Barney Frank's JP Morgan Chase Connection

by Dollars and Sense

From Bob Feldman:

Since 1989, the corporation whose Political Action Committee [PAC] or executives have been the top source of campaign contributions for the House Financial Services Committee Chairman, Barney Frank, has been JP Morgan Chase & Company. A Democratic Congressional representative from Massachusetts, Frank has accepted over $70,000 in campaign contributions from JP Morgan Chase executives or its PAC since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics web site data base at www.opensecrets.org. In 2007, for example, Rep. Frank accepted $6,000 in campaign contributions from JP Morgan Chase's PAC, according to the JP Morgan Chase web site.

Coincidentally, Frank recently helped push through Congress a Wall Street corporate welfare bill which authorized the U.S. Treasury Department to invest $25 billion in JP Morgan Chase.

In a January, 1996, I asked Rep. Frank, in a phone interview for the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown, why his campaign committee had accepted a $500 contribution from then J.P. Morgan vice-chairman Robert Mendoze in April 1995.

"I'm surprised by the question," Frank replied in 1996. "There's no alternative to accepting such contributions, although I'm in favor of public financing of campaigns. I am on the banking committee and I accept contributions from many different contributors. But none of these contributors will determine how I vote on the banking committee."

According to Frank, when he first ran for Congress he received no campaign contributions from banking industry executives. But apparently, after some banks saw that, as a House Banking Committee member, Frank favored allowing banks to again enter the securities business, he began to receive some campaign contributions from people in the banking industry.

Asked in 1996 how he'd respond to the argument that the acceptance of a campaign contribution from a bank executive by a member of the House Banking Committee, which passes legislation that regulates banks, represents a conflict of interest, Frank replied in 1996: "That's nonsense." According to the Massachusetts representative, it was as ethical for him to accept campaign contributions from corporate special interest groups and JP Morgan's vice-chairman as it was for him to accept campaign contributions from public interest groups, labor union members or organizations that favor the legalized use of marijuana for medical purposes.

Yet in the appendix of his 1992 book, Still The Best Congress Money Can Buy, Philip Stern defined "conflict-of-interest' receipts as "contributions given to, and accepted by, that lawmaker from groups having a particular interest in the decision of the legislative committee on which that lawmaker sits (e.g....gifts by banks and other financial PACs to members of the House Banking Committee)..." Stern also indicated in this same book that the "conflict-of-interest" receipts accepted by Rep. Frank between 1985 and 1990 exceeded $149,000.

The chairman of the JP Morgan Chase board of directors' Risk Policy Committee and a member of the JP Morgan Chase corporate board's Public Responsibility Committee, General Dynamics board member James Crown, has also been a heavy campaign contributor to 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaigns since 2003. On June 27, 2003, for example, JP Morgan Chase board member Crown gave a $10,000 campaign contribution to Obama's campaign committee, prior to Obama's 2004 election to the U.S. Senate. Coincidentally, U.S. Senator Obama also supported using U.S. Treasury Department money to help bail out JP Morgan Chase.

Other members of the JP Morgan Chase board of directors besides James Crown include Exxon Mobil's retired chairman of the board and former CEO Lee Raymond and Comcast Cable Communications President Stephen Burke.

--bob f.

Labels: barney frank, Bob Feldman, JP Morgan Chase

 

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10/31/2008 10:03:00 AM