Word: interests
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...wage plan is not retroactive, applying only to companies that tap TARP in the future. The restrictions will apply until a bank pays off its TARP tab and starts behaving. According to an Administration source, "If a bank has restored viability, has paid back the United States government with interest, and is now a completely private-sector bank ... then we can return to a time when this is between them and their shareholders...
...turned into the new President's first official policy, when he signed an Executive Order banning lobbyists from serving in his Administration. The order did come with some fine print, however - a waiver process that the White House counsel could invoke at will in the name of the "public interest," allowing an undetermined number of former lobbyists to effectively violate the new policy. (See members of Obama's White House...
...that looks, smells and tastes a lot like lobbying - work that led to the taxes flap that forced him to apologize to his former colleagues on Monday for what he called a "completely inadvertent" mistake. And while that failure to pay more than $128,000 in back taxes and interest has briefly marred his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), it's the ethical gray area Daschle's advisory work represents that has called into question Obama's promise of changing the culture in Washington...
...Monday, Daschle's spokeswoman, Jenny Backus, told the Associated Press that his work on behalf of health-care clients did not constitute a conflict of interest for his job at HHS. "He welcomed every opportunity to make his case to the American public at large and the health-care industry in particular that America can't afford to ignore the health-care crisis any longer," Backus said. Under the Obama ethics rules, Daschle will be barred from dealing with "specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients," unless he is granted a waiver...
...Ironically, Wertheimer and a group of other public-interest lobbyists made a push in 2007 to bar former members of Congress, like Daschle, from participating in the non-lobbying coordination of lobbying efforts for a preset "cooling-off period" of two years. The chief sponsor of that effort happened to be Senator Obama. "Obama was the one who really became excited about the whole idea," says Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, a group that helped write the bill. "We lost that on the House side, initially. It was largely the committee chairmen who didn't want that...