1993 L.A. Times explains why Bill and Hillary Clinton are so close to Wall Street...

[Octafish]

The following piece was written by the great journalist Barbara Demick, once of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It ran three days before the inauguration of President Clinton in 1993:

Clinton's Wealth Of Support

An Arkansas Family Has Been A Backer,
And A Source Of Controversy.

By Barbara Demick
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER STAFF WRITER, January 17, 1993

EXCERPT...

Early in the game, the Stephenses raised $100,000 in Arkansas to get Clinton's candidacy up and running. Then last spring, when Clinton was trailing both George Bush and Ross Perot, Worthen Bank supplied the cash- starved campaign with a $3.5 million line of credit.

SNIP...

The centerpiece of the family's $1 billion empire is Stephens Inc., one of the largest investment banking firms off Wall Street. In addition to its 38 percent interest in Worthen Bank, the family owns stakes in oil and natural gas, utilities, nursing homes, waste management, diamond mining and hog farming.

SNIP...

The Stephens businesses are often represented by the Rose law firm, where Hillary Clinton has been a partner. Until the mid-1980s, they owned Arkla Inc., the Shreveport, La., natural-gas utility from which Clinton tapped chairman Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty as his White House chief of staff. Their investment firm serves as business manager to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason, the Hollywood couple who helped choreograph Clinton's public image.

SNIP...

In 1978, federal securities regulators alleged that Stephens, along with Lance, helped Middle Eastern investors linked to BCCI secretly buy up shares in a Washington bank. Stephens and the others settled the civil lawsuit by signing a consent decree in which they neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

SNIP...

The Stephenses have extensive holdings in natural gas, a resource strongly supported by Clinton. They, along with Bradbury, have been vocal proponents of easing banking regulations - in particular the limits on interstate banking and the Glass-Steagal Act, which separates banks from brokerage firms.

CONTINUED...

http://articles.philly.com/1993-01-17/news/25959645_1_worthen-bank-stephens-family-bill-clinton

The whole article is worth reading if you want to understand Ms. Clinton and where she's coming from -- and where she will lead.

[tonyt53]

1. Your post is a sign of desperation

[reddread]

2. information equals desperation?

no kidding?

[NWCorona]

3. Agreed!

[brentspeak]

6. DU is being inundated with automated Hillary-sponsored "Correct the Record" bot trolls

Your response to the bot troll probably won't even be read.

[reddread]

7. by others at least

You are correct and it saddens me.
let this be the last time we put up with falseness.

[KoKo]

8. I checked out their profile.....

Bot Troll. Couldn't be clearer...

Desperation.

[Octafish]

4. Yeah, as in ''I'm desperate to see Justice return to the USA.''

For instance, UBS Wealth Management.

These are the wealthiest times in human history. The steward of trickle down David Stockman reports that 7/8th of all wealth ever has been created in the last 32 years. Yet, a Democratic administration makes the case that the solution for our problems is...Austerity? That is sick. It also shows the power of money upon democracy.

For me, the best example is the team at UBS Wealth Management. After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm found a job at Swiss bank UBS as vice chairman. He later brought on former President Bill Clinton. What a coincidence, they are the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagal. Since the New Deal it was the financial regulation that protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino. Oh well, what's a $16 trillion bailout among friends?



About UBS Wealth Management

It's Buy Partisan



It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:

President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool

SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html

One of my attorney chums doesn't like to see his name on any committees, event letterhead or political campaign literature. These folks, it seems to me, are past caring.

Some of why DUers and ALL voters should care about Phil Gramm.

Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic, JUL 31, 2015

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.

SNIP...

As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, “Ten of the world’s biggest financial institutions––including UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs––have hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundation––the family’s global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/

Bernie wants to use the powers of government to redistribute wealth, as was done from FDR to Reagan.

To see him so virulently opposed by people in the Democratic Party, of all places, shows the power of money in what used to be a Democracy.

[KoKo]

9. Phil and Wendy Gramm-"Too Big to Fail..Too Big to Jail" Corruption, Inc.

Why those two live such charmed lives...escape all prosecution..is another symptom of how our Government has been infested. Thanks Octafish...no one even speaks about them, anymore.

------------

Enron And the Gramms
By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 17, 2002

When Senator Phil Gramm and his wife Wendy danced, it was most often to Enron's tune.

Mr. Gramm, a Texas Republican, is one of the top recipients of Enron largess in the Senate. And he is a demon for deregulation. In December 2000 Mr. Gramm was one of the ringleaders who engineered the stealthlike approval of a bill that exempted energy commodity trading from government regulation and public disclosure. It was a gift tied with a bright ribbon for Enron.

Wendy Gramm has been influential in her own right. She, too, is a demon for deregulation. She headed the presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration. And she was chairwoman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1988 until 1993.

In her final days with the commission she helped push through a ruling that exempted many energy futures contracts from regulation, a move that had been sought by Enron. Five weeks later, after resigning from the commission, Wendy Gramm was appointed to Enron's board of directors.

According to a report by Public Citizen, a watchdog group in Washington, ''Enron paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in salary, attendance fees, stock options and dividends from 1993 to 2001.''

