{"id":9057,"date":"2015-06-13T06:50:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-13T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9057"},"modified":"2015-06-13T06:50:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-13T11:50:00","slug":"emails-reveal-coziness-between-koch-lobbyists-and-regulators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9057","title":{"rendered":"Emails Reveal Coziness Between Koch Lobbyists and Regulators"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/06\/12\/emails-reveal-koch-industries-lobbying-weaken-derivatives-regulations-cozy-ties-regulators\/\" target=\"_blank\">Emails Reveal Coziness Between Koch Lobbyists and Regulators<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"title\">The close ties between corporate interests and the regulators who are supposed to police them contributes, many argue, to fundamentally lax oversight.<\/p>\n<p>Emails I recently obtained through a records request show how cozy a Koch Industries lobbyist is with officials at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the primary regulator for derivatives and commodity trading.<\/p>\n<p>Though Koch Industries is better known for using its considerable political machine to promote fossil fuel industry priorities and tax cuts for the wealthy, the company also has a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/report\/koch-oil-speculation\/\">major stake<\/a>\u00a0in the financial markets via\u00a0its business unit devoted to commodity speculation. Notably, the very first\u00a0oil-indexed\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/db.riskwaters.com\/data\/energyrisk\/EnergyRisk\/Energyrisk_0709\/markets.pdf\">price swap<\/a>\u00a0was pioneered by a Koch trader in 1986, and the infamous \u201cEnron Loophole\u201d that deregulated the trading of credit default swaps was engineered by a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/11\/17\/business\/17grammside.html?pagewanted=print\">lobbying team<\/a>\u00a0that included two Koch lobbyists.<\/p>\n<p>The recent lobbying campaign around derivatives is already paying off. As\u00a0Zach Carter of the\u00a0<em>Huffington Post<\/em>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2015\/06\/09\/koch-brothers-wall-street_n_7544956.html\">reported<\/a>,\u00a0the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a major regulatory roll-back supported by Wall Street banks and the Kochs. The legislation would affect the post-financial crisis reforms designed to rein in the global derivatives market.<\/p>\n<p>Just as Citigroup lobbyists\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2014\/12\/spending-bill-992-derivatives-citigroup-lobbyists\">authored<\/a>\u00a0their own deregulation bills in Congress, the Koch emails reveal just\u00a0<span class=\"s1\">how comfortable the regulators and the lobbyists who curry their favor feel with each other, even as the latter are besieging the former with information and pressure that benefits their very rich clients.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Gregory Zerzan, a former\u00a0Treasury Department official during the George W. Bush administration, went on to work for the International Swaps and Derivatives Association before becoming a Koch lobbyist.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Emails Reveal Coziness Between Koch Lobbyists and Regulators The close ties between corporate interests and the regulators who are supposed to police them contributes, many argue, to fundamentally lax oversight. Emails I recently obtained through a records request show how cozy a Koch Industries lobbyist is with officials at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6338,327,6339,4543,6335,6336,6337,1669],"class_list":["post-9057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-enron-loophole","tag-fossil-fuel-industry","tag-global-derivatives-market","tag-intercept","tag-koch-industries","tag-koch-lobbyists","tag-regulators","tag-wall-street-banks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9058,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9057\/revisions\/9058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}