Concerned about seeing their huge profits cut, six big banks are leading the charge to weaken or block new financial regulations being considered in the United States Senate. To push their cause these banks have hired 145 former government officials--congressmen, staffers and executive branch officials--to lobby on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch.

The top six bank holding companies engaged in lobbying on financial regulation include Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, these banks spent a combined total of $23.8 million lobbying Washington in 2009.

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Former government officials accounted for seventy-one percent of all lobbyists hired in 2009 by these six banking companies. The company with the highest percentage of former government officials working as lobbyists is Goldman Sachs. Eighty-two percent of the lobbyists hired by Goldman Sachs previously worked in government.

Fifty-five of the 145 former government employees previously worked in the Senate, the current point of lobbying in the financial regulation debate. Fourteen of these former staffers turned lobbyists previously worked for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs or members of the committee. The senator with the most former staffers working as lobbyists for these big banks is Sen. Max Baucus with four former staffers who have gone through the revolving door.

One chief concern of the major bank holding companies is the derivatives language introduced by Sen. Blanche Lincoln and passed out of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Lincoln's legislation would require these banks to spin off their derivatives trading desks into separate entities. This would slash the profits that these companies currently make from derivatives trading.

According to the Office of the Comptroller or the Currency, five of these big banks -- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs -- account for 97% of the derivatives holdings of United States commercial banks. The investment of millions of dollars in lobbying could save the companies billions of dollars in lost revenue.

Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's chief executive, stated earlier that derivatives reform could cost his company "$700 million or a couple billion dollars," depending on how tough the regulations were. This calculation likely excludes the possibility that banks would spin off their derivatives trading desks, which could, according to some analysts, lead to the banks getting out of derivatives trading entirely.

The former staffers turned big bank lobbyists worked in other parts of government aside from the Senate. Sixty-five of the 145 previously worked in the House of Representatives. Forty-two worked previously in the executive branch in some capacity and of those with executive experience eight previously worked for either the Treasury Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Michael Paese used to be the chief of staff to Finance Committee Chair Barney Frank until he took a job as a chief lobbyist for Goldman Sachs last September. Congressional ethics laws forbid former staffers from contacting the office or committee of their previous employment for one year. Paese's year was about to be up, just in time for him to lobby his former employer and coworkers as they took up work on an extensive financial regulation package. Frank, however, took the rare step of prohibiting Paese from communicating with any staff of the committee for an undetermined amount of time to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.

This continues a trend in Washington where decision makers understand where the the lines of a conflict of interest could be crossed. The White House has instituted new lobbying policies for both the TARP and stimulus funding (with many loopholes, as Daniel Schuman has pointed out). A former lobbyist turned chief of staff to Rep. Jim Matheson turned down an invitation to a lobbyist thrown party. And now, Frank has refused to allow his staff to talk to one of Goldman Sachs' prime hires.

This could point towards a moment where Congress could enact further lobbying reforms to strengthen those passed in the 2007 ethics bill. More transparency should be shed on the meetings between lawmakers, staff and lobbyists. Simple disclosure of names and clients simply serves to provide a listing for lawmakers to know who they are talking to and does little to provide real information to the public.

Here are some of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies over the past week:

CQ Weekly's Maura Reynolds wrote about the Obama administration's successes and failures in achieving its transparency goals six months into the term. Reynolds quoted Ellen Miller, Sunlight's director, about how many of their transparency initiatives are still in development and how the kinks are being worked out. "A default position that government data will be accessible to the public in machine-readable format is a huge step forward," Ellen said. "Is it moving as fast as I'd like? Of course not. But I can be patient while this unfolds." Ellen also commented on some of the administration's initiatives, such as "town hall" meetings, that have been tightly controlled. "There is real transparency, and then there is transparency theater,'' she said. "I can distinguish between the two." Reynolds wrote that the more people expect the Internet to deliver the information they want, the more kinds of information they will expect to access that way. "It's kind of a genie out of the bottle," Ellen said. "The Internet has raised expectations. I fundamentally believe that the way technology pushes information out to the edges will have a powerful effect on the power structure." Reynolds reports that open government advocates praise two federal Web sites, USAspending.gov, a site that tracks all federal spending and was set up as a result of a bill co-sponsored by then-Sen. Obama, and Data.gov, the site the new administration designed as a "one-stop shop for number crunchers that consolidates statistics across federal agencies in standard, machine-readable formats." The article quotes Gary Bass, director of OMB Watch, saying the sites could be vehicles for connecting government performance to spending. "From the point of view of the average user, there has been nothing like this before. That is truly a credit to this administration." Reynolds notes that it was OMB Watch's FedSpending.org that served as the technical platform for USAspending.gov.

