http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/17/silverglate-three-felonies-book/print
The wrong arm of the law
A new book reveals how US federal prosecutors twist the law to criminalise legal activities, with connivence from the media
Dan Kennedy
November 2009 19.30 GMT
Sharp-elbowed business executives and grasping politicians may not be especially popular figures within the American iconography. But membership in either of those classes is not a federal crime.
Except when it is.
In an important new book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, Boston civil-rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate argues that over the past several decades the federal government, relying on vague, dangerously elastic statutes, has criminalised a whole range of activities. The result, Silverglate contends, is that people are regularly sent to prison for crimes they hadn't even known they'd committed.
"Wrongful prosecution of innocent conduct that is twisted into a felony charge has wrecked many an innocent life and career. Whole families have been devastated, as have myriad relationships and entire companies," writes Silverglate, a friend as well as an occasional collaborator.
Skeptical? Consider three prominent cases ripped from recent headlines:
• Jurors in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn, New York, took just nine hours to acquit Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin of conspiracy and fraud charges related to the collapse of two hedge funds, a disaster that wiped out $1.6 billion in assets. It seems there was a problem: "It wasn't clear that there was a crime," Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University Law School, told Bloomberg. Oh, that. Well, never mind, and double jeopardy be damned. Prosecutors now say they'll bring a wire-fraud charge against the two.
• The latest poster boy for financial shenanigans is Raj Rajaratnam, who manages a hedge fund called Galleon Group and who's been charged with insider trading. Rajaratnam actually lost money on those trades, which makes him either comically inept or innocent. The latter might be a good bet. As the New York Times put it: "Mr Rajaratnam and Galleon trade assets rapidly, gather information rapaciously and focus on short-term gains. But those tactics are not illegal."
• Sal DiMasi, a former speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, is fighting a federal indictment related to political favors he received on the grounds that the federal "honest services fraud" law he's accused of violating is "unconstitutionally vague", according to the Boston Globe. (Silverglate notes that no less an authority than supreme-court justice Antonin Scalia has worried that the "honest services" law could be used to criminalise just about anything, right down to "a mayor's attempt to use the prestige of his office to obtain a restaurant table without a reservation.") First, though, DiMasi must hang on to his lawyer: the feds have reportedly tried to deny DiMasi the counsel of his choice through a dubious conflict-of-interest charge and by attempting to persuade state officials to strip DiMasi of his pension.
According to Silverglate, such aggressive prosecutorial conduct – or, rather, misconduct – is nothing new. Indeed, DiMasi is the third consecutive Massachusetts House speaker to be targeted by the feds. His immediate predecessor, Tom Finneran, Silverglate writes, was convicted of a charge related to his testimony in a civil suit involving redistricting, in which an inconsequential bit of witness-stand gamesmanship was transformed into something akin to perjury. Finneran is now a radio talk-show host, and not a very good one.
Silverglate traces these practices back a half-century, to a time when federal prosecutors began departing from the common-law tradition that you can't convict someone of a crime unless there is criminal intent. The danger, warned supreme-court justice Robert Jackson in 1952, was that prosecutors would target a person and then try to find a law he may have broken – not a difficult task, he noted, given the "great assortment of crimes" on the books.
Such targeting is compounded, Silverglate argues, by the practice of pressuring lesser targets to plead guilty and rat out higher-ups, knowing full well that the more florid the tale of wrongdoing, the more likely they are to receive a lesser sentence. He quotes his friend Alan Dershowitz, a well-known Harvard Law School professor, as saying that such witnesses are taught not only to "sing" but also to "compose".
Silverglate's victims range from doctors to artists. Mainly, though, his cavalcade of the wrongly prosecuted are unsympathetic characters from the world of business – Reagan-era financial wizard Michael Milken, Enron major domos Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, and Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone among them. By the time Silverglate is through, you are convinced that not only did they commit no crimes, but that their bad-boy images are largely a creation of the media, which eagerly passed along leaks from federal prosecutors.
In fact, Silverglate makes a powerful argument that journalists, far from acting as an independent check on government, all too often are virtual collaborators in abusive law enforcement.
"Reporters are too willing to sit down with their prosecutorial sources to learn about the evil-doers in the dock, without doing the hard work of understanding why and how the government claims their conduct broke the law, or even why and how they are supposedly bad people," Silverglate writes.
The real cause of Wall Street's collapse wasn't conduct that was illegal, but, rather, conduct that was legal. With the financial markets rebounding even as unemployment continues to rise, and with Congress shying away from even the timid reforms proposed by the Obama administration, the public is demanding the legal equivalent of blood.
Silverglate's cautionary tale is a worthwhile counterweight to that justifiable but misplaced anger.
Pulling Back the Wizards' Curtains
Thursday, November 19, 2009
CLASS WAR 101: MEET THE REPTILES (WHO ARE MAKING MEAT OUT OF YOU)
http://exiledonline.com/class-war-101-meet-the-reptiles-who-are-making-meat-out-of-you/
MARCH 31, 2009
CLASS WAR 101: MEET THE REPTILES (WHO ARE MAKING MEAT OUT OF YOU)
By Mark Ames
(This article was first published last week on Playboy.com)
America is now in a state of bloodlust, following the shocking realization that there are bad people at the top of our economic food chain. We knew there were some bad apples out there, but AIG’s $450 million bonus swindle simply defies everything we assumed about the American character, particularly the character of our best and brightest, our All-Star Success Stories.
It was one thing to bail out their banks and insurance companies—at least our tax dollars weren’t being wired directly to specific people with names and faces, but rather to “institutions,” which makes it a little more palatable. But now, with the AIG scandal, there are real people stuffing their pockets with money looted from us. It suggests that they have no conscience. That they learned nothing. That, in fact, they didn’t give a fuck about our bailout on any emotional grounds, except as it presented a new feeding opportunity. Despite how it works in the movies, we haven’t been brought closer together—we, the common folk taxpayers, and they, the super-wealthy villains we bailed out. And this is what’s so enraging and humiliating: We were denied that cinematic transformation of character that Americans have been brainwashed to expect from our billionaire CEOs with their hardened hearts-of-gold—think Oscar Schindler’s climactic anti-greed speech, or Mister Magoo throwing coins out the window in the cartoon version of A Christmas Carol.
The shock we’re feeling today is like the shock and rage a wife feels after her husband is arrested on 152 counts of child molestation spanning three decades. How could we not know, when it’s been going on every day, every year, right in front of us?
If we’d cared to look around us at any time since the Reagan Revolution, we’d realize that the CEOs, billionaires and finance stars are behaving no differently today than they have been for nearly three decades. When we look back, what will pain us most is the way we admired the billionaires even as they brought about our ruin, turning them into TV celebrities and magazine-cover heroes, worshipping them like rock stars right up to the end.
A perfect example of the kind of person who benefited from the Reagan Revolution is Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap, a corporate superstar during the peak Clinton years, when Reaganomics accelerated under the guiding hands of Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. It was during Clinton’s centrist pro-business presidency that innovations like the like mass-layoff (rebranded as “downsizing”) became a regular feature of economicbooms, rather than of economic busts, as they had been in the past. Layoffs expanded right with the economy for the simple reason that each mass firing freed up millions or billions of dollars that had gone to workers, but now could be divided up between executives and major shareholders. The problem was finding people cold-blooded enough to do the job—which is to say, there was no problem whatsoever. As Dunlap himself boasted in a 1998 interview with Fortune magazine, “Mickey Mouse could do the cost cutting.”
By that time, he was already a celebrity with a nine-figure net worth. It all started back in 1994, when Al Dunlap was named CEO of Scott Paper. His first move was to fire nearly one-third of the workforce, or 11,200 workers. This cheered investors, who piled in, driving Scott Paper’s stock up by 225 percent. By reclaiming the sum total of whatever 11,200 workers earned and redistributing it to the shareholders and executives, Dunlap earned himself a $100 million payout for 19 months of “Mickey Mouse” chainsaw duty.
Mutual fund billionaire Michael Price was so impressed that in 1996 he brought Dunlap in to “restructure” one of his portfolio investments, the ailing Sunbeam Enterprises. The mere announcement that Dunlap would take his chainsaw onto Sunbeam’s factory floor and massacre all those payroll-sucking employees caused Sunbeam’s stock to rise 60 percent as portfolio investors rushed to get a chunk of the promised loot. And Chainsaw Al didn’t disappoint: as soon as he had an office, he fired 6,000 Sunbeam employees, or half the work force. Investors roared in approval, driving the stock straight up for four months.
But in a now-familiar plot-twist that has repeated itself over the past 30 years, it turned out that Dunlap wasn’t the great Rand-inspired corporate innovator that he and the media made him out to be. Instead, his “success” looks to have from the oldest trick in town: cooking the books. When the shit hit the fan, he was fired, and sued. According to an SEC lawsuit filed against Dunlap, he led a team that:
“employed a laundry list of fraudulent techniques to falsely give the picture of a successful turnaround, falsely raising results, in an attempt to sell the company at an inflated price.”
