OCCUPY WALL STREET

[greeneyedgrrl]

i believe that nonviolence is the way to go...including non-violent language.

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by greeneyedgrrl

i believe that nonviolence is the way to go...including non-violent language.

I agree completely.

[dykeumentary]

The NYPD used smart tactics if their goal was to reclaim that physical space.
If the goal of OWS is system-wide change, and more participation of everyday people, maybe this eviction will work towards OWS's goals.
I hope it does.

[SoNotHer]

I agree, Dykeumentary. By doing this in the early hours on a Monday with a brief formality of notice, they have created more empathy and outrage. This was not played well, and people will not forget it.

And this forces the movement in a new direction and I believe a better one.

[SoNotHer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/1...c1_lnk1|112574

In an unexpected move, the New York City Police Department descended on Zuccotti Park around 1 a.m. Tuesday morning, proceeding to evict protesters, clear the park and arrest those that stood in their way.

Police told demonstrators that the 2-month-old camp must be temporarily emptied for cleaning, citing "health and fire safety" hazards, and that protesters could either leave on their own volition or stay and be arrested and stripped of their belongings. By 4 a.m., the park was cleared and hundreds of protesters, uncertain of their next move and blocked by police barricades, wandered the financial district.


According to The Associated Press, 70 arrests had already been made.

While police say protesters will be allowed back in the park in the morning, their tents will not, according to an eviction notice handed to occupiers.

"You are required to immediately remove all property, including tents, sleeping bags and tarps from Zuccotti Park. That means you must remove the property now," the notice read. "You will be allowed to return to the park in several hours, when this work is complete. If you decide to return, you will not be permitted to bring your tents, sleeping bags, tarps and similar materials with you."

Although the park was cleared, some protesters did not appear ready to give in to the eviction notice's demands.

"This is a standoff," said James Rose, 39, an artist who had been occupying the park on and off for a month. Rose is a member of the Arts and Culture working group, and had been out for the evening at an Occupy Wall Street arts show offsite. He returned home to find himself locked out by the barricades.

He gestured at a line of roughly 30 cops, setting up a fresh row of metal fences along the side of Cortland Street, one block north of the park. "We're being herded like sheep now," Rose said. "But this is so not over."

Garrett Perkins, 29, standing with two stuffed camping backpacks, said he had been sleeping in Zuccotti when hundreds of cops surrounded the tents. Most protesters did not move, he said, even after the police first announced that the park must be cleared. Then the police began throwing out tents, cuffing occupiers and using pepper spray.

Perkins travelled to Occupy Wall Street from Alaska with a large collection of cold weather gear. When the choice came down to losing his gear or walking, he opted to hold onto his belongings.

"I thought it would be a blow to myself and the movement if I lost all this cold weather gear," Perkins said. "This is a long uphill battle and we're going to need it."

Protesters did not appear ready to give up the fight -- or the occupation of Zuccotti -- despite the setback.

"The movement started at Zuccotti, but it's bigger than Zuccotti," said Jerry Letto, a 24-year-old deliveryman from Brooklyn. Letto said demonstrators would "definitely" return to Zuccotti, although the time frame remained unclear at that time.

"I don't know about that," Billie Greenfield, a 24-year-old standing nearby said. Greenfield wasn't without hope, however. "This will only make us stronger," she said.

Through the night, protesters routinely sang "We Shall Overcome" and chanted "We are the 99 percent." Others beat drums and yelled: "New York, Cairo, Wisconsin, push us down we'll rise again!" They did so under the watchful eye of hundreds of police officers.

Shen Tong, a protester and former leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, tried to calm the growing tension between protesters and police. Addressing a crowd of about a hundred people two blocks from the park, he shouted, and his words were echoed by all those standing near.

"Brothers and sisters of the NYPD who used to think you're not part of this. Tonight, you're a part of this," he said. "You used to think you could just keep your head down and get along, or maybe get ahead, but tonight, we tell you, you are involved!"

Shen said the key to winning the night was to stay mobile. In light of the night's events, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is reportedly planning to address the situation at an 8 a.m. press conference. Demonstrators had previously planned to stage "a block party the 1 percent will never forget" on Wall Street Thursday in commemoration of the Occupy Wall Street's two-month anniversary.

[persiphone]

more on insider trading by our elected officials......


Visa's Courtship of Nancy Pelosi
By Daniel Stone | The Daily Beast – 12 hrs ago


Visa has long bragged about its rewards program for consumers. So when its lucrative swipe fees got caught in the congressional crosshairs a few years back, the credit-card giant developed a special program for then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to feel its influence.

