“At The Altar Of International Finance”: Romney “Goes For The Gold” In London’s Libor Village
In fairness to Mitt Romney, he did not schedule his $75,000-a-plate money grab at the altar of international finance when he heard that—via the Libor bank-rate scandal—Londoners were practicing his kind of crony capitalism.
Even before the Bain capitalist knew that bankers in London were lying to regulators and fixing interest rates in order to run up their profits—engaging in activities that the governor of the Bank of England said “meet my definition of fraud”—Romney was excited about getting a piece of the London bankster action.
But Romney campaign has has gone to Olympian lengths to make their candidate’s British sojourn seem to be about something other than the looting of London.
The Republican presidential contender’s international fundraising operation—and, yes, he does have an international fundraising operation—scheduled two major events to coincide with the opening of the Olympic Games. As a candidate who is having trouble touting his business experience (Bain Vulture Capital) and his governing experience (RomneyCare), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee calculated that it might be a good idea to take a trip across the pond to highlight his (somewhat less controversial) management of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
The Olympics are being held this year in east London, just beyond the fabled “City” precincts which are, along with New York’s Wall Street, the nerve center of global banking and financial dealmaking. And Romney is using his London sojourn to skim off some cash—make that a lot of cash—for his campaign accounts.
Or, as London’s Independent headlines the story: “Romney Goes for the Gold in London.”
Romney Victory Inc., the incredibly complex fundraising structure the candidate has developed to funnel money into his many campaign operations, has scheduled two London events for July 26:
1. A meet-and-greet where the price of admission is $2,500 per person.
2. A dinner where the places at the tables go for as much as $75,000 per person.
Both the Romney and Obama campaigns have raised money overseas from American expatriates (who, along with Green Card holders, are allowed to donate to US campaigns even if they do not reside in the United States or work for US-based banks or corporations). Obama’s had the upper hand in the global fundraising race by a $3.1 million to $1.4 million margin. But that will change after Romney collects his London haul.
Why? Because Romney is getting together with with The City’s wealthiest, and most scandal-plagued, banksters.
Or, at least, most of them.
Bob Diamond, the former Barclay’s banking empire chief executive who was forced to resign after it was revealed that his bank manipulated the Libor (London InterBank Offered Rate) with false reports about interest rates, was supposed to be at the head of the table. But with his busy schedule of testimony before parliamentary committees and investigators of the biggest banking scandal in recent years, the American expatriate has been forced to absent himself from the festivities.
“Mr. Diamond decided to step aside as a co-host for the upcoming London reception to focus all his attention on Barclays,” the Romney camp announced. “We respect his decision.”
Why shouldn’t they? One of Diamond’s closest lieutenants at Barclays—which just paid $453 million in fines stemming from the Libor scandal—is still co-chairing Romney’s big-ticket event in London.
Barclay’s lobbyist Patrick Durkin’s name is right there at the top of the invite to “a private dinner with Governor Mitt Romney at a central London location.”
Also on the list of forty-seven co-chairs of Romney’s London fundraisers are the names of top players in other banks that have been targets of the interest-rate manipulation scandal, including:
* Bank of Credit Suisse chief executive Eric Varvel (Varvel has already donated $100,000 to Romney’s “Restore Our Future” Super PAC.)
* Deutsche Bank managing director Raj Bhattacharyya
* HSBC managing director Whitfield Hines
Executives from Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Wells Fargo Securities—and, of course, Bain Capital Europe—are also on the list.
Why would these Americans associated with international banks be giving maximum money to this particular presidential candidate? Gee, could it have anything to do with the fact that there are calls for criminal prosecution of the bankers who were involved in interest rate manipulations that effectively rigged the rates that helped to determine who consumers in the United States and other countries obtained mortgages and paid on credit cards?
“Much more needs to be done,” Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jack Reed( D-RI) and ten of their colleagues wrote in a mid-July letter to financial regulators and Attorney General Eric Holder. “Banks and their employees found to have broken the law should face appropriate criminal prosecution and civil action.”