Sunbeam filed for bankruptcy and shareholders lost $4.4 billion in value. Even though Dunlap was fired from the company he destroyed, he still walked away with at least $16 million. The SEC looked at all this destruction, and decided to punish him with a $500,000 fine. When you consider that he’d already netted at least $116 million in the span of a few years, a half-million dollar “punishment” for all that destruction wasn’t even so much as a slap on the wrist. Moreover, the settlement allowed Dunlap to avoid having to admit wrongdoing.
This same arc has been repeated all over the American economy—what we once thought were isolated cases turned out to be a pattern, and the pattern repeated so much up down corporate America that it finally became clear: These things are the rule. No wonder the SEC never came down hard on anyone: it would have meant shutting down the entire economy and starting from scratch.
In the past, when downsizings and payouts happened, they were seen as a necessary evil in the overall march to a free-market utopia. Now we understand that what really happened wasn’t as complicated or theoretical as it was made out to be. It was a straight-forward transfer of wealth out of the pockets of, say, 11,200 employees at Scott Paper into the pockets of Wall Street bankers and their CEO henchmen. No matter how many words like “efficiency” and “restructuring” you gloss it with, it’s still taking money that formerly went into one group’s pocket, and giving to another, much smaller group.
What’s so strange, looking back, isn’t just the blatant, shameless plundering of thousands of American families for a few individual’s excessive profit, but the way we all adored them while they were in mid-plunder. Just look again at Al Dunlap: he didn’t even try to pretend he was likeable or even human, but still we were licking his boots. As Chainsaw Al himself boasted to the New York Daily News back in 1996, when asked about how he could pocket so much money while destroying so many employees’ lives,
“Did I earn it? Damn right I did!… I’m a superstar in my field, much like Michael Jordan in basketball and Bruce Springsteen . . . “
Looking back, the Daily News’ question to Dunlap is absurd. It’s like asking a crocodile how he could possibly eat a baby wildebeest when its mother is right there on the riverbank watching. “I earned it! Damn right!” is exactly what the croc would answer.
And Dunlap was right, too: we made him a superstar. He didn’t just get away with it, he was a hero for doing what none of us had the guts (or conscience) to do. As the Daily News itself noted, “When he fires thousands of workers, he boasts about it.” You might expect someone who caused as much destruction as Al Dunlap would want to keep a low profile, if not out of a guilty conscience then at least out of a fear that a destroyed worker might hunt him down and get some payback. In the old days that’s what they did. What held those workers back from going to a Dunlap book signing and exacting some revenge? Why didn’t a single person ever attack him?
Dunlap at one of his book signings, not even pretending to worry that one of his adoring fans might be out to get him.
It just wasn’t considered. Not until two weeks ago, when AIG’s Financial Products division received so many death threats and hate emails that they hired armed security guards to protect them from potential revenge attacks.
And yet, there’s a silver lining: The government is finally being forced to act on the taxpayer’s behalf, and make a serious attempt to recover the millions in bonus money from the AIG looters.
This is a class war, in case you didn’t know. On one side are the reptiles like Dunlap, AIG, and so on; on the other side, the humans, us. We’re at a huge disadvantage because, like in Starship Troopers, we’re saddled with a conscience and with fear, and the reptile-plutocrats aren’t. They’re not afraid of shame or fines; but they want to live, as all life forms do. That’s why death threats are bringing real results: Death threats work when you’re dealing with reptiles like AIG’s financial products division. To see what I mean, let’s go back again to the example of Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap:
In 1967, unions were much stronger, income disparities were much narrower, and Americans didn’t culture-hump their bosses. Back then, Al Dunlap tried to apply his “chainsaw” to a company called Sterling Pulp & Paper. He proposed mass firings of its unionized workforce to bring down costs and boost the owners’ share. But Sterling’s 1967 workers weren’t like Sunbeam’s or Scott Paper’s in the 1990s. They didn’t roll over and accept the downsizing with a sullen grumble. Instead, to quote from Dunlap’s own book, “There were also physical threats of violence. We received anonymous calls and letters from nuts who said they were going to blow up my car or shoot me in the parking lot.” It worked: Dunlap caved in to the “nuts,” the workers weren’t downsized, and Dunlap eventually was forced to retreat. (A biographical note: according to the book Testosterone, Inc., Dunlap’s first wife divorced him on grounds of “extreme cruelty” after he allegedly took a knife to her and said, “I’ve always wondered what human flesh tastes like.”)
But America was a different country back then. We weren’t in awe of the CEO class, and they were kept in check. In 1978, American CEOs made more than 30 times the average salary of their company’s employees; by the early 2000s, CEOs made more than 500 times the average salary of their employees. Workers weren’t losing just a portion of the wealth, but also their pensions, health care, vacation time and job security.
Over the past few months, with the repetition of scandals and villains—whose names are different but whose machinations are all roughly the same—we’re starting to understand that people like Al Dunlap weren’t the aberrations we hoped they were. We see a similar modus operandi at work with Lehman’s Dick Fuld, with Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, with the Countrywide execs (who’ve bounced back recently with a new scheme to profit off the misery of Americans), with Washington Mutual’s ex-CEO Kerry Killinger, with Bernie Madoff, and now with AIG’s derivatives traders. They may not be as crude and boastful as Dunlap, but they were far more successful at plunder than he was. The really scary thing is that pretty much everywhere you see a “success story” in corporate America or Wall Street, you’ll find a variation on the “Chainsaw” Dunlap story: plunder, looting, destruction—the reptiles versus the humanoids.
A couple of weeks ago, while researching for an article on the shooting spree in southern Alabama that left 11 people dead, I came across a variation of the Dunlap Plunder in an unlikely place: Pilgrim’s Pride chicken, the largest chicken processor in the world. I looked into Pilgrim’s Pride because the company was high on the shooter’s alleged “hit list.” At the top of his grievances: he and his mother had both filed lawsuits against Pilgrim’s Pride in 2006 claiming they’d been cheated out of their wages. They weren’t the only ones: A class-action lawsuit filed by over 10,000 employees charged the Pilgrim’s Pride with denying payment for overtime work, and the U.S. Labor department agreed. In 2007, the US Labor Department slapped a paltry $3 million fine on Pilgrim’s Pride for illegally undercounting work hours.
It gets worse: Pilgrim’s Pride’s founder Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim overleveraged the company in 2006, the year everyone was overleveraging, in order to acquire rivals and overtake Tyson as the world’s number one chicken producer. He achieved his goal, and assured shareholders it was a wise move; but that’s when the company started getting sued for shaving employees’ salaries, which is another way of saying transferring money from the workers to the owners. Last year, shareholders filed suit against Pilgrim’s Pride, charging securities fraud. By December, the company declared bankruptcy, thereby protecting the billionaire Pilgrim family from its creditors and aggrieved workers and shareholders.
In short: wealth transferred from the pockets of local fireman, police, teachers and utilities into the pockets of the Pilgrim family.
But supposedly there’s nothing we can do. Like AIG, Pilgrim’s Pride is holding a proverbial gun to the American government’s head: if it goes into Chapter 7 and collapses, then as bad as things are now, it could get much worse, with its 50,000 employees facing layoffs and dozens of factories facing closure. As a result, the USDA announced that we, the taxpayers, will spend tens of millions to buy Pilgrim’s Pride chicken. Meanwhile, Pilgrim’s Pride responded by shutting down three plants anyway, and the bankruptcy judge has allowed former executives of Pilgrim to be rehired as “consultants” on company retainer.
Amid all of this, the man who went on his shooting rampage a couple weeks ago, Michael McLendon, appears to have been set off by a decision by Pilgrim’s Pride to suspend his 53-year-old mother from her factory job due to a dispute over how she counted her work hours—the same dispute that Pilgrim has been fighting and losing the past few years. You would think they wouldn’t do something as brash as suspend an employee over a work-time related dispute, not during a lawsuit, not during bankruptcy, not now with Obama in power. Right? But they did.
The new Florida State University “Albert Dunlap Student Success Center” was inaugurated last September, when the financial crisis hit. Dunlap put up $5 million, and the state put up the other $8.5 million or so. Dunlap was awarded an honorary degree in human dissection, before slithering back into his swamp-lair in the Everglades.
Which brings me back to the original point of this article, which is to say that we’ve finally learned our bitter Brady Bunch lesson: The economic elite of this country is made up of people whose exterior features look human, but whose brains are reptilian.
That’s why AIG’s behavior, and all the rest of them, makes so much sense—both their bottomless appetite for plunder in the face of no resistance, and the way they have released the loot from their jaws and scrambled away to the muddy river bottom at the first sign of serious threats from the humans they’ve been feeding on. They’ll retreat for awhile, but in the end, a croc’s got to eat, and his idea of eating isn’t our idea of eating.
Things in this country could get very strange and very hardcore. Stay tuned.
MARCH 31, 2009
CLASS WAR 101: MEET THE REPTILES (WHO ARE MAKING MEAT OUT OF YOU)
By Mark Ames
(This article was first published last week on Playboy.com)
America is now in a state of bloodlust, following the shocking realization that there are bad people at the top of our economic food chain. We knew there were some bad apples out there, but AIG’s $450 million bonus swindle simply defies everything we assumed about the American character, particularly the character of our best and brightest, our All-Star Success Stories.
