McCain's campaign co-chair also tied to disgraced Stephen Payne

Another close political ally of John McCain is listed as a member of the executive team of disgraced lobbyist Stephen Payne's international petro-lobbying venture.

Fred Zeidman, a McCain campaign co-chair and on of the candidate's top fundraisers, is listed as a member of the advisory board of Worldwide Strategic Energy in a pre-prospectus memo circulated in 2007. [Click on thumbnail to view his bio from the WSE pre-prospectus.]

Zeidman is an elite Bush fundraiser. Like Stephen Payne and Jack Abramoff, Zeidman was a Bush Pioneer in 2004. Zeidman apparently improved over his 2000 performance where he didn't quite raise the $100,000 required for full-fledged Pioneer status.

Bush appointed him to head the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2002 and reappointed him in 2007. Ziedman has accompanied the president abroad on official trips. In 2003, he accompanied Tom DeLay to Israel.

In 2006, Bush appointed Fred's son Jay Zeidman to the post of White House Liaison to the Jewish Community. Zeidman fils left that position in 2007 for a stint with the McCain campaign.

Zeidman pere initially backed Rudy Giuliani, now of Bracewell Guiliani (WSE's official law firm). He later switched his allegiance to McCain. Now he co-chairs the GOP's 2008 Victory Jewish Coalition with Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va).

Zeidman is senior director of government affairs at Jack Abramoff's old law firm, Greenberg Traurig. Abramoff resigned as director of government affairs in 2004 and Zeidman joined the firm shortly thereafter. Oddly, a search of Open Secrets suggests that Zeidman had never registered to lobby the federal government before he joined Greenberg Traurig's Washington practice.

One of Worldwide Strategic Energy's main business projects is to obtain oil and gas leases in near the Caspian Sea. McCain adviser Randy Scheuneman lobbied for the Caspian Alliance, a WSE subsidiary. It just so happens that Zeidman was recently appointed to the board of Transmeridian Exploration Incorporated dedicated to oil and gas exploration in the Caspian region. TMEI's headquarters are located in the same Houston building as WSE's headquarters at 5847 San Felipe Plaza.

[Original reporting, please credit Lindsay Beyerstein.]

Comments

[john]

Check out this hopeful Obama video from Maria Muldaur’s “Yes We Can!” Tons of friends, too, like Amma, Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, Holly Near, Phoebe Snow, Marianne Williamson, and more.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZLVXxGMG3Fw

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[TomK]

You must have taken the red pill.

How deep will this rabbit hole go?

[Daniel]

Beyerstein,

Couldn't your skill and drive to uncover malfeasance and corruption be put to better use than to worry about the trivial political hijinks of a third rate fundraiser?

Right under your nose (I presume you live in New York) is the mother of all corruption scandals: the most outrageous exploitation of the public fisc for private personal gain and protection that the world has probably ever seen. I'm talking about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, hedge funds, private equity funds and on and on and on. These banks and funds made zero money over the past 5 years, nothing, they just made paper entries in their accounting systems. And from these conjured up paper profits senior executives and plenty of not-so-senior executives paid themselves anywhere from 100s of thousands to tens of millions of dollars per year in real money, all the while confident that when the gig was up the American taxpayer would pay the price for these reckless and outrageous practices. Confident also that governmental authorities would never come after them, either civilly or criminally. And why do these bastards feel so secure? Because they have paid off all the friggin politicians, Democrats more so than Republicans even. Yes, Democrats, Liberals, bought and owned by the banking industry. Amongst others, senators Schumer, Dodd and Clinton are owned by the banking, hedge fund and private equity industry. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic party. This should not be surprising; for money-making roles these banks recruit almost exclusively from "elite" schools, student bodies of which are overwhelming liberal. Oh these bankers are good liberals; they agree with you on all the soft-headed liberal issues (race, gender, guilt, etc...), they just like money, a lot of money, as much as any wingnut conservative does.

Now you are a self-described liberal, so I shouldn't expect you to get worked up about this corruption. Now the fact that a moron named Zoe Cruz was passed over for CEO of Morgan Stanley, that is something to get worked up about, but the fact that she was to a great degree responsible for running the company onto the rocks - all the while pocketing tens of millions of dollars per year - that is just toooo boring. Now, I am not putting the blame for this mess on women, generally. Women are under-represented in the ranks of Wall Street sleaze (thank God for that), but I do correctly use this as an example of what preoccupies liberals. Trivia.

So, get your head out of trivia, prophesize with your pen, you will not get such and opportunity again. There is a lot of sleaze and corruption in the banking industry that leads right to the Democratic party. A lot. Follow the money. She/He who takes is owned.

[TB]

Anyway ... back to the topic at hand, it seems that the McCain organization is pretty thoroughly corrupt organization.

[SanderO]

Of course the issue that Daniel raises is the elephant in the room that no one wants to see and 99.9% of Americans including pols don't have a clue about: how the banking and financial "industry" is a huge ponzi scheme which creates wealth by using "money as dent".

We take for granted that the money we spend, save (?), invest and so forth represents "something", but it really doesn't. It is simply created and pushed into the economy and the bankers get their hands on MOST of it, and "sell" it to the rest of us, and then "bundle" these imaginary "certificates" of "value" and trade them as if they were gemstones, or stamps, or pigs. They are worth absolutely nothing and the emperor has no clothes.

Why is this allowed to go on? Well the answer is that "we" accept this ridiculous "currency" and the wealthy ones, use it to acquire EVERYTHING and pay it to us as "wages" so we can buy "things" and chase the dream of happiness to be found in consumerism and property. We need money to survive now so we are enslaved to this entire system.

The guys at the top create false demand for their fiat "money" and instruments and suck us dry by fees and interests.

The gov now funnels money to corporations who are owned by the same wealthy class for everything they consume.

We are the workers as in Metropolis and only the rare person who has "something" can cash out. The rest of us are the slaves in this system.

WAKE UP.

[Benjy]

Good Day. My home is not a place, it is people.
I am from Monaco and too poorly know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "I amazed to see that even reuters and cnn realize this is a rally built on cheap money provided by the fed, just as the housing bubble was built on cheap money provided by the fed."

Regards :-( Benjy.