No one is surprised or shocked now that it’s been revealed that the president and chief operating officer of MF Global, the firm that conveniently misplaced $1.2 billion of customer money as it slid into bankruptcy, has been a top financial advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency since 2010.
The Democrats under president Obama have shown again and again that they put political patronage so far above public good that the reliably liberal Washington Post is taking notice, even if Congress isn’t.
Let’s face it: Obama doesn’t have supporters, he has investors. He’s probably the first president of the United States who needs an investor relations department.
But Rezko, Soros, Buffett, Kaiser, Immelt, Corzine, Abelow and the rest of the crew aren’t just investors, they’re also Obama’s known associates, capos in the ponzi scheme that now passes for progressive government.
Quick! Tax someone, anyone!
“[A]s the House and Senate interrogated Bradley I. Abelow and other top executives at MF Global Holdings Ltd.,” reports the Washington Times, “lawmakers did not mention Mr. Abelow’s role as a financial adviser for the Environmental Protection Agency, which as of Tuesday listed him as the chairman of its financial advisory board. Even as he finds himself the public face of a bankruptcy and admitted to lawmakers that he had no idea how client funds disappeared, Congress and the administration have voiced no public concern about Mr. Abelow’s role advising the $8.6 billion government agency on its finances.”
Why should they? This is a government that has lost literally trillions of dollars in the last ten years, and then brags about it.
“We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet,” said Senator Michael Bennet (D-Obamacare), “in my view we have nothing to show for it.”
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And then Bennet voted, advocated and campaigned for spending more trillions even as he admitted the Democrats had failed to show any return of their investment.
But why should Bennet care?
He made his fortune in true progressive style by not showing any return on investment when he forced school teachers and firefighters to take huge losses on their investments in a group of movie theaters now known as Regal Cinemas.
That’s right: Before he was Senator Bennet, he was a wiz kid of Wall Street. His bio credits him with a restructuring of debt in the Regal Cinemas deal. But the facts show a US Senator in the making.
Bennet bought out a group of bankrupt companies for pennies on the dollars and forced small investors, including the Louisiana teachers pension fund to take huge losses while loading the company up with billions in debt- again. The new debt of $1.6 billion went to pay back Bennet and his Wall Street benefactors via a fat dividend. The total take for Bennet and his buddies was $1.4 billion profit.
“Ratings agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poors downgraded Regal’s debt to negative,” at the time, writes the Cherry Creek News. “A Moody’s VP said, ‘It’s pretty mind-boggling to me that this company, recently out of bankruptcy, will pay out $1.6 billion’” to Bennet and his known associates.
Since then investors have lost another $1.5 billion as Regal stock traded from $22 to about $12 currently.
No wonder then-Colorado Governor Bill Ritter appointed Bennet to the US Senate when then-Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar was appointed as Secretary of the Interior. Bennet’s $3 billion boondoggle makes the investment in Solyndra look shrewd. It seems Bennet was a natural for US Senator.
These are the guys who are both publicly and privately running our government of hope and change.
But as conservatives I say we should welcome them even more warmly to politics. And we should invite their friends too.
Because I think it’s long past time to ask investors in the Obama administration to appear before Congress and testify about their investments over the last few years of the Democrat ascendancy.
All those people like Soros, Buffett, Bennet, Kaiser- Solyndra-and Abelow who always seem to be in the right place and right time investment-wise, and politically too, can show up and tell us about the genius required to invest when supplied with government information from top policy makers.
Soros can tell us about his Lightsquared investment or the investments he made in natural gas vehicles that Nancy Pelosi seems to favor.
Buffett can talk about what he knew and when he knew it when he decided to invest in Goldman Sachs right before the government bailed them out. Buffett can tell us why he's one of the world's top investors in US government bailout companies as he writes letters in support of higher taxes on everyone besides himself.
Because Buffett's call to tax millionaires and billionaires has a little different ring when you know the money is going to support companies his company owns.
Well, they wanted to get involved in politics. And they are too.
I say conservatives should invite them all the way in.
Especially if the invitation comes in the form of a subpoena.
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