Despite the existence of rules requiring congressional lawmakers to disclose earmarks they request, rules do not exist requiring them to disclose items classified as "program support." The Washington Post's Carol Leonnig illustrates this problem with a report on how $160 million intended to help Mexico's police buy U.S.-made first-responder radios was tucked into the voluminous congressional plan for U.S. military spending next year. Leonnig quotes Bill Allison, Sunlight's senior fellow, "It kind of makes a mockery of the disclosure requirements we have. They will disclose the little things, the $1 million projects, but when you have the big-ticket items, you don't have members willing to take responsibility for those."

Stephanie Condon, writing at CBS News' "Political Hotsheet" column, cited a report from Taxpayers for Common Sense that found that lawmakers serving on the the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense included 1,080 earmarks worth $2.7 billion dollars in the fiscal-year 2010 defense appropriations bill they approved last week. The lawmakers specifically requested more than $1.6 billion in earmarks for their campaign contributors, entities who had donated nearly $1 million to the committee members.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and Taxpayers for Common Sense achieved a major victory when the Senate voted to halt production of the Air Force's top fighter jet, the F-22 Raptor, as reported by The Boston Globe. POGO called it a “landmark vote" that “marks the end of business as usual, and the beginning of real reform, in Washington." And Taxpayers termed it a “giant step for fiscal sanity (that) affirms the government’s ability to stop unneeded weapons programs even when they are firmly entrenched in the American industrial and congressional base."

Tom Hamburger and Peter Nicholas at The Los Angeles Times reported on Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, asked a simple question: What had the nation's banks done with all their bailout money? And the Treasury Department answered that they don't know. The Times reporters quoted Ellen crediting the Obama administration for making more government data public. She cited Data.gov as an example of a genuine attempt to put a wealth of government information on the Internet. But at the same time, Ellen said: "We don't see any radical changes from what we've seen in the past." The Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp" blog picked up the story, as did a number of other outlets across the country.

National Journal's Eliza Krigman reported on Cato's Jim Harper launching a contest at WashingtonWatch.com. The contest, supported by Sunlight, is meant to encourage citizens to contribute online to an earmark database to track how congressional lawmakers steer federal funds to special interests and projects in their districts. Krigman notes that the project is similar to Sunlight's Transparency Corps. Amanda Carpenter at The Washington Times, Ryan Singel at Wired's "Epicenter" blog and Nate Anderson at Ars Technica wrote about WashingtonWatch.com's earmark contest as well.

In their headlines for Monday, Democracy Now reported on a bipartisan group of centrist and conservative senators who called on Democratic and Republican leaders to put off a vote on health care reform legislation for 70 days. In the report they cite info from Paul Blumenthal's blog post on how each of these senators has raised at least $1 million from the health and insurance sectors combined over the course of their respective careers.

National Public Radio's Andrea Seabrook and Peter Overby, in a report the network broadcast on Wednesday afternoon's edition of "All Things Considered," asked the question, "Who has access to U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (Mont.), the chair of the Senate Finance Committee?" They highlight and link to the graphic produced by Paul and Kerry Mitchell, Sunlight's creative director, that traces health care lobbyists' ties to Baucus and other senators on the Finance Committee. They also interviewed Paul who said, "In Washington, relationships are part of the huge game of influence. If you don't have a relationship with someone on the Hill, then you aren't going to have the kind of access that you need for your client." And so, Paul said, these lobbyists — and their clients — have a unique brand of access to one man at the center of the health-care debate.

Anne Mulkern of Greenwire (subscription required) reported on an analysis conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics of a portion of lobbying disclosures for the second quarter of 2009 by energy companies, which show that electric utilities increased their expenditures, nearly catching up with oil and gas. While Congress debated and voted on the Cap and Trade Energy Conservation Bill, electric utilities spent $12 million, while oil and gas spent $13.9 million, attempting to influence the outcome. The New York Times republished Mulkern's piece.

The the Financial Times and Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi have picked up LittleSis.org's profiling of Bob Hormats, Obama's pick to be under secretary of state for economic, energy, and agricultural affairs. Hormats, as vice chair of Goldman Sachs (International), has dubious ties to the genocidal regime in Sudan through a Chinese oil company.

Quinn Norton at the Irish Times highlights Transparency Corps in an article about how crowdsourcing can be an effective means of getting labor-intensive work done online. Norton quotes Clay extensively, “Right now we’re just trying to keep up with the users, which is a nice problem to have.” Clay said that next up will be a project from LittleSis.org.