The lobbying campaign, reconstructed by Newsweek through interviews and documents, speaks volumes about the efforts of big business to curry favor, even among perceived enemies. It also shows how such efforts can personally and politically benefit politicians, even ones like Pelosi who set out to suffocate the “culture of corruption” in Washington or ultimately didn’t give Visa what it wanted.

The tale begins in 2007, when the credit-card industry became concerned that the new Democrats who took charge of Congress after the 2006 elections were intent on passing legislation to curtail credit-card swipe fees to vendors, which were worth billions of dollars in revenues in the industry, and to create new protections for consumers.

Visa had never been particularly close to Pelosi, a frequent critic of the financial industry, even though the credit-card giant’s headquarters were in her hometown of San Francisco.

But the army of lobbyists Visa assembled—it had a total of 14 lobbying firms at its disposal—set out to try to woo Pelosi with a strategic campaign, hoping to forestall action on any credit-card legislation until after the 2008 presidential election.

“Was there a concerted effort to press Pelosi? Yes. It was partly that she was speaker. But also that Visa’s based out [in her district], where she’s from. They were under attack. It was the confluence between her position and when she engaged she would be intense,” says a lobbyist directly familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the press about internal strategy. “We were sitting around the table and decided we needed a concerted effort related to Pelosi. We needed a full-court press.”

The effort began in earnest in late 2007. Ogilvy, one of Visa's outside lobbying firms, picked off one of Pelosi’s government-affairs advisers, Dean Aguillen, who had close ties in the speaker’s office. Aguillen quit the speaker’s team and went to Ogilvy in December 2007. By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.

In an interview, Aguillen told Newsweek he worked for Visa on the credit-card-legislation issue and sporadically talked with his former colleagues in Pelosi’s office. “It’s public record that I advocated on behalf of Visa the past few years,” he said. “I didn’t set up a meeting with the speaker directly, but I’ve definitely done some outreach to the House individually. What we did is help Visa build and maintain strong relationships and a strong reputation.”

Aguillen said he didn’t have any lobbying contact the first year after he left Pelosi’s office, but starting in 2009 he did aim to maintain the relationships, and talked about the various issues he was working on.

Asked whether Visa was using his connections for access, he demurred. “This is my first venture into the private sector. I hope that I had done enough that people would find me to be an asset.”

Visa wanted to meet with Pelosi and her top aides to make the case against the swipe fees. That summer Visa’s outgoing CEO, Carl Pascarella, bumped into Pelosi on the street in the San Francisco neighborhood they share, and she arranged for him to contact her Washington office for a meet-and-greet, according to sources families with the encounter.

Around the same time—on July 21, 2008, to be exact—Pelosi’s reelection campaign received a $1,000 donation from Visa’s political-action committee. Two days later, according to Pelosi’s office, the speaker met Pascarella and the incoming Visa chief executive, Joe Saunders, in her Capitol Hill office. The three exchanged pleasantries and no specific legislation was discussed, according to Pelosi’s office.

Aguillen, for his part, also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the first half of 2008.

Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market. The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals. Almost $18 billion was made available in public stock to preselected investors. Paul Pelosi made the cut.

The top financial institution to handle the sale was Wells Fargo Shareholder Services, a bank where Paul Pelosi, a seasoned investor, held an account. Before the IPO, Pelosi received a call from his financial adviser at Wells Fargo alerting him that he had been approved to purchase Visa stock and, considering the public buzz around the stock, recommending he buy, according to Pelosi’s office.

Paul Pelosi initially bought 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. Within a couple of days, the shares' value soared to $64. Paul Pelosi purchased 15,000 more shares over the next three months, at much higher prices. The total quantity was valued as high as $5 million, according to the then-speaker’s financial-disclosure form. In late 2008, when the stock market soured, Pelosi sold 1,000 of the first IPO shares for a meager profit of $2,500 to $5,000, records show. He has kept the other 19,000 shares, which now are valued at $95 each.

Nancy Pelosi’s office denies that the meetings, the lobbying, or her husband’s stock purchase had any influence on her legislative actions. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for the Democratic leader, said Paul Pelosi’s finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman’s legislative work, and she complies with all the legal as well as ethical obligations of her position. He also pointed out that Pelosi has repeatedly advocated for legislation the credit-card industry dislikes.