It was one thing to bail out their banks and insurance companies—at least our tax dollars weren’t being wired directly to specific people with names and faces, but rather to “institutions,” which makes it a little more palatable. But now, with the AIG scandal, there are real people stuffing their pockets with money looted from us. It suggests that they have no conscience. That they learned nothing. That, in fact, they didn’t give a fuck about our bailout on any emotional grounds, except as it presented a new feeding opportunity. Despite how it works in the movies, we haven’t been brought closer together—we, the common folk taxpayers, and they, the super-wealthy villains we bailed out. And this is what’s so enraging and humiliating: We were denied that cinematic transformation of character that Americans have been brainwashed to expect from our billionaire CEOs with their hardened hearts-of-gold—think Oscar Schindler’s climactic anti-greed speech, or Mister Magoo throwing coins out the window in the cartoon version of A Christmas Carol.
The shock we’re feeling today is like the shock and rage a wife feels after her husband is arrested on 152 counts of child molestation spanning three decades. How could we not know, when it’s been going on every day, every year, right in front of us?
If we’d cared to look around us at any time since the Reagan Revolution, we’d realize that the CEOs, billionaires and finance stars are behaving no differently today than they have been for nearly three decades. When we look back, what will pain us most is the way we admired the billionaires even as they brought about our ruin, turning them into TV celebrities and magazine-cover heroes, worshipping them like rock stars right up to the end.
A perfect example of the kind of person who benefited from the Reagan Revolution is Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap, a corporate superstar during the peak Clinton years, when Reaganomics accelerated under the guiding hands of Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. It was during Clinton’s centrist pro-business presidency that innovations like the like mass-layoff (rebranded as “downsizing”) became a regular feature of economicbooms, rather than of economic busts, as they had been in the past. Layoffs expanded right with the economy for the simple reason that each mass firing freed up millions or billions of dollars that had gone to workers, but now could be divided up between executives and major shareholders. The problem was finding people cold-blooded enough to do the job—which is to say, there was no problem whatsoever. As Dunlap himself boasted in a 1998 interview with Fortune magazine, “Mickey Mouse could do the cost cutting.”
By that time, he was already a celebrity with a nine-figure net worth. It all started back in 1994, when Al Dunlap was named CEO of Scott Paper. His first move was to fire nearly one-third of the workforce, or 11,200 workers. This cheered investors, who piled in, driving Scott Paper’s stock up by 225 percent. By reclaiming the sum total of whatever 11,200 workers earned and redistributing it to the shareholders and executives, Dunlap earned himself a $100 million payout for 19 months of “Mickey Mouse” chainsaw duty.
Mutual fund billionaire Michael Price was so impressed that in 1996 he brought Dunlap in to “restructure” one of his portfolio investments, the ailing Sunbeam Enterprises. The mere announcement that Dunlap would take his chainsaw onto Sunbeam’s factory floor and massacre all those payroll-sucking employees caused Sunbeam’s stock to rise 60 percent as portfolio investors rushed to get a chunk of the promised loot. And Chainsaw Al didn’t disappoint: as soon as he had an office, he fired 6,000 Sunbeam employees, or half the work force. Investors roared in approval, driving the stock straight up for four months.
But in a now-familiar plot-twist that has repeated itself over the past 30 years, it turned out that Dunlap wasn’t the great Rand-inspired corporate innovator that he and the media made him out to be. Instead, his “success” looks to have from the oldest trick in town: cooking the books. When the shit hit the fan, he was fired, and sued. According to an SEC lawsuit filed against Dunlap, he led a team that:
“employed a laundry list of fraudulent techniques to falsely give the picture of a successful turnaround, falsely raising results, in an attempt to sell the company at an inflated price.”
Sunbeam filed for bankruptcy and shareholders lost $4.4 billion in value. Even though Dunlap was fired from the company he destroyed, he still walked away with at least $16 million. The SEC looked at all this destruction, and decided to punish him with a $500,000 fine. When you consider that he’d already netted at least $116 million in the span of a few years, a half-million dollar “punishment” for all that destruction wasn’t even so much as a slap on the wrist. Moreover, the settlement allowed Dunlap to avoid having to admit wrongdoing.
This same arc has been repeated all over the American economy—what we once thought were isolated cases turned out to be a pattern, and the pattern repeated so much up down corporate America that it finally became clear: These things are the rule. No wonder the SEC never came down hard on anyone: it would have meant shutting down the entire economy and starting from scratch.
In the past, when downsizings and payouts happened, they were seen as a necessary evil in the overall march to a free-market utopia. Now we understand that what really happened wasn’t as complicated or theoretical as it was made out to be. It was a straight-forward transfer of wealth out of the pockets of, say, 11,200 employees at Scott Paper into the pockets of Wall Street bankers and their CEO henchmen. No matter how many words like “efficiency” and “restructuring” you gloss it with, it’s still taking money that formerly went into one group’s pocket, and giving to another, much smaller group.
What’s so strange, looking back, isn’t just the blatant, shameless plundering of thousands of American families for a few individual’s excessive profit, but the way we all adored them while they were in mid-plunder. Just look again at Al Dunlap: he didn’t even try to pretend he was likeable or even human, but still we were licking his boots. As Chainsaw Al himself boasted to the New York Daily News back in 1996, when asked about how he could pocket so much money while destroying so many employees’ lives,
“Did I earn it? Damn right I did!… I’m a superstar in my field, much like Michael Jordan in basketball and Bruce Springsteen . . . “
Looking back, the Daily News’ question to Dunlap is absurd. It’s like asking a crocodile how he could possibly eat a baby wildebeest when its mother is right there on the riverbank watching. “I earned it! Damn right!” is exactly what the croc would answer.
And Dunlap was right, too: we made him a superstar. He didn’t just get away with it, he was a hero for doing what none of us had the guts (or conscience) to do. As the Daily News itself noted, “When he fires thousands of workers, he boasts about it.” You might expect someone who caused as much destruction as Al Dunlap would want to keep a low profile, if not out of a guilty conscience then at least out of a fear that a destroyed worker might hunt him down and get some payback. In the old days that’s what they did. What held those workers back from going to a Dunlap book signing and exacting some revenge? Why didn’t a single person ever attack him?
Dunlap at one of his book signings, not even pretending to worry that one of his adoring fans might be out to get him.
It just wasn’t considered. Not until two weeks ago, when AIG’s Financial Products division received so many death threats and hate emails that they hired armed security guards to protect them from potential revenge attacks.
And yet, there’s a silver lining: The government is finally being forced to act on the taxpayer’s behalf, and make a serious attempt to recover the millions in bonus money from the AIG looters.
This is a class war, in case you didn’t know. On one side are the reptiles like Dunlap, AIG, and so on; on the other side, the humans, us. We’re at a huge disadvantage because, like in Starship Troopers, we’re saddled with a conscience and with fear, and the reptile-plutocrats aren’t. They’re not afraid of shame or fines; but they want to live, as all life forms do. That’s why death threats are bringing real results: Death threats work when you’re dealing with reptiles like AIG’s financial products division. To see what I mean, let’s go back again to the example of Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap:
In 1967, unions were much stronger, income disparities were much narrower, and Americans didn’t culture-hump their bosses. Back then, Al Dunlap tried to apply his “chainsaw” to a company called Sterling Pulp & Paper. He proposed mass firings of its unionized workforce to bring down costs and boost the owners’ share. But Sterling’s 1967 workers weren’t like Sunbeam’s or Scott Paper’s in the 1990s. They didn’t roll over and accept the downsizing with a sullen grumble. Instead, to quote from Dunlap’s own book, “There were also physical threats of violence. We received anonymous calls and letters from nuts who said they were going to blow up my car or shoot me in the parking lot.” It worked: Dunlap caved in to the “nuts,” the workers weren’t downsized, and Dunlap eventually was forced to retreat. (A biographical note: according to the book Testosterone, Inc., Dunlap’s first wife divorced him on grounds of “extreme cruelty” after he allegedly took a knife to her and said, “I’ve always wondered what human flesh tastes like.”)
But America was a different country back then. We weren’t in awe of the CEO class, and they were kept in check. In 1978, American CEOs made more than 30 times the average salary of their company’s employees; by the early 2000s, CEOs made more than 500 times the average salary of their employees. Workers weren’t losing just a portion of the wealth, but also their pensions, health care, vacation time and job security.
Over the past few months, with the repetition of scandals and villains—whose names are different but whose machinations are all roughly the same—we’re starting to understand that people like Al Dunlap weren’t the aberrations we hoped they were. We see a similar modus operandi at work with Lehman’s Dick Fuld, with Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, with the Countrywide execs (who’ve bounced back recently with a new scheme to profit off the misery of Americans), with Washington Mutual’s ex-CEO Kerry Killinger, with Bernie Madoff, and now with AIG’s derivatives traders. They may not be as crude and boastful as Dunlap, but they were far more successful at plunder than he was. The really scary thing is that pretty much everywhere you see a “success story” in corporate America or Wall Street, you’ll find a variation on the “Chainsaw” Dunlap story: plunder, looting, destruction—the reptiles versus the humanoids.
