http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_43/b4200039780126.htm
Lobbyists: the corporate elite making sure their position is bought!
Now a lawyer at Winston & Strawn, with Goldman Sachs (GS) among his clients, Malyshev says he's more likely these days to encounter a small regiment of people lining up to get into meetings where they hope to influence the biggest rewrite of Wall Street rules since the 1930s. At times the line of lawyers, bank executives, and hedge fund managers stretches out the door of the small waiting room in the commission's black marble lobby
"The number of people that have come in requesting to be exempt from the law or to have the law delayed has literally shocked me," says Bart Chilton, a Democrat who is one of the agency's five commissioners. "A lot of folks are having problems coming to grips with the fact that they do have a new law and will have to change their business models."
Chilton says he found himself confronting the same lobbyist representing three different companies in the space of two weeks. In each meeting, the attorney argued that his client was exempt from the law or that implementation ought to be put off, says Chilton. "The volume and intensity of the lobbying is unprecedented in my experience at the agency."
The bottom line: Congress gave regulators wide discretion to regulate derivatives, causing the CFTC to be besieged by lobbyists