Several bills affecting credit providers snaked through the House in 2008, including one introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that would have ended the swipe fees, the small percentage that credit companies like Visa charge with every transaction. Another bill by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), affording significant new protection to credit-card holders, passed the House but did not make it through the Senate. Conyers’s legislation passed his House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support on Oct. 3, 2008, the last day lawmakers were in office before leaving to campaign for the election, but was not brought to the floor, which Pelosi controlled as speaker.

Pelosi’s office says she chose not to bring up the swipe-fee bills in 2008 because she did not believe President George W. Bush would sign them into law.

Pelosi tried for consumer protections in 2008, but the next year she put more muscle behind the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, a bill that gave new protections to consumers and was opposed by the credit-card industry. The bill was entirely devoted to preventing consumer exploitation, and swipe fees were not included, a victory of sorts for the industry.

Only after Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois caught momentum with a bill that would crack down on credit-card companies’ fees in 2009 did the provision eventually make it into law as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

When confronted earlier this month at a press conference about the delay in swipe fees, Pelosi said the House waited to act on the swipe fees until “we had a president that could sign the bill.” Her spokesman Hammill says it is preposterous to think Visa’s lobbying or the stock purchases had any influence on the speaker’s legislative actions.

[dykeumentary]

Well, pesky elections might soon be a thing of the past. Imagine the streamlined production of government money into profit -- without having to do any campaign spending! It's happening in Greece and Italy.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/s...4/1?csp=34news

[SoNotHer]

I've just been getting up to speed on this the past couple days. There's a terrific article in the current Newsweek about the intimate relationship between DC and Wall Street and who's getting rich and how. Not good. Thank you for staying on this issue.

Originally Posted by persiphone

more on insider trading by our elected officials......


Visa's Courtship of Nancy Pelosi
By Daniel Stone | The Daily Beast – 12 hrs ago


Visa has long bragged about its rewards program for consumers. So when its lucrative swipe fees got caught in the congressional crosshairs a few years back, the credit-card giant developed a special program for then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to feel its influence.

The lobbying campaign, reconstructed by Newsweek through interviews and documents, speaks volumes about the efforts of big business to curry favor, even among perceived enemies. It also shows how such efforts can personally and politically benefit politicians, even ones like Pelosi who set out to suffocate the “culture of corruption” in Washington or ultimately didn’t give Visa what it wanted.

The tale begins in 2007, when the credit-card industry became concerned that the new Democrats who took charge of Congress after the 2006 elections were intent on passing legislation to curtail credit-card swipe fees to vendors, which were worth billions of dollars in revenues in the industry, and to create new protections for consumers.

Visa had never been particularly close to Pelosi, a frequent critic of the financial industry, even though the credit-card giant’s headquarters were in her hometown of San Francisco.

But the army of lobbyists Visa assembled—it had a total of 14 lobbying firms at its disposal—set out to try to woo Pelosi with a strategic campaign, hoping to forestall action on any credit-card legislation until after the 2008 presidential election.

“Was there a concerted effort to press Pelosi? Yes. It was partly that she was speaker. But also that Visa’s based out [in her district], where she’s from. They were under attack. It was the confluence between her position and when she engaged she would be intense,” says a lobbyist directly familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the press about internal strategy. “We were sitting around the table and decided we needed a concerted effort related to Pelosi. We needed a full-court press.”

The effort began in earnest in late 2007. Ogilvy, one of Visa's outside lobbying firms, picked off one of Pelosi’s government-affairs advisers, Dean Aguillen, who had close ties in the speaker’s office. Aguillen quit the speaker’s team and went to Ogilvy in December 2007. By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.

In an interview, Aguillen told Newsweek he worked for Visa on the credit-card-legislation issue and sporadically talked with his former colleagues in Pelosi’s office. “It’s public record that I advocated on behalf of Visa the past few years,” he said. “I didn’t set up a meeting with the speaker directly, but I’ve definitely done some outreach to the House individually. What we did is help Visa build and maintain strong relationships and a strong reputation.”

Aguillen said he didn’t have any lobbying contact the first year after he left Pelosi’s office, but starting in 2009 he did aim to maintain the relationships, and talked about the various issues he was working on.

Asked whether Visa was using his connections for access, he demurred. “This is my first venture into the private sector. I hope that I had done enough that people would find me to be an asset.”

Visa wanted to meet with Pelosi and her top aides to make the case against the swipe fees. That summer Visa’s outgoing CEO, Carl Pascarella, bumped into Pelosi on the street in the San Francisco neighborhood they share, and she arranged for him to contact her Washington office for a meet-and-greet, according to sources families with the encounter.