A couple of weeks ago, while researching for an article on the shooting spree in southern Alabama that left 11 people dead, I came across a variation of the Dunlap Plunder in an unlikely place: Pilgrim’s Pride chicken, the largest chicken processor in the world. I looked into Pilgrim’s Pride because the company was high on the shooter’s alleged “hit list.” At the top of his grievances: he and his mother had both filed lawsuits against Pilgrim’s Pride in 2006 claiming they’d been cheated out of their wages. They weren’t the only ones: A class-action lawsuit filed by over 10,000 employees charged the Pilgrim’s Pride with denying payment for overtime work, and the U.S. Labor department agreed. In 2007, the US Labor Department slapped a paltry $3 million fine on Pilgrim’s Pride for illegally undercounting work hours.
It gets worse: Pilgrim’s Pride’s founder Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim overleveraged the company in 2006, the year everyone was overleveraging, in order to acquire rivals and overtake Tyson as the world’s number one chicken producer. He achieved his goal, and assured shareholders it was a wise move; but that’s when the company started getting sued for shaving employees’ salaries, which is another way of saying transferring money from the workers to the owners. Last year, shareholders filed suit against Pilgrim’s Pride, charging securities fraud. By December, the company declared bankruptcy, thereby protecting the billionaire Pilgrim family from its creditors and aggrieved workers and shareholders.
In short: wealth transferred from the pockets of local fireman, police, teachers and utilities into the pockets of the Pilgrim family.
But supposedly there’s nothing we can do. Like AIG, Pilgrim’s Pride is holding a proverbial gun to the American government’s head: if it goes into Chapter 7 and collapses, then as bad as things are now, it could get much worse, with its 50,000 employees facing layoffs and dozens of factories facing closure. As a result, the USDA announced that we, the taxpayers, will spend tens of millions to buy Pilgrim’s Pride chicken. Meanwhile, Pilgrim’s Pride responded by shutting down three plants anyway, and the bankruptcy judge has allowed former executives of Pilgrim to be rehired as “consultants” on company retainer.
Amid all of this, the man who went on his shooting rampage a couple weeks ago, Michael McLendon, appears to have been set off by a decision by Pilgrim’s Pride to suspend his 53-year-old mother from her factory job due to a dispute over how she counted her work hours—the same dispute that Pilgrim has been fighting and losing the past few years. You would think they wouldn’t do something as brash as suspend an employee over a work-time related dispute, not during a lawsuit, not during bankruptcy, not now with Obama in power. Right? But they did.
The new Florida State University “Albert Dunlap Student Success Center” was inaugurated last September, when the financial crisis hit. Dunlap put up $5 million, and the state put up the other $8.5 million or so. Dunlap was awarded an honorary degree in human dissection, before slithering back into his swamp-lair in the Everglades.
Which brings me back to the original point of this article, which is to say that we’ve finally learned our bitter Brady Bunch lesson: The economic elite of this country is made up of people whose exterior features look human, but whose brains are reptilian.
That’s why AIG’s behavior, and all the rest of them, makes so much sense—both their bottomless appetite for plunder in the face of no resistance, and the way they have released the loot from their jaws and scrambled away to the muddy river bottom at the first sign of serious threats from the humans they’ve been feeding on. They’ll retreat for awhile, but in the end, a croc’s got to eat, and his idea of eating isn’t our idea of eating.
Things in this country could get very strange and very hardcore. Stay tuned.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
While the Economy Crashes and Burns, Bush Loyalists Are Making a Killing
While the Economy Crashes and Burns, Bush Loyalists Are Making a Killing
By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com
June 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140762/
In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9% to 9.4%. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, "The jobs aren't coming back anytime soon." In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that "the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period."
The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7% jobless rate) and blacks (14.9% jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I'm talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies, and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors. While their high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies, and shredding of economic safety nets have proved disastrous for so many, for them the economic outlook remains bright and jobs are seemingly plentiful. In fact, many of them have performed the eye-opening feat of securing two or more potentially lucrative revenue streams at once during these tough financial times.
While it would likely take a small book to catalogue the fates of all former "loyal Bushies," a look at just a few of these fortunate folks indicates that not everybody was harmed by the Bush era.
The Memoirists
Many of the top figures of the Bush years are joining the ranks of (or reaffirming their credentials as) men and women of letters. Following in the footsteps of 2003-2006 White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who wrote the tell-some exposé, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001-2006). Now penning his life story for Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group, he has announced that he is forgoing an advance and donating all proceeds to charity. Similarly, 2006-2009 Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is reportedly donating the "author's profits" from his forthcoming "insider's account of [his] experiences as Treasury Secretary." Many other former colleagues are, however, apparently intent on cashing in on their public service.
Last month, the New York Times reported that Rumsfeld's long-time pal, former Vice President Dick Cheney, "is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations" and seeking multi-millions. In the same way, back in 2007, Bush's right-hand man Karl Rove, aka his "brain," agreed, for a reported seven figures, to write a memoir for Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint Threshold. Earlier this year, Bush's first term National Security Advisor and second term Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, signed a gaudy three-book deal, reportedly worth at least $2.5 million, with Random House's Crown imprint.
Following her to Crown (also the publisher of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope) was former President Bush himself. His book, tentatively titled Decision Points, will reportedly recount "a dozen of the most interesting and important decisions in the former President's personal and political life" for a cool $7 million. Former First Lady Laura Bush has already inked a book deal with Scribner reportedly worth $3.5-5 million.
Only one prominent Bush loyalist who cared to try appears to have been unable to cash-in. In late 2008, the Wall Street Journal's Evan Perez reported that Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel (2001-2005) and attorney general (2005-2007), "said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration," but could interest no publisher in the manuscript. This followed an earlier report in the New York Times that Gonzales had been "unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster..."
Law and Orders
One Bush administration lawyer who did land a job with a law firm was Gonzales's successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), who became a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, a firm "offering sophisticated legal services" which "places the highest value on collaboration and interdisciplinary cooperation in order to provide clients with seamless representation across practice areas and across continents."
Tommy Thompson, Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2001-2005, is now a partner with Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld where he "focuses on developing solutions for clients in the health care industry, as well as for companies doing business in the public sector." Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005-2009, is serving as "senior of counsel," and a "member of the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice group" at the firm of Covington & Burling.
Meanwhile, Harriet Miers, who served Bush from 2001-2007 as Staff Secretary, Deputy Chief of Staff, and Counsel to the President -- and whose Supreme Court bid crashed and burned in 2005 -- returned to Locke, Lord, Bissell & Liddell in May 2007 to serve as a member of the law firm's "Litigation and Public Policy sections." That firm is also home to Karin Torgerson, a partner who served as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, one of several White House positions she held from 2003-2005.
Speak Easy
In addition to his book-writing duties, former President Bush recently signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, which already represents his wife. The Bureau is to arrange lucrative speeches for him worldwide. In fact, just last month, the New York Times reported that the former president had "earned more than an estimated $150,000" to "discuss national and international policy" alongside fellow former President Bill Clinton at the Metro Toronto Convention Center.
Together the Bushes joined a speakers' roster of former administration heavyweights, including Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State, 2001-2005), John Bolton (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-2006), Andrew Card (White House Chief of Staff, 2001-2006), Ari Fleischer (White House Press Secretary, 2001-2003), Michael Mukasey, Colin Powell (Secretary of State, 2001-2005), Condoleezza Rice, Tom Ridge (Secretary of Homeland Security, 2003-2005), Donald Rumsfeld, and John Snow (Secretary of the Treasury, 2003-2006), as well as Bush family consigliere James Baker III.
Meanwhile, at Leading Authorities, another top-of-the-line speakers bureau, the list of ex-Bush loyalists includes Dan Bartlett (Counselor to the President, 2002-2007), Christopher Cox (Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, 2005-2009), Ed Gillespie (Counselor to the President, 2007-2009), Porter Goss (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2005-2006), Stephen Hadley (National Security Advisor, 2005-2009), Michael Hayden (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2006-2009), Keith Hennessey (Director of the National Economic Council, 2007-2009), Dana Perino (White House Press Secretary, 2007-2009), and Margaret Spellings (Secretary of Education, 2005-2009).
A third lecturers' stable, the Leigh Bureau, boasts John Negroponte who served Bush as Ambassador to the United Nations, Ambassador to Iraq, Director of National Intelligence, and Deputy Secretary of State.
Talking Heads and Lobbyists
Some Bush loyalists have nabbed other sorts of speaking gigs. Karl Rove, for one, took a job as an analyst for Fox News. (He also writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and, in 2007, signed a two-year deal to be a columnist for Newsweek magazine.)
Ari Fleischer was hired as a media consultant to the Green Bay Packers in 2008 and serves as the president of Ari Fleischer Communications, Inc., which bills itself as a "unique media training and consultancy company [that] brings to the world of sports the lessons of how to successfully handle the toughest situations with the most aggressive reporters." (Clients reportedly include Major League Baseball, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, and "several other leading sports figures.")
Many more Bush loyalists, however, are involved in another lucrative form of communication. For example, Michael Chertoff quickly launched the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm that "will advise clients on a range of security concerns, including cyber security, terrorism, fraud, border protection and supply-chain security." Tom Ridge, when not serving as a keynote-speaker-for-hire (as he did recently at the 2009 CoBank Energy Directors Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado) is now a security and crisis-management consultant for his own firm, Ridge Global, whose self-professed "expertise encompasses risk management and global trade security, leadership guidance and strategic business generation, event security, crisis management and communications, campus security, technology innovation and integration and more."
