President Bush today appointed a top industry lobbyist who lobbied on behalf of America's biggest businesses and interest groups as his counselor, replacing Dan Bartlett who left the White House recently.
DaimlerChrysler, Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, SBC Communications, TysonFoods, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Viacom are just some of the clients of Ed Gillespie, who served as the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) between 2003 and 2005.
Enron paid Gillespie's firm Quinn, Gillespie & Associates $700,000 in 2001 alone to lobby on the “California energy crisis” and thwart efforts to re-regulate the Western electricity market through price controls. Before its collapse, the company also funneled money to a Gillespie-run group to buy national television ads promoting the president’s industry-friendly energy plan, according to non-profit organisation Public Citizen
Quinn Gillespie received $820,000 from Microsoft to lobby during negotiations over its antitrust settlement as well as to oppose the use, especially within the government, of “open source” systems such as Linux..
Viacom, the parent company of the CBS and UPN networks, retained Quinn Gillespie two years – and $720,000 – to push for relaxed rules on the number and reach of television stations a single company could own. In June, the Federal Communications Commission
voted to raise the allowable percentage of the nation’s viewers within the reach of a given company’s stations and increased the number of stations a network could own in one city.
Gillespie's firm charged DaimlerChrysler more than $1 million to lobby heavily against any increase in fuel-efficiency standards for gas-guzzling light trucks and SUVs. Gillespie declared, “The Democrats’ approach to energy policy is an attack on our quality of life.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers paid Quinn Gillespie $1.35 million from 2000 to 2002 to lobby against increased oversight of the accounting industry. PricewaterhouseCoopers – which paid a $5 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2002 for repeated accounting irregularities, including improperly auditing millions in fees paid to its own consultants – tried to water down accounting reforms in the wake of an unprecedented wave of corporate fraud.
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