Around the same time—on July 21, 2008, to be exact—Pelosi’s reelection campaign received a $1,000 donation from Visa’s political-action committee. Two days later, according to Pelosi’s office, the speaker met Pascarella and the incoming Visa chief executive, Joe Saunders, in her Capitol Hill office. The three exchanged pleasantries and no specific legislation was discussed, according to Pelosi’s office.

Aguillen, for his part, also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the first half of 2008.

Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market. The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals. Almost $18 billion was made available in public stock to preselected investors. Paul Pelosi made the cut.

The top financial institution to handle the sale was Wells Fargo Shareholder Services, a bank where Paul Pelosi, a seasoned investor, held an account. Before the IPO, Pelosi received a call from his financial adviser at Wells Fargo alerting him that he had been approved to purchase Visa stock and, considering the public buzz around the stock, recommending he buy, according to Pelosi’s office.

Paul Pelosi initially bought 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. Within a couple of days, the shares' value soared to $64. Paul Pelosi purchased 15,000 more shares over the next three months, at much higher prices. The total quantity was valued as high as $5 million, according to the then-speaker’s financial-disclosure form. In late 2008, when the stock market soured, Pelosi sold 1,000 of the first IPO shares for a meager profit of $2,500 to $5,000, records show. He has kept the other 19,000 shares, which now are valued at $95 each.

Nancy Pelosi’s office denies that the meetings, the lobbying, or her husband’s stock purchase had any influence on her legislative actions. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for the Democratic leader, said Paul Pelosi’s finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman’s legislative work, and she complies with all the legal as well as ethical obligations of her position. He also pointed out that Pelosi has repeatedly advocated for legislation the credit-card industry dislikes.

Several bills affecting credit providers snaked through the House in 2008, including one introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that would have ended the swipe fees, the small percentage that credit companies like Visa charge with every transaction. Another bill by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), affording significant new protection to credit-card holders, passed the House but did not make it through the Senate. Conyers’s legislation passed his House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support on Oct. 3, 2008, the last day lawmakers were in office before leaving to campaign for the election, but was not brought to the floor, which Pelosi controlled as speaker.

Pelosi’s office says she chose not to bring up the swipe-fee bills in 2008 because she did not believe President George W. Bush would sign them into law.

Pelosi tried for consumer protections in 2008, but the next year she put more muscle behind the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, a bill that gave new protections to consumers and was opposed by the credit-card industry. The bill was entirely devoted to preventing consumer exploitation, and swipe fees were not included, a victory of sorts for the industry.

Only after Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois caught momentum with a bill that would crack down on credit-card companies’ fees in 2009 did the provision eventually make it into law as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

When confronted earlier this month at a press conference about the delay in swipe fees, Pelosi said the House waited to act on the swipe fees until “we had a president that could sign the bill.” Her spokesman Hammill says it is preposterous to think Visa’s lobbying or the stock purchases had any influence on the speaker’s legislative actions.

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by persiphone

more on insider trading by our elected officials......


Visa's Courtship of Nancy Pelosi
By Daniel Stone | The Daily Beast – 12 hrs ago


Visa has long bragged about its rewards program for consumers. So when its lucrative swipe fees got caught in the congressional crosshairs a few years back, the credit-card giant developed a special program for then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to feel its influence.

The lobbying campaign, reconstructed by Newsweek through interviews and documents, speaks volumes about the efforts of big business to curry favor, even among perceived enemies. It also shows how such efforts can personally and politically benefit politicians, even ones like Pelosi who set out to suffocate the “culture of corruption” in Washington or ultimately didn’t give Visa what it wanted.

The tale begins in 2007, when the credit-card industry became concerned that the new Democrats who took charge of Congress after the 2006 elections were intent on passing legislation to curtail credit-card swipe fees to vendors, which were worth billions of dollars in revenues in the industry, and to create new protections for consumers.

Visa had never been particularly close to Pelosi, a frequent critic of the financial industry, even though the credit-card giant’s headquarters were in her hometown of San Francisco.

But the army of lobbyists Visa assembled—it had a total of 14 lobbying firms at its disposal—set out to try to woo Pelosi with a strategic campaign, hoping to forestall action on any credit-card legislation until after the 2008 presidential election.

“Was there a concerted effort to press Pelosi? Yes. It was partly that she was speaker. But also that Visa’s based out [in her district], where she’s from. They were under attack. It was the confluence between her position and when she engaged she would be intense,” says a lobbyist directly familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the press about internal strategy. “We were sitting around the table and decided we needed a concerted effort related to Pelosi. We needed a full-court press.”

