he said the Church should highlight the human cost of financial injustice, but warned its leaders against “proposing specific answer to complex economic problems”.

“Rather, it’s the calling of the Church to draw attention to the human cost of financial injustice, and to reset the debate about our financial institutions firmly within the context of a bigger story about what human life is for,” he said.

His comments will be amplified in a report he had written for the St Paul’s Institute – effectively the cathedral’s think-tank, which is endorsed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop for/of Canterbury – and which will be published tomorrow, which argues that the City has lost its moral framework as technology has replaced human interaction.

Based on a survey of 500 city workers, who say they think they are paid too much, it examines how the culture of the financial sector has changed since the Big Bang of 1986.

“The fact that trading is now less reliant on direct human contact may go some way to explain how a sense of moral obligation has come to feel less compelling,” it says.

“Morality as its most robust when it is impregnated with a strong sense of community.

“The old City may have been an exclusive and inward-looking club, but the value of clubs is that their members often have a better-developed sense of standing for something, and are able to hold each other to account for failing to live up to the club’s values.”

The study was due to be published last month, but was shelved by the cathedral after its Dr Fraser, resigned in protest at its decision to support the City of London Corporation’s legal bid to remove the camp.

The cathedral executed a u-turn after the intervention of Dr Williams, who sided with the anti-capitalist protesters camped outside the cathedral, and as a result the Corporation of London has now had to suspend its legal action.

Dr Williams acted after becoming increasingly dismayed at the stance taken by Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, who backed the legal action to have them removed.

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Veil of Secrecy at the Fed Lifted–Senator Bernie Sanders: Now, It’s Time for Change

The Fed secretly loaned $16 trillion during the Wall Street bailout to every major financial institution

Some of the leading progressive economists in America, including a Nobel Prize winner, are serving on a panel Sen. Bernie Sanders formed to help him craft legislation to rethink the nearly 100-year-old Federal Reserve System. In a column published in the Huffington Post, Bernie detailed six issues he would like the panel to address, including: how to make the Fed more democratic and transparent, how to use the central bank’s resources to create jobs, whether a bank that is “too big to fail” should be allowed to exist, and how to create new Fed policies to reduce income inequality which is the greatest it has been since 1928.

A provision in the Wall Street reform law, authored by Bernie, revealed the Fed secretly loaned $16 trillion during the Wall Street bailout to every major financial institution in the country, large corporations, wealthy individuals, and central banks throughout the world. An investigation also raised serious concerns about conflicts of interest between the Fed, which acts as a regulator of the banks, and the banks, themselves.

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