In fact, a recent analysis by USA TODAY found that "more than one in four members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet have landed jobs with consulting or lobbying firms in which they can help clients navigate the departments they once oversaw." And it's not just heads of executive departments like Homeland Security who are cashing in.
John Ashcroft (Attorney General, 2001-2005) co-founded the Ashcroft Group, a strategic consulting firm that advises and invests "in companies in the security and law enforcement marketplaces." Not surprisingly, the firm has become a home for Bush loyalists like Juleanna Glover, who served on the senior staffs of then President-elect George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and was then "the registered U.S. government affairs advisor for Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein ambassador to the United States."
Recently, according to the Quad City Times, Jim Nussle, Bush's director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (2007-2009) "formed a company that will offer consulting, government relations and lobbying services." The Nussle Group, its website proclaims, "specializes in recruiting a talented team and developing creative solutions to assist clients in navigating the complicated and challenging intersections of public policy, government relations, public relations, international relations and politics."
According to his company bio, the senior policy director at lobbying powerhouse Dutko Worldwide, Gene Hickok, "joined the George W. Bush Administration as Under Secretary of Education. He became Deputy Secretary in 2003 [and] was an architect of the No Child Left Behind Act." And he isn't alone. Kent Sholars, a Senior Associate at Dutko, "was a political appointee during both terms of the administration of George W. Bush, serving as the Confidential Assistant to the Controller for the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, DC," while Karen Yeager, a Dutko vice president, "serve[d] in the White House for President Bush in 2001."
Spin-Mistresses
Karen Hughes helped George W. Bush get elected in 2000 and, for the first two years of his first term, served him as a "counselor." In 2002, she left the White House to spend more time with her family in Texas. In 2004, however, she was back at work on Bush's campaign and then, in 2005, signed on as an undersecretary of state. In 2007, she left again, the White House said, "to spend more time with her family." Nonetheless, in 2008, she was in an office yet again, this time as Global Vice Chair at public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. In 2009, she was joined there by former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who now serves as Chief Issues Counselor for the company in the U.S.
Here, too, Michael Chertoff has gotten into the act. The announcement of the formation of the Chertoff Group, wrote the Wall Street Journal, "was made by the communications firm Burson-Marsteller, which said it formed an alliance with Mr. Chertoff."
Board to Death
Bush Administration officials have also been popping up on various boards of directors. Richard Armitage is perhaps typical. He sits on the board at military-corporate complex member ManTech International. He also serves on the boards of oil giant ConocoPhillips, "pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical" company Transcu Ltd., and his own firm, Armitage International, which, according to its website, provides "multinational clients with critical support in the areas of international business development, strategic planning, and problem-solving."
In April, chemical giant DuPont announced that Samuel Bodman, Secretary of Energy from 2005-2009 (and before that, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, 2004-2005, and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Commerce, 2001-2004) had been elected to its board of directors.
That same month, former CIA chief Michael Hayden became a member of the Board of Directors of the National Interest Security Company, an "information technology, information management, and management technology consulting services" provider serving the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy. There, Hayden joined fellow former administration cronies Henry A. Crumpton (Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department, 2005-2007) and Donald Kerr (Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, 2007-2009).
Meanwhile, Andrew Card not only serves on the board of directors of railroad giant Union Pacific, but has also turned up on the board of directors of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.
In the Tank
If you can't get a gig at a law firm, a PR agency, or on a corporate board of directors, there are always the nation's think-tanks to fall back into -- and they've become a shelter for more than a few Bush administration refugees in the Obama era. For example, after serving as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser in the Bush administration, Elliott Abrams has now joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies.
Alongside Abrams at CFR are a number of officials who served during the Bush years, including Evan Feigenbaum, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives; Paul Lettow, former senior adviser to the Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs and the Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Senor, an administration foreign policy advisor and senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation is not surprisingly housing a large contingent of Bush loyalists, including Becky Norton Dunlop, who served as the chairperson of the Federal Services Impasse Panel (which handles disputes between government agencies and labor unions); Kim R. Holmes, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; Terry Miller, ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council; Peter Brookes, Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for Asian and Pacific Affairs; and Mike Gonzalez who, in 2005, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Bush administration where, according to his Heritage Foundation bio, he "wrote speeches for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, then moved to the State Department in 2006 as communications adviser and speechwriter on European and Eurasian affairs" and even "helped craft an op-ed column… which appeared throughout Europe under the bylines of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates."
Ivory Tower Power
While Gates stayed on to work for President Barack Obama, Rice is pursuing many different career paths. In addition to the lucrative book contracts and the speakers bureau gigs, she inked a deal for the William Morris Agency to represent her for "business initiatives in media, sports and communications." Rice also returned, as a professor of political science, to her old stomping grounds at Stanford University, where she had long taught and also, from 1993-1999, served as provost. Presumably in her spare time, she serves as the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution.
Rice is actually following in the footsteps of Rumsfeld who served a stint, beginning in 2007, as "a distinguished visiting fellow" at the Hoover Institution. But Stanford is hardly the only academic bastion of former Bush-ites. For example, this year, John Negroponte headed back to his old alma mater, Yale University, to become the "Brady-Johnson Distinguished Senior Research Fellow in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in International Affairs at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies."
"Torture memo" author John Yoo, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice from 2001-2003, is, of course, a professor of law at the School of Law of that bastion of leftist radicalism, the University of California at Berkeley. (As Liliana Segura of AlterNet recently reported, he also just landed a gig as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.)
Hope on the Horizon
Last year, for many Americans, Barack Obama became synonymous with hope. (And last year, Obama's The Audacity of Hope as well as his Dreams from My Father earned him an eye-popping $2.4 million in royalties.) This year, for struggling job-hunters nationwide, it's former Bush administration officials who offer a glimmer of hope in tough economic times. Their ease in finding gainful employment suggests that, even if your prior work has been judged ruinous by many and been roundly repudiated, there's still hope for you on the job front.
Even former Vice President Cheney, a man about whom 55% of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion, has realistic prospects of receiving a multimillion dollar book deal. After all, his former boss is viewed unfavorably by 57% of Americans and look how he's done.
Since most jobless Americans don't have nearly the unfavorable polling numbers of Bush or Cheney, nor do they face the distant threat of possible war crimes prosecutions like John Yoo, they should perk up. Maybe the problem is that none of them have signed up with the right speakers bureau to discuss their disastrous life circumstances. Maybe they haven't had that extra little bit of help tweaking their book proposals for their proposed tell-littles and tell-nones. Maybe they hadn't thought to check with Burson-Marsteller, just in case a few top slots with grandiose titles are still open. Maybe the Hoover Institution will now extend distinguished visiting fellowships to a few of the residents of modern-day Hoovervilles.
With only former Attorney General Gonzales still out of work, grant the men and women of the Bush administration one thing: the best unemployment rate in the land. In but a few short months, they've managed to prove that, no matter how spectacularly you fail, those inside-the-Beltway never have to tighten a belt. In our world, they will always fail upwards -- generally in lucrative, prestigious, and glamorous ways.
By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com
June 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140762/
In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9% to 9.4%. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, "The jobs aren't coming back anytime soon." In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that "the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period."
The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7% jobless rate) and blacks (14.9% jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I'm talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies, and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors. While their high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies, and shredding of economic safety nets have proved disastrous for so many, for them the economic outlook remains bright and jobs are seemingly plentiful. In fact, many of them have performed the eye-opening feat of securing two or more potentially lucrative revenue streams at once during these tough financial times.
While it would likely take a small book to catalogue the fates of all former "loyal Bushies," a look at just a few of these fortunate folks indicates that not everybody was harmed by the Bush era.
The Memoirists
Many of the top figures of the Bush years are joining the ranks of (or reaffirming their credentials as) men and women of letters. Following in the footsteps of 2003-2006 White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who wrote the tell-some exposé, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001-2006). Now penning his life story for Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group, he has announced that he is forgoing an advance and donating all proceeds to charity. Similarly, 2006-2009 Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is reportedly donating the "author's profits" from his forthcoming "insider's account of [his] experiences as Treasury Secretary." Many other former colleagues are, however, apparently intent on cashing in on their public service.
Last month, the New York Times reported that Rumsfeld's long-time pal, former Vice President Dick Cheney, "is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations" and seeking multi-millions. In the same way, back in 2007, Bush's right-hand man Karl Rove, aka his "brain," agreed, for a reported seven figures, to write a memoir for Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint Threshold. Earlier this year, Bush's first term National Security Advisor and second term Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, signed a gaudy three-book deal, reportedly worth at least $2.5 million, with Random House's Crown imprint.
Following her to Crown (also the publisher of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope) was former President Bush himself. His book, tentatively titled Decision Points, will reportedly recount "a dozen of the most interesting and important decisions in the former President's personal and political life" for a cool $7 million. Former First Lady Laura Bush has already inked a book deal with Scribner reportedly worth $3.5-5 million.