Electing a friendly president, who might put the brakes on those prosecutions, just became a very high priority for the men who pull the financial strings not just on Wall Street but in London.
Approached by Britain’s Telegraph, one invitee hailed Romney’s “American understanding of capitalism. A prominent lawyer who will be attending one of Romney’s London bashes explained that the Republican candidate understands “very important things [that] people here in the UK also understand.”
That sort of “understanding” is worth a lot to embattled bankers. Certainly, the $75,000 it will cost for what the Independent describes as a “chance to whisper some of their own policy preferences into the ear of the man who may—or may not—be US president.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, July 20, 2012
“Mourning and Mulling”: We Can’t Keep Digging Graves Where Common Ground Should Be
America is aching.
There are some events that we never grow numb to, things that weigh heavily on our sense of humanity and national psyche.
Early Friday morning, 24-year-old James Holmes, masked and armed, entered a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and opened fire. After things settled, at least 12 people were dead and 59 were left wounded.
It is on days like this that we are reminded of how much more alike than different we are, when we see that tears have no color, when ideologies melt into a common heart broken by sorrow.
But it is also on days like this that the questions invariably come.
They are questions about the shooter. How deep must the hole have been in his life? How untenable was the ache? How cold must the heart have grown? When did he cross the line from malcontent to monster?
But there are also questions for us as a country and as a people. We are called to question our values and our laws, and those obviously include our gun laws.
My own feelings on the matter are complicated.
I grew up in a small town in northern Louisiana — in the sticks. Everyone there seemed to own guns, even the children. My brothers slept beneath a gun rack that hung over their bed. Women carried handguns for protection. Even now, my oldest brother is an amateur gun dealer, buying and selling guns at his local gun shows.
There are parts of America where guns are simply part of the culture, either for hunting and keeping the vermin out of the garden (there are more humane methods of doing this, of course, but some people simply have their ways), or for collecting. (According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 45 percent of Americans have a gun in their home.)
But, as a child, I also saw how guns could be used in a fit of anger or after a few swigs of liquor. And I have seen the damage they do to the fabric of society in big cities where criminals and cowards alike use them to settle disputes and even scores.
While I hesitate to issue blanket condemnations about gun ownership — my upbringing simply doesn’t support that — common sense would seem to dictate that it is prudent and wise to consider the place of guns in modern societies. It has been some time since we have needed to raise a militia, but senseless violence is all too common. The right to bear arms is constitutional, but the right to be safe even if you don’t bear arms would seem universal. We must ask ourselves the hard question: Can both rights be equally protected and how can they best be balanced?
As Howard Steven Friedman, a statistician and health economist for the United Nations, wrote for The Huffington Post in April:
“America’s homicide rates, incarceration rates and gun ownership rates are all much higher than other wealthy countries. While the data associated with crime is imperfect, these facts all point to the idea that America is more violent than many other wealthy countries.” This is not the way in which we should seek to excel.
There are whole swaths of gun owners who don’t use their guns in a criminal way. But many of the people who use guns to commit murder are also law-abiding until they’re not. (Holmes’s only previous brush with the law seems to have been a 2011 traffic summons.) We shouldn’t simply wait for the bodies to fall to separate the wheat from the chaff.
One step in the right direction would be to reinstate the assault weapons ban. Even coming from a gun culture, I cannot rationalize the sale of assault weapons to everyday citizens. (The Washington Post reported that Holmes had a shotgun, two pistols and an AR-15 assault rifle, all legally purchased.)
But this will be an uphill battle because the National Rifle Association has been extremely effective at promoting its agenda and sowing fears that gun rights are in jeopardy even when they are not. Much of that campaign has been aimed at painting President Obama as an enemy of the Second Amendment, and it has been exceedingly successful.
That 2011 Gallup poll, in a reversal from previous polls, found that most people are now against an assault weapons ban. (In general, the desire for stricter gun control laws has been falling for the last two decades.)