In the back-and-forth regarding who inserted the retroactive bonus immunity provision into the stimulus bill, we were repeatedly treated to on-air dodgeball acrobatics as both Sen. Chris Dodd and Treasury Secretary refused to name the Treasury staffers who could have pressed for this provision. While Geithner has owned up to his role and his support for the bonus immunity provision--on the grounds that a legal challenge could invalidate the entire stimulus bill--it would be worth our time to take a look at one member of Geithner's staff: his chief of staff. Mark Patterson is a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs who has lobbied for pretty much every position that the administration is now openly opposing.

David Corn, in Mother Jones, dives into this revolving door drama:

On Wednesday afternoon, as President Barack Obama was leaving the White House for a town hall meeting in California, he spoke for 15 minutes to reporters about the AIG controversy. Responding to the rising rage over the $165 million or so in bonuses paid to executives at the bailed-out insurance firm, Obama noted that he was quickly developing policies to prevent future AIG-like catastrophes. And he slammed Wall Street's culture of "excess greed, excess compensation, excess risk taking." To demonstrate that he's committed to battling such greed, the president cited his work in the Senate to rein in executive compensation. Noting that he and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) had each introduced legislation on this front in 2007, Obama declared that "there were some people who attacked us, saying government has no business doing that." One of Obama's opponents at that time was Mark Patterson, a lobbyist then for Goldman Sachs, the investment banking firm, which opposed the Frank-Obama initiative. Yet Patterson is now chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the embattled point man in the Obama administration's endeavor to undo the notorious AIG bonuses. That is, a Washington influence-peddler who worked against Obama's effort to limit excessive corporate pay is now a key member of the Obama administration team that is supposed to contain excessive compensation in the AIG case and in general.

Corn notes at the end of his post that, according to Treasury spokesmen, Patterson has recused himself from discussion regarding Goldman Sachs and issues he was previously paid to lobby. This still creates a serious conflict for Geithner, as Treasury is being partly managed by a former Goldman lobbyist. Geithner is also placed in a tough position considering that his chief of staff is limited in the areas in which he can work (supposedly).

For those who ask, didn't Obama plan on not allowing the influence of lobbyists into his administration, here's a handy chart showing the 30 individuals in his administration who were registered as lobbyists at some point during the past five years. Now not all of these persons are objectionable for their lobbying (lobbying on public interest issues is rather different than private interest), but it clearly flies in the face of a lot of remarks we heard during the campaign trail. National Journal's Julie Kosterlitz has a good article on this today as well.

Looking at the Dodd-Geithner-AIG-Stimulus secret provision quadrangle, the real problem may be who the decision makers listen to. If their top advisors are former Goldman Sachs lobbyists previously hired to lobby against tame executive compensation bills, then we can begin to assume where their positions come from.

Today, the Center for Political Accountability (CPA), a non-partisan group working to create transparency and accountability with corporate political spending, announced that they are leading a nationwide shareholder initiative to address the lack of disclosure of certain kinds of political giving by banks receiving TARP money.

The initiative, supported by 23 shareholder advocates, is calling on 19  companies that received more than $1 billion in TARP funds to disclose and require board oversight of their political spending with corporate funds. Only three financial groups -- Prudential Financial Services, American Express and Capital One -- have agreed to do so. Bruce Freed, CPA’s executive director, said that, as a matter of course, banks should be open and above board with their political spending. This is especially true now that they have received huge amounts of bailout funds from the government. Unfortunately, many have resisted. “A safe and sound financial system must be based on transparency and accountability,” he said.

The CPA-lead initiative sent each bank a letter calling for disclosure of political spending (including soft money contributions and payments to trade associations and other tax exempt groups used for political purposes) to help rebuild shareholder and public trust in financial services institutions. Unfortunately, the banking industry has lagged behind other industries in adopting disclosure. As of mid February, CPA reports, more than 52 leading U.S. public companies, including more than one-third in the S&P 100, have disclosed political giving, including Merck, Dell, General Electric, Pfizer, Hewlett Packard, FirstEnergy, Procter & Gamble and Aetna.

The initiative sent letters to the following institutions: Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, PNC Financial Services, Regions Financial Corp, SunTrust Banks, Fifth Third Bancorp, BB&T, Bank of New York Mellon, KeyCorp, CIT Group, Comerica, State Street, Marshall & Ilsley, Northern Trust, Zions Bancorporation and Huntington Bancshares.

It’s outrageous that the Congress didn’t include a provision in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act passed last fall that would require disclosure of this type of political spending. And it’s doubly outrageous that the banks are refusing to disclose as due course of receiving public funds.