Only one prominent Bush loyalist who cared to try appears to have been unable to cash-in. In late 2008, the Wall Street Journal's Evan Perez reported that Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel (2001-2005) and attorney general (2005-2007), "said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration," but could interest no publisher in the manuscript. This followed an earlier report in the New York Times that Gonzales had been "unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster..."
Law and Orders
One Bush administration lawyer who did land a job with a law firm was Gonzales's successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), who became a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, a firm "offering sophisticated legal services" which "places the highest value on collaboration and interdisciplinary cooperation in order to provide clients with seamless representation across practice areas and across continents."
Tommy Thompson, Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2001-2005, is now a partner with Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld where he "focuses on developing solutions for clients in the health care industry, as well as for companies doing business in the public sector." Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005-2009, is serving as "senior of counsel," and a "member of the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice group" at the firm of Covington & Burling.
Meanwhile, Harriet Miers, who served Bush from 2001-2007 as Staff Secretary, Deputy Chief of Staff, and Counsel to the President -- and whose Supreme Court bid crashed and burned in 2005 -- returned to Locke, Lord, Bissell & Liddell in May 2007 to serve as a member of the law firm's "Litigation and Public Policy sections." That firm is also home to Karin Torgerson, a partner who served as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, one of several White House positions she held from 2003-2005.
Speak Easy
In addition to his book-writing duties, former President Bush recently signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, which already represents his wife. The Bureau is to arrange lucrative speeches for him worldwide. In fact, just last month, the New York Times reported that the former president had "earned more than an estimated $150,000" to "discuss national and international policy" alongside fellow former President Bill Clinton at the Metro Toronto Convention Center.
Together the Bushes joined a speakers' roster of former administration heavyweights, including Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State, 2001-2005), John Bolton (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-2006), Andrew Card (White House Chief of Staff, 2001-2006), Ari Fleischer (White House Press Secretary, 2001-2003), Michael Mukasey, Colin Powell (Secretary of State, 2001-2005), Condoleezza Rice, Tom Ridge (Secretary of Homeland Security, 2003-2005), Donald Rumsfeld, and John Snow (Secretary of the Treasury, 2003-2006), as well as Bush family consigliere James Baker III.
Meanwhile, at Leading Authorities, another top-of-the-line speakers bureau, the list of ex-Bush loyalists includes Dan Bartlett (Counselor to the President, 2002-2007), Christopher Cox (Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, 2005-2009), Ed Gillespie (Counselor to the President, 2007-2009), Porter Goss (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2005-2006), Stephen Hadley (National Security Advisor, 2005-2009), Michael Hayden (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2006-2009), Keith Hennessey (Director of the National Economic Council, 2007-2009), Dana Perino (White House Press Secretary, 2007-2009), and Margaret Spellings (Secretary of Education, 2005-2009).
A third lecturers' stable, the Leigh Bureau, boasts John Negroponte who served Bush as Ambassador to the United Nations, Ambassador to Iraq, Director of National Intelligence, and Deputy Secretary of State.
Talking Heads and Lobbyists
Some Bush loyalists have nabbed other sorts of speaking gigs. Karl Rove, for one, took a job as an analyst for Fox News. (He also writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and, in 2007, signed a two-year deal to be a columnist for Newsweek magazine.)
Ari Fleischer was hired as a media consultant to the Green Bay Packers in 2008 and serves as the president of Ari Fleischer Communications, Inc., which bills itself as a "unique media training and consultancy company [that] brings to the world of sports the lessons of how to successfully handle the toughest situations with the most aggressive reporters." (Clients reportedly include Major League Baseball, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, and "several other leading sports figures.")
Many more Bush loyalists, however, are involved in another lucrative form of communication. For example, Michael Chertoff quickly launched the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm that "will advise clients on a range of security concerns, including cyber security, terrorism, fraud, border protection and supply-chain security." Tom Ridge, when not serving as a keynote-speaker-for-hire (as he did recently at the 2009 CoBank Energy Directors Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado) is now a security and crisis-management consultant for his own firm, Ridge Global, whose self-professed "expertise encompasses risk management and global trade security, leadership guidance and strategic business generation, event security, crisis management and communications, campus security, technology innovation and integration and more."
In fact, a recent analysis by USA TODAY found that "more than one in four members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet have landed jobs with consulting or lobbying firms in which they can help clients navigate the departments they once oversaw." And it's not just heads of executive departments like Homeland Security who are cashing in.
John Ashcroft (Attorney General, 2001-2005) co-founded the Ashcroft Group, a strategic consulting firm that advises and invests "in companies in the security and law enforcement marketplaces." Not surprisingly, the firm has become a home for Bush loyalists like Juleanna Glover, who served on the senior staffs of then President-elect George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and was then "the registered U.S. government affairs advisor for Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein ambassador to the United States."
Recently, according to the Quad City Times, Jim Nussle, Bush's director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (2007-2009) "formed a company that will offer consulting, government relations and lobbying services." The Nussle Group, its website proclaims, "specializes in recruiting a talented team and developing creative solutions to assist clients in navigating the complicated and challenging intersections of public policy, government relations, public relations, international relations and politics."
According to his company bio, the senior policy director at lobbying powerhouse Dutko Worldwide, Gene Hickok, "joined the George W. Bush Administration as Under Secretary of Education. He became Deputy Secretary in 2003 [and] was an architect of the No Child Left Behind Act." And he isn't alone. Kent Sholars, a Senior Associate at Dutko, "was a political appointee during both terms of the administration of George W. Bush, serving as the Confidential Assistant to the Controller for the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, DC," while Karen Yeager, a Dutko vice president, "serve[d] in the White House for President Bush in 2001."
Spin-Mistresses
Karen Hughes helped George W. Bush get elected in 2000 and, for the first two years of his first term, served him as a "counselor." In 2002, she left the White House to spend more time with her family in Texas. In 2004, however, she was back at work on Bush's campaign and then, in 2005, signed on as an undersecretary of state. In 2007, she left again, the White House said, "to spend more time with her family." Nonetheless, in 2008, she was in an office yet again, this time as Global Vice Chair at public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. In 2009, she was joined there by former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who now serves as Chief Issues Counselor for the company in the U.S.
Here, too, Michael Chertoff has gotten into the act. The announcement of the formation of the Chertoff Group, wrote the Wall Street Journal, "was made by the communications firm Burson-Marsteller, which said it formed an alliance with Mr. Chertoff."
Board to Death
Bush Administration officials have also been popping up on various boards of directors. Richard Armitage is perhaps typical. He sits on the board at military-corporate complex member ManTech International. He also serves on the boards of oil giant ConocoPhillips, "pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical" company Transcu Ltd., and his own firm, Armitage International, which, according to its website, provides "multinational clients with critical support in the areas of international business development, strategic planning, and problem-solving."
In April, chemical giant DuPont announced that Samuel Bodman, Secretary of Energy from 2005-2009 (and before that, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, 2004-2005, and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Commerce, 2001-2004) had been elected to its board of directors.
That same month, former CIA chief Michael Hayden became a member of the Board of Directors of the National Interest Security Company, an "information technology, information management, and management technology consulting services" provider serving the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy. There, Hayden joined fellow former administration cronies Henry A. Crumpton (Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department, 2005-2007) and Donald Kerr (Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, 2007-2009).
Meanwhile, Andrew Card not only serves on the board of directors of railroad giant Union Pacific, but has also turned up on the board of directors of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.
In the Tank
If you can't get a gig at a law firm, a PR agency, or on a corporate board of directors, there are always the nation's think-tanks to fall back into -- and they've become a shelter for more than a few Bush administration refugees in the Obama era. For example, after serving as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser in the Bush administration, Elliott Abrams has now joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies.
Alongside Abrams at CFR are a number of officials who served during the Bush years, including Evan Feigenbaum, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives; Paul Lettow, former senior adviser to the Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs and the Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Senor, an administration foreign policy advisor and senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation is not surprisingly housing a large contingent of Bush loyalists, including Becky Norton Dunlop, who served as the chairperson of the Federal Services Impasse Panel (which handles disputes between government agencies and labor unions); Kim R. Holmes, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; Terry Miller, ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council; Peter Brookes, Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for Asian and Pacific Affairs; and Mike Gonzalez who, in 2005, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Bush administration where, according to his Heritage Foundation bio, he "wrote speeches for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, then moved to the State Department in 2006 as communications adviser and speechwriter on European and Eurasian affairs" and even "helped craft an op-ed column… which appeared throughout Europe under the bylines of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates."
Ivory Tower Power
While Gates stayed on to work for President Barack Obama, Rice is pursuing many different career paths. In addition to the lucrative book contracts and the speakers bureau gigs, she inked a deal for the William Morris Agency to represent her for "business initiatives in media, sports and communications." Rice also returned, as a professor of political science, to her old stomping grounds at Stanford University, where she had long taught and also, from 1993-1999, served as provost. Presumably in her spare time, she serves as the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution.
Rice is actually following in the footsteps of Rumsfeld who served a stint, beginning in 2007, as "a distinguished visiting fellow" at the Hoover Institution. But Stanford is hardly the only academic bastion of former Bush-ites. For example, this year, John Negroponte headed back to his old alma mater, Yale University, to become the "Brady-Johnson Distinguished Senior Research Fellow in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in International Affairs at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies."