We simply have to take some reasonable steps toward making sure that all our citizens are kept safer — those with guns and those without.
We can’t keep digging graves where common ground should be.
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 20, 2012
“Let’s Talk About Guns”: Why New Gun Control Is Not Likely To Follow Tragedy
Before the sun had even risen in Aurora, Colo., the shooting there last night had reignited the debate over gun control, with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the country’s most outspoken advocates of gun regulations, demanding action. While it may seem a bit crass to turn to politics so soon, it is worth asking how this could happen less than 30 minutes away from Littleton, the Colorado town where the 1999 Columbine high school massacre left a lasting scar on the state and the country for years.
While the emotional damage from Columbine may linger, its policy effects did not. After the school shooting, the state legislature, like many across the country, pushed a flight of bills aimed at making it more difficult for kids to get hold of guns. Lawmakers sought to close the “gun show loophole,” which allows people who buy guns at conventions, instead of brick-and-mortar retailers, to avoid a background check. They also aimed for a law requiring guns to be stored with trigger locks or in safes at home, and tried to increase the age someone could buy a handgun from 18 to 21.
But a year later, almost all of these bills had been shot down thanks to effective lobbying from the NRA and other gun groups. The only laws that passed were token ones the gun lobby supported, like allowing police to arrest people who knowingly purchased guns for criminals. The NRA spent $16,950 in January of 2000 alone fighting gun laws. “[It’s a] tremendous amount of money,” Pete Maysmith of Colorado Common Cause, a government watchdog group, told CBS News in February of that year. “$16,000 in one month going into the Colorado Legislature — it’s a financial arms race.”
More than a decade after Columbine, gun laws across the country are more lax than ever. Opponents of gun control say legislation wouldn’t have prevented the Columbine massacre or any other major shooting, which may be true to varying degrees, depending on the shooting. Early reports indicate the suspect in last night’s theater shooting had an AK-47-type weapon, some variants of which were outlawed under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. That law was signed by President Clinton in 1994 but expired 10 years later and is not likely to be reauthorized.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, writes today, “If history is any guide, however, the Aurora shootings will do little to change public sentiment regarding gun control, which has been moving away from putting more laws on the books for some time.” Indeed, the experience after the Columbine shooting shows he may be right.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 20, 2012
“Witchy Woman”: Republicans Line Up To Rip Michele Bachmann
They were long afraid to do it, but now conservatives have their knives out for Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Senators in her own party, congressional candidates, a lawmaker in her state’s delegation and leaders of the House Republican Conference are all lambasting the Minnesota Republican for saying the wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said merely floating the idea that Huma Abedin — a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — has family ties to the radical Middle East group is “pretty dangerous.”
“I don’t know Huma, but from everything I do know of her, she has a sterling character,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “And I think accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous.” Later on CNN, Boehner said he expects to speak to Bachmann soon.
Bachmann’s accusation came in a handful of letters to intelligence and national security agencies raising questions about the Muslim Brotherhood. The letters, also signed by four other Republicans, specifically mentioned Abedin, accusing her late father of having ties to the Brotherhood.
Boehner declined to entertain a reporter’s question about whether he would toss Bachmann off the Intelligence Committee, where she’s privy to highly classified information. Behind the scenes, leadership aides said they were shaken by the comments from someone as prominent as Bachmann.
And Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was described by several sources as incredibly angry when he heard of the incident.
The Republican backlash against Bachmann started with Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) statement on the Senate floor Wednesday, saying she had made “sinister accusations.”
Rep. Jeff Flake, a conservative Arizona lawmaker running for Senate, tweeted “Kudos to @SenJohnMcCain for his statement on Senate floor yesterday defending Clinton aide. Well said.”
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) added: “Rep. Bachmann’s accusations about Sec. Clinton aide Huma Abedin are out-of-line. This kind of rhetoric has no place in our public discourse.”