The effort began in earnest in late 2007. Ogilvy, one of Visa's outside lobbying firms, picked off one of Pelosi’s government-affairs advisers, Dean Aguillen, who had close ties in the speaker’s office. Aguillen quit the speaker’s team and went to Ogilvy in December 2007. By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.

In an interview, Aguillen told Newsweek he worked for Visa on the credit-card-legislation issue and sporadically talked with his former colleagues in Pelosi’s office. “It’s public record that I advocated on behalf of Visa the past few years,” he said. “I didn’t set up a meeting with the speaker directly, but I’ve definitely done some outreach to the House individually. What we did is help Visa build and maintain strong relationships and a strong reputation.”

Aguillen said he didn’t have any lobbying contact the first year after he left Pelosi’s office, but starting in 2009 he did aim to maintain the relationships, and talked about the various issues he was working on.

Asked whether Visa was using his connections for access, he demurred. “This is my first venture into the private sector. I hope that I had done enough that people would find me to be an asset.”

Visa wanted to meet with Pelosi and her top aides to make the case against the swipe fees. That summer Visa’s outgoing CEO, Carl Pascarella, bumped into Pelosi on the street in the San Francisco neighborhood they share, and she arranged for him to contact her Washington office for a meet-and-greet, according to sources families with the encounter.

Around the same time—on July 21, 2008, to be exact—Pelosi’s reelection campaign received a $1,000 donation from Visa’s political-action committee. Two days later, according to Pelosi’s office, the speaker met Pascarella and the incoming Visa chief executive, Joe Saunders, in her Capitol Hill office. The three exchanged pleasantries and no specific legislation was discussed, according to Pelosi’s office.

Aguillen, for his part, also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the first half of 2008.

Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market. The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals. Almost $18 billion was made available in public stock to preselected investors. Paul Pelosi made the cut.

The top financial institution to handle the sale was Wells Fargo Shareholder Services, a bank where Paul Pelosi, a seasoned investor, held an account. Before the IPO, Pelosi received a call from his financial adviser at Wells Fargo alerting him that he had been approved to purchase Visa stock and, considering the public buzz around the stock, recommending he buy, according to Pelosi’s office.

Paul Pelosi initially bought 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. Within a couple of days, the shares' value soared to $64. Paul Pelosi purchased 15,000 more shares over the next three months, at much higher prices. The total quantity was valued as high as $5 million, according to the then-speaker’s financial-disclosure form. In late 2008, when the stock market soured, Pelosi sold 1,000 of the first IPO shares for a meager profit of $2,500 to $5,000, records show. He has kept the other 19,000 shares, which now are valued at $95 each.

Nancy Pelosi’s office denies that the meetings, the lobbying, or her husband’s stock purchase had any influence on her legislative actions. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for the Democratic leader, said Paul Pelosi’s finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman’s legislative work, and she complies with all the legal as well as ethical obligations of her position. He also pointed out that Pelosi has repeatedly advocated for legislation the credit-card industry dislikes.

Several bills affecting credit providers snaked through the House in 2008, including one introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that would have ended the swipe fees, the small percentage that credit companies like Visa charge with every transaction. Another bill by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), affording significant new protection to credit-card holders, passed the House but did not make it through the Senate. Conyers’s legislation passed his House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support on Oct. 3, 2008, the last day lawmakers were in office before leaving to campaign for the election, but was not brought to the floor, which Pelosi controlled as speaker.

Pelosi’s office says she chose not to bring up the swipe-fee bills in 2008 because she did not believe President George W. Bush would sign them into law.

Pelosi tried for consumer protections in 2008, but the next year she put more muscle behind the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, a bill that gave new protections to consumers and was opposed by the credit-card industry. The bill was entirely devoted to preventing consumer exploitation, and swipe fees were not included, a victory of sorts for the industry.

Only after Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois caught momentum with a bill that would crack down on credit-card companies’ fees in 2009 did the provision eventually make it into law as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

When confronted earlier this month at a press conference about the delay in swipe fees, Pelosi said the House waited to act on the swipe fees until “we had a president that could sign the bill.” Her spokesman Hammill says it is preposterous to think Visa’s lobbying or the stock purchases had any influence on the speaker’s legislative actions.

I saw the 60 minutes segment about this on Sunday. It was really well produced and I am surprised CBS and it's corporate owners allowed it to air.