"Torture memo" author John Yoo, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice from 2001-2003, is, of course, a professor of law at the School of Law of that bastion of leftist radicalism, the University of California at Berkeley. (As Liliana Segura of AlterNet recently reported, he also just landed a gig as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.)
Hope on the Horizon
Last year, for many Americans, Barack Obama became synonymous with hope. (And last year, Obama's The Audacity of Hope as well as his Dreams from My Father earned him an eye-popping $2.4 million in royalties.) This year, for struggling job-hunters nationwide, it's former Bush administration officials who offer a glimmer of hope in tough economic times. Their ease in finding gainful employment suggests that, even if your prior work has been judged ruinous by many and been roundly repudiated, there's still hope for you on the job front.
Even former Vice President Cheney, a man about whom 55% of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion, has realistic prospects of receiving a multimillion dollar book deal. After all, his former boss is viewed unfavorably by 57% of Americans and look how he's done.
Since most jobless Americans don't have nearly the unfavorable polling numbers of Bush or Cheney, nor do they face the distant threat of possible war crimes prosecutions like John Yoo, they should perk up. Maybe the problem is that none of them have signed up with the right speakers bureau to discuss their disastrous life circumstances. Maybe they haven't had that extra little bit of help tweaking their book proposals for their proposed tell-littles and tell-nones. Maybe they hadn't thought to check with Burson-Marsteller, just in case a few top slots with grandiose titles are still open. Maybe the Hoover Institution will now extend distinguished visiting fellowships to a few of the residents of modern-day Hoovervilles.
With only former Attorney General Gonzales still out of work, grant the men and women of the Bush administration one thing: the best unemployment rate in the land. In but a few short months, they've managed to prove that, no matter how spectacularly you fail, those inside-the-Beltway never have to tighten a belt. In our world, they will always fail upwards -- generally in lucrative, prestigious, and glamorous ways.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11dowd.html?em=&pagewanted=print
November 11, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
The Great Vampire Squid has gotten religion.
In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are “mad and bent out of shape” at blood-sucking banks.
“I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O., told the reporter John Arlidge.
But the little people who are boiling simply don’t understand. And Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” doesn’t understand.
Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good.
“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital,” he said. “Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.”
When Arlidge asked whether it’s possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was “doing God’s work.”
Whether he knows it, he’s referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks’ vicious — not virtuous — cycle of greed and concupiscence.
Blankfein’s trickle-down catechism isn’t working. Now we have two economies. We have recovering banks while we have 10-plus percent unemployment and 17.5 percent underemployment. The gross thing about the Wall Street of the last decade is how much its success was not shared with society.
Goldmine Sachs, as it’s known, is out for Goldmine Sachs.
As many Americans continue to struggle, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, banks that took government bailout money after throwing the entire world into crisis, have said they will dish out $30 billion in bonuses — up 60 percent from last year.
The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.
Under pressure from regulators, who were trying to ensure that long-term performance was rewarded, the banks agreed to award more in stock, deferring cash payments.
But as The Times reported this week, the Goldman executives who got stock options instead of bonuses last year, at market lows, got a windfall — so it had nothing to do with bank employees’ performance.
“The company gave its general counsel, for example, 104,868 stock options and 14,117 shares in December, when the bank’s stock was around $78,” Louise Story wrote for The Times. “Now the bank’s shares have more than doubled in value, making that stock and option award worth nearly $12 million.”
As one former Goldman banker told Arlidge, the culture there is “completely money-obsessed. ... There’s always room — need — for more. If you are not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you’re falling behind. It’s an addiction.”
It’s an addiction that Washington has done little to quell. President Obama has not been strong on the issue, and Timothy Geithner coddles the wanton bankers whenever they freak out that they might not be able to put in their new pools next summer.
The bankers try to dismiss calls for regulation as populist ravings, but the insane inequity of it cannot be dismissed.
No sooner had the Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd announced his plan to overhaul financial regulation Tuesday than compensation experts declared it toothless.
The banks and their lobbyists wheedled concession after concession out of Washington and knocked down proposed inhibition after inhibition. Now the banks are laughing all the way to the bank.
“Saturday Night Live” was tougher on Goldman Sachs than the government, giving the firm flak about commandeering 200 doses of the swine flu vaccine — the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital got — while so many at-risk Americans wait.
“Can you not read how mad people are at you?” demanded Amy Poehler. “When most people saw the headline ‘Goldman Sachs Gets Swine Flu Vaccine’ they were superhappy until they saw the word ‘vaccine.’ ”
Seth Meyers chimed in: “Also, Centers for Disease Control, you sent the vaccine to Wall Street before schools and hospitals? Really!?! Were you worried the swine flu might spread to the Hamptons and St. Barts? These are the least contagious people in the world. They don’t even touch their own car-door handles.”
And as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
November 11, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
The Great Vampire Squid has gotten religion.
In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are “mad and bent out of shape” at blood-sucking banks.
“I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O., told the reporter John Arlidge.
But the little people who are boiling simply don’t understand. And Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” doesn’t understand.
Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good.
“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital,” he said. “Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.”
When Arlidge asked whether it’s possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was “doing God’s work.”
Whether he knows it, he’s referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks’ vicious — not virtuous — cycle of greed and concupiscence.
Blankfein’s trickle-down catechism isn’t working. Now we have two economies. We have recovering banks while we have 10-plus percent unemployment and 17.5 percent underemployment. The gross thing about the Wall Street of the last decade is how much its success was not shared with society.
Goldmine Sachs, as it’s known, is out for Goldmine Sachs.
As many Americans continue to struggle, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, banks that took government bailout money after throwing the entire world into crisis, have said they will dish out $30 billion in bonuses — up 60 percent from last year.
The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.
Under pressure from regulators, who were trying to ensure that long-term performance was rewarded, the banks agreed to award more in stock, deferring cash payments.
But as The Times reported this week, the Goldman executives who got stock options instead of bonuses last year, at market lows, got a windfall — so it had nothing to do with bank employees’ performance.
“The company gave its general counsel, for example, 104,868 stock options and 14,117 shares in December, when the bank’s stock was around $78,” Louise Story wrote for The Times. “Now the bank’s shares have more than doubled in value, making that stock and option award worth nearly $12 million.”
As one former Goldman banker told Arlidge, the culture there is “completely money-obsessed. ... There’s always room — need — for more. If you are not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you’re falling behind. It’s an addiction.”
It’s an addiction that Washington has done little to quell. President Obama has not been strong on the issue, and Timothy Geithner coddles the wanton bankers whenever they freak out that they might not be able to put in their new pools next summer.
The bankers try to dismiss calls for regulation as populist ravings, but the insane inequity of it cannot be dismissed.
No sooner had the Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd announced his plan to overhaul financial regulation Tuesday than compensation experts declared it toothless.
The banks and their lobbyists wheedled concession after concession out of Washington and knocked down proposed inhibition after inhibition. Now the banks are laughing all the way to the bank.
“Saturday Night Live” was tougher on Goldman Sachs than the government, giving the firm flak about commandeering 200 doses of the swine flu vaccine — the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital got — while so many at-risk Americans wait.
“Can you not read how mad people are at you?” demanded Amy Poehler. “When most people saw the headline ‘Goldman Sachs Gets Swine Flu Vaccine’ they were superhappy until they saw the word ‘vaccine.’ ”
Seth Meyers chimed in: “Also, Centers for Disease Control, you sent the vaccine to Wall Street before schools and hospitals? Really!?! Were you worried the swine flu might spread to the Hamptons and St. Barts? These are the least contagious people in the world. They don’t even touch their own car-door handles.”
And as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
Nearly Half of Congress Millionaires While Only Earning 6 Figures
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Nearly-Half-of-Congress-Mi-by-Grant-Lawrence-091107-574.html
November 10, 2009
Nearly Half of Congress Millionaires While Only Earning 6 Figures
By Grant Lawrence
....Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That's 44 percent of the body – compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall....Source: Politico.com
Strange how the politicos can have 2 separate residences with families living a fine life style and yet they are able to sock away millions while earning just 6 figures. Must be good money management. Now if they could manage the country as well as they do their own finances.
But in reality the Legislators are bankrupting the country so that they can benefit their corporate benefactors.
Let's be honest corporate welfare doesn't come cheap.
But did you ever wonder why someone would want a job that pays 6 figures when they are worth 200 or so million?
Maybe they just want to serve their friends in corporate America.
November 10, 2009
Nearly Half of Congress Millionaires While Only Earning 6 Figures
By Grant Lawrence
....Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That's 44 percent of the body – compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall....Source: Politico.com
Strange how the politicos can have 2 separate residences with families living a fine life style and yet they are able to sock away millions while earning just 6 figures. Must be good money management. Now if they could manage the country as well as they do their own finances.
But in reality the Legislators are bankrupting the country so that they can benefit their corporate benefactors.
Let's be honest corporate welfare doesn't come cheap.
But did you ever wonder why someone would want a job that pays 6 figures when they are worth 200 or so million?