Even the Minnesota delegation is dispensing with its characteristic niceness. Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim who served in the state Legislature with Bachmann in St. Paul, said it’s not personal, but Bachmann is out of line.
“It’s not right to question the loyalty of fellow Americans without any evidence,” said Ellison, whose district is based in Minneapolis. “I object when people do that.”
Bachmann has said her letters “are unfortunately being distorted.”
And while she did not specifically mention Abedin in a follow-up comment, Bachmann is not backing down from her premise of looking into threats from the Muslim Brotherhood: “I will not be silent as this administration appeases our enemies instead of telling the truth about the threats our country faces.”
She elaborated during an interview Thursday with conservative radio host Glenn Beck.
“She is the chief aide … to the Secretary of State,” Bachmann said of Abedin. “And we quoted from the document, and this has been well reported all across Arab media, that her father, her late father who is now deceased was a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, her brother was a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and her mother was part of what’s called the Muslim Sisterhood.”
Yet more and more Republicans seem to feel more comfortable coming out publicly against Bachmann now — perhaps because she’s no longer engaged in a presidential primary and has returned to the House as a rank-and-file lawmaker.
Ed Rollins, her former presidential campaign manager, said in a post on Fox News’s website that Bachmann has “difficulty with her facts.”
Former New Jersey GOP Gov. Christine Todd Whitman wrote in POLITICO’s Arena, that “the sort of unfounded attack unleashed by Congresswoman Bachmann and her [colleagues] brings back painful memories of a low point in our history.”
Former Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, a recently retired Florida Republican, said “Michele means well but she sometimes doesn’t let proven facts get in the way of a possibility of having national television coverage.”
“Michele would be better served by having competent staff to check out these accusations before she goes out there sometimes appearing to be a ‘bomb thrower,’” Brown-Waite wrote on POLITICO.
Bachmann’s fundraising prowess remains impressive, but requests for donations seem dire. One last month was labeled “URGENT note from Michele,” and urged folks to pony up for her reelection effort against a self-funder who she said “will be able to keep pouring in millions of his own money to defeat me.” Her opponent is Jim Graves, a Minnesota businessman.
“My opponent just released his financial numbers and it will blow you away. His net worth is approximately $111 million. Yes, you read that correctly. One hundred and eleven million dollars,” according to a fundraising email June 26.
She remains a top House fundraiser, bringing in $1.8 million in the second quarter, bringing the total in her campaign account to $1.72 million. At this point in the previous cycle, she had $2.4 million on hand.
The question many Republicans and Democrats alike ask is whether her district — outside St. Paul — truly cares about issues like the allegations she made regarding Abedin.
“They know what she says, they know what she does,” Ellison told POLITICO. “Her district knows her. They know her well. We came into this place together. My district knows me, her district knows her. I guess they either like what she’s saying or they don’t dislike it enough to get rid of her. That’s it.”
By: Jake Sherman, Politico, July 19, 2012
“A Dangerous And Crazy Bigot”: The End Of Michele Bachmann?
Following John McCain’s condemnation of Michele Bachmann’s letter to the Department of State’s Inspector General, demanding an investigation of imagined ties of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood, other Republicans are piling on.
GOP strategist Ed Rollins, who at one time managed Bachmann’s failed presidential campaign, weighed in at Fox News:
Having worked for Congressman Bachmann’s campaign for president, I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Senator Joe McCarthy level…
The Republican Party, which John McCain led as our nominee in 2008, is going to become irrelevant if we become the party of intolerance and hate. The party founded by Abraham Lincoln was a party that fought slavery and intolerance at every level.
I can assure Mrs. Bachmann, that Ms. Abedin has been thru every top clearance available and would never have been given her position with any questions of her loyalty to this country.
As a member of Congress, with a seat on the House Intelligence Committee, Mrs. Bachmann you know better. Shame on you, Michele! You should stand on the floor of the House and apologize to Huma Abedin and to Secretary Clinton and to the millions of hardworking, loyal, Muslim Americans for your wild and unsubstantiated charges. As a devoted Christian, you need to ask forgiveness for this grievous lack of judgment and reckless behavior. (emphasis mine)
House Speaker John Boehner today called Bachmann’s accusations “pretty dangerous.”