Maybe they just want to serve their friends in corporate America.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Congress Is Teeming With Millionaires
http://www.sphere.com/2009/11/06/44-percent-of-congress-are-millionaires/
(Nov. 6) -- Apparently, times aren't so tough all over.
According to a new study compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, 237 members of the U.S. Congress, or 44 percent, are millionaires.
"What's easy to see is that the economic reality of our elected officials is not reflective of the general population," said Dave Levinthal, who helped compile the study's findings.
Nationwide, only 1 percent of U.S. citizens qualify as millionaires.
An inquiry into financial data reveals that 44 percent of the U.S. Congress are millionaires.
Among the wealthiest members of Congress are Darrell Issa, R-Calif., whose net worth is estimated at $251 million, and Jane Harman, D-Calif., who boasts a net worth of around $244.7 million.
A slight majority of those elected to Congress are not millionaires. And some of the least well-off members include Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., and Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., both of whose net worth is less than zero, according to the RCP database.
By compiling financial disclosure statements and public tax records, the Center for Responsive Politics was also able to examine the investment holdings of elected officials.
In 2008, the same year that the federal government bailed out several U.S. banks, the second most commonly held stock among members of Congress was Bank of America, the data showed. Other popular bank stocks included Wells Fargo, Citi Group and Goldman Sachs, all of which received congressionally approved funds.
And as Congress continues to work on the issue of health care reform, Levinthal noted that industry-related stocks were also commonly held by many on Capitol Hill.
"Pfizer was the sixth most commonly held stock in 2008, for instance," Levinthal said. "Oftentimes, members of Congress are heavily invested in companies who will be affected by decisions the federal government makes."
Surprisingly, in a year in which the economy ravaged the retirement savings and overall net worth of so many Americans, some members of Congress experienced just the opposite. In the Senate, Richard Shelby, R-Ala., saw his net worth increase by $2.8 million. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, earned $2.6 million, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's earnings rose by $9.2 million.
(Nov. 6) -- Apparently, times aren't so tough all over.
According to a new study compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, 237 members of the U.S. Congress, or 44 percent, are millionaires.
"What's easy to see is that the economic reality of our elected officials is not reflective of the general population," said Dave Levinthal, who helped compile the study's findings.
Nationwide, only 1 percent of U.S. citizens qualify as millionaires.
An inquiry into financial data reveals that 44 percent of the U.S. Congress are millionaires.
Among the wealthiest members of Congress are Darrell Issa, R-Calif., whose net worth is estimated at $251 million, and Jane Harman, D-Calif., who boasts a net worth of around $244.7 million.
A slight majority of those elected to Congress are not millionaires. And some of the least well-off members include Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., and Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., both of whose net worth is less than zero, according to the RCP database.
By compiling financial disclosure statements and public tax records, the Center for Responsive Politics was also able to examine the investment holdings of elected officials.
In 2008, the same year that the federal government bailed out several U.S. banks, the second most commonly held stock among members of Congress was Bank of America, the data showed. Other popular bank stocks included Wells Fargo, Citi Group and Goldman Sachs, all of which received congressionally approved funds.
And as Congress continues to work on the issue of health care reform, Levinthal noted that industry-related stocks were also commonly held by many on Capitol Hill.
"Pfizer was the sixth most commonly held stock in 2008, for instance," Levinthal said. "Oftentimes, members of Congress are heavily invested in companies who will be affected by decisions the federal government makes."
Surprisingly, in a year in which the economy ravaged the retirement savings and overall net worth of so many Americans, some members of Congress experienced just the opposite. In the Senate, Richard Shelby, R-Ala., saw his net worth increase by $2.8 million. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, earned $2.6 million, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's earnings rose by $9.2 million.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
237 millionaires in Congress
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29235.html
Report: 237 millionaires in Congress
Erika Lovely
Politico
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:38 EST
Talk about bad timing.
As Washington reels from the news of 10.2 percent unemployment, the Center for Responsive Politics is out with a new report describing the wealth of members of Congress.
Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That's 44 percent of the body - compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall.
CRP says California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa is the richest lawmaker on Capitol Hill, with a net worth estimated at about $251 million. Next in line: Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), worth about $244.7 million; Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), worth about $214.5 million; Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), worth about $209.7 million; and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), worth about $208.8 million.
All told, at least seven lawmakers have net worths greater than $100 million, according to the Center's 2008 figures.
"Many Americans probably have a sense that members of Congress aren't hurting, even if their government salary alone is in the six figures, much more than most Americans make," said CRP spokesman Dave Levinthal. "What we see through these figures is that many of them have riches well beyond that salary, supplemented with securities, stock holdings, property and other investments."
The CRP numbers are somewhat rough estimates - lawmakers are required to report their financial information in broad ranges of figures, so it's impossible to pin down their dollars with precision. The CRP uses the mid-point in the ranges to build its estimates.
Senators' estimated median reportable worth sunk to about $1.79 million from $2.27 million in 2007. The House's median income was significantly lower and also sank, bottoming out at $622,254 from $724,258 in 2007.
But CRP's analysis suggests that some lawmakers did well for themselves between 2007 and 2008, even as many Americans lost jobs and saw their savings and their home values plummet.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gained about $9.2 million. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) gained about $3 million, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) had an estimated $2.6 million gain, and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) gained about $2.8 million.
Some lawmakers have profited from investments in companies that have received federal bailouts; dozens of lawmakers are invested in Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
Among executive branch officials, CRP says the richest is Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary L. Schapiro, with a net worth estimated at $26 million.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is next, worth an estimated $21 million. President Barack Obama is the sixth-wealthiest, worth about an estimated $4 million. Vice President Joe Biden has often tagged himself as an original blue collar man. The CRP backs him up, putting his net worth at just $27,000.
He's hardly the worst off.
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), freshman Rep. Harry Teague (D-N.M.), Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), Rep. John Salazar (D-Colo.) and Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) each a net worth of less than zero, CRP says.
One caveat on those numbers: Federal financial disclosure laws don't require members to list the value of their personal residences. That information could alter the net worth picture for many lawmakers.
Even so, Levinthal said, "It is clear that some members are struggling financially.
"Over a calendar year, one's wealth can change drastically. Many peoples' investments took a nose dive over night in the last year," he said.
A number of lawmakers are estimated to have suffered double-digit percentage lossed in their net worth from 2007 to 2008. The biggest losers include Kerry, who lost a whopping $127.4 million; Warner lost about $28.1 million; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lost about $11.8 million; and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lost about $10.1 million.
Report: 237 millionaires in Congress
Erika Lovely
Politico
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:38 EST
Talk about bad timing.
As Washington reels from the news of 10.2 percent unemployment, the Center for Responsive Politics is out with a new report describing the wealth of members of Congress.
Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That's 44 percent of the body - compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall.
CRP says California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa is the richest lawmaker on Capitol Hill, with a net worth estimated at about $251 million. Next in line: Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), worth about $244.7 million; Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), worth about $214.5 million; Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), worth about $209.7 million; and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), worth about $208.8 million.
All told, at least seven lawmakers have net worths greater than $100 million, according to the Center's 2008 figures.
"Many Americans probably have a sense that members of Congress aren't hurting, even if their government salary alone is in the six figures, much more than most Americans make," said CRP spokesman Dave Levinthal. "What we see through these figures is that many of them have riches well beyond that salary, supplemented with securities, stock holdings, property and other investments."
The CRP numbers are somewhat rough estimates - lawmakers are required to report their financial information in broad ranges of figures, so it's impossible to pin down their dollars with precision. The CRP uses the mid-point in the ranges to build its estimates.
Senators' estimated median reportable worth sunk to about $1.79 million from $2.27 million in 2007. The House's median income was significantly lower and also sank, bottoming out at $622,254 from $724,258 in 2007.
But CRP's analysis suggests that some lawmakers did well for themselves between 2007 and 2008, even as many Americans lost jobs and saw their savings and their home values plummet.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gained about $9.2 million. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) gained about $3 million, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) had an estimated $2.6 million gain, and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) gained about $2.8 million.
Some lawmakers have profited from investments in companies that have received federal bailouts; dozens of lawmakers are invested in Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
Among executive branch officials, CRP says the richest is Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary L. Schapiro, with a net worth estimated at $26 million.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is next, worth an estimated $21 million. President Barack Obama is the sixth-wealthiest, worth about an estimated $4 million. Vice President Joe Biden has often tagged himself as an original blue collar man. The CRP backs him up, putting his net worth at just $27,000.
He's hardly the worst off.
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), freshman Rep. Harry Teague (D-N.M.), Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), Rep. John Salazar (D-Colo.) and Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) each a net worth of less than zero, CRP says.
One caveat on those numbers: Federal financial disclosure laws don't require members to list the value of their personal residences. That information could alter the net worth picture for many lawmakers.
Even so, Levinthal said, "It is clear that some members are struggling financially.
"Over a calendar year, one's wealth can change drastically. Many peoples' investments took a nose dive over night in the last year," he said.
A number of lawmakers are estimated to have suffered double-digit percentage lossed in their net worth from 2007 to 2008. The biggest losers include Kerry, who lost a whopping $127.4 million; Warner lost about $28.1 million; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lost about $11.8 million; and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lost about $10.1 million.
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