This appears to be an important moment of Republicans finally trying to dial back the party’s Islamophobia wing, defending public servants from the wild-eyed imaginings of Frank Gaffney’s protégés. Bachmann and the four other signatories to her letter—Republicans Trent Franks (AZ), Louie Gohmert (TX), Thomas Rooney (FL), and Lynn Westmoreland (GA)—open their argument with one of the central lies of Gaffney’s Islamophobia complex: the US government itself, they write, “has established in federal court that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission in the United States is ‘destroying the Western Civilization from within’—a practice the Muslim Brothers call ‘civilization jihad.’” As a result, they contend, “the apparent involvement of those with such ties raises serious security concerns that warrant your urgent attention.”
Setting aside the fact that Bachmann et al. rely entirely on Gaffney—who has been dismissed by fellow conservatives as a “crazy bigot”—for their unsubstantiated claim that Abedin has Brotherhood ties, their supposed proof of the Brotherhood’s theocratic ambitions in the United States is a fabrication. For her proof, Bachmann cites an exhibit from the US government’s prosecution in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing case. Here’s what I wrote about that exhibit, and that case, over a year ago:
This claim that the Muslim Brotherhood’s aim is a worldwide theocracy, and that all American Muslim organizations fall into lock-step with it, stems solely from a single 20-year-old document written by a single Brotherhood member in 1991. In the controversial terrorism financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which first resulted in a mistrial in 2007, and convictions in a 2008 re-trial, federal prosecutors introduced a document, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”
Gaffney and others have seized upon this document developing theories that the goal of “radical Islamists” is a global theocracy and that the Muslim Brotherhood lurks in every corner of America. GWU’s [Nathan] Brown, who testified in the first Holy Land Foundation trial, said, “Nobody has ever produced any evidence that the document was more than something produced by the daydream of one enthusiast.” Noting that he has been studying Palestinian, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, and Jordanian Brotherhood movements since 2005, Brown added, “Nothing in anything that I have heard has ever struck me as similar in tone or content to the ‘master plan.’”
Yet this single document has been used to create a mythology around a supposedly global plot. Brown, addressing the document, notes that “The prosecution in the Holy Land Case painted with a broad brush and probably should not be relied upon. There is indeed a loose coordinating international structure for the Muslim Brotherhood, but it has no real authority over the chapters.” But that hasn’t stopped Gaffney, who said recently, “It is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.”
Based on the ‘explanatory memorandum’ document identifying a number of American Muslim organizations as allies in its author’s aspirations, prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation trial publicly labeled over 200 American Muslim organizations “unindicted co-conspirators,” a highly controversial move derided at the time by legal experts as contrary to Justice Department policy and in violation of the groups’ constitutional rights. Eventually, the court ruled, on the motion of three of the groups, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), that publicly identifying them as “unindicted co-conspirators” did violate their Fifth Amendment rights. That didn’t stop The National Review’s Andrew McCarthy—a former federal prosecutor himself—from falsely claiming at CPAC, “those people were all convicted” in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
Meanwhile, the Family Research Council has just appointed Lt. General William G. “Jerry” Boykin (Ret.) as executive vice president. Boykin, among other things, has claimed that “we need to realize that Islam itself is not just a religion—it is a totalitarian way of life. It’s a legal system, shari’ah law; it’s a financial system; it’s a moral code; it’s a political system; it’s a military system. It should not be protected under the First Amendment, particularly given that those following the dictates of the Qur’an are under an obligation to destroy our Constitution and replace it with shari’ah law.” Bachmann is taking heat from fellow Republicans for her attempted witch hunt of Abedin. But will those Republicans back away from the FRC’s Values Voters Summit this fall in protest of Boykin’s history of Islamophobia?
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, July 19, 2012
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