As a board member, Ms. Gramm has served on Enron's audit committee, but her eyesight wasn't any better than that of the folks at Arthur Andersen. The one thing Enron did not pay big bucks for was vigilance.

There's a lot more you can say about the Gramms and Enron, and not much of it good. But Phil and Wendy Gramm are just convenient symptoms of the problem that has contributed so mightily to the Enron debacle and other major scandals of our time, from the savings and loan disaster to the Firestone tires fiasco. That problem is the obsession with deregulation that has had such a hold on the Republican Party and corporate America.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/17/opinion/enron-and-the-gramms.html

[Octafish]

11. Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come

By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone, January 4, 2013

EXCERPT...

So what did bailout officials do? They put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it past Congress a second time. That process began almost exactly four years ago – on January 12th and 15th, 2009 – when Larry Summers, the senior economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a pair of letters to Congress. The pudgy, stubby­fingered former World Bank economist, who had been forced out as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science, begged legislators to reject Vitter's bill and leave TARP alone.

In the letters, Summers laid out a five-point plan in which the bailout was pitched as a kind of giant populist program to help ordinary Americans. Obama, Summers vowed, would use the money to stimulate bank lending to put people back to work. He even went so far as to say that banks would be denied funding unless they agreed to "increase lending above baseline levels." He promised that "tough and transparent conditions" would be imposed on bailout recipients, who would not be allowed to use bailout funds toward "enriching shareholders or executives." As in the original TARP bill, he pledged that bailout money would be used to aid homeowners in foreclosure. And lastly, he promised that the bailouts would be temporary – with a "plan for exit of government intervention" implemented "as quickly as possible."

The reassurances worked. Once again, TARP survived in Congress – and once again, the bailouts were greenlighted with the aid of Democrats who fell for the old "it'll help ordinary people" sales pitch. "I feel like they've given me a lot of commitment on the housing front," explained Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat from Alaska.

But in the end, almost nothing Summers promised actually materialized. A small slice of TARP was earmarked for foreclosure relief, but the resultant aid programs for homeowners turned out to be riddled with problems, for the perfectly logical reason that none of the bailout's architects gave a shit about them. They were drawn up practically overnight and rushed out the door for purely political reasons – to trick Congress into handing over tons of instant cash for Wall Street, with no strings attached. "Without those assurances, the level of opposition would have remained the same," says Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a leading progressive who voted against TARP. The promise of housing aid, in particular, turned out to be a "paper tiger."

HAMP, the signature program to aid poor homeowners, was announced by President Obama on February 18th, 2009. The move inspired CNBC commentator Rick Santelli to go berserk the next day – the infamous viral rant that essentially birthed the Tea Party. Reacting to the news that Obama was planning to use bailout funds to help poor and (presumably) minority homeowners facing foreclosure, Santelli fumed that the president wanted to "subsidize the losers' mortgages" when he should "reward people that could carry the water, instead of drink the water." The tirade against "water drinkers" led to the sort of spontaneous nationwide protests one might have expected months before, when we essentially gave a taxpayer-funded blank check to Gamblers Anonymous addicts, the millionaire and billionaire class.

CONTINUED...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104?page=2

The corruption, as shown by ENRON and the Banksters and just about everything else that puts the interests of the 1-percent of 1-percent at the top of the agenda in Washington is Buy-Partisan.

[BernieforPres2016]

5. What was Worthen Bank is now part of Bank of America

Worthen was acquired by Boatmen's Bank (formerly run by Bush 41's younger brother) in 1995. Nations Bank acquired Boatmen's Bank in 1996. In 1998, Nations Bank acquired Bank of America and took on the Bank of America name. All of this happened during the flurry of banking consolidation during the Clinton administration, enabled by repeal of Glass-Steagall and deregulation of financial services.

[Octafish]

16. BCCI: The Bank of the CIA

There once was a bank from Karachi that helped the connected class move money and other stuff around all the way to Little Rock, Arkansas and beyond...

BCCI: Bank of the CIA

Jack Colhoun
Covert Action Quaterly, Spring 1993

Jack Colhoun was Washington correspondent for the (New York) Guardian news weekly from 1980 to 1992. He has a Ph.D. in history and specializes in post-World War II U.S. foreign policy. His soon-to-be-published book The George Bush File (Los Angeles: ACCESS, 1993) includes reprints of several of his articles cited below.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal opens a window with a spectacular view of a subject usually shrouded in secrecy: How the CIA uses banks to finance clandestine operations.


The view is spectacular because BCCI, which earned the moniker the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International,” worked closely with former Director of Central Intelligence William Casey and the Reagan administration’s off-the-shelf arms Enterprise. BCCI financed some of the Enterprise’s arms-for-hostages deals with Iran. Arms merchants linked to the October Surprise banked with BCCI. The CIA funneled funds through the bank to underwrite the Agency’s secret wars in Afghanistan and Nicaragua.

But BCCI’s ties to the shadowy world of intelligence go deeper. Clark Clifford and Richard Helms--retired, but still connected senior members of the U.S. intelligence community--helped pave the way for BCCI’s secret acquisition of the Washington, D.C.-based banking network, Financial General Bankshares. Sheikh Kamal Adham, the founder of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, also played a key role on behalf of BCCI in the takeover of Financial General, which was renamed First American Bankshares.

Casey met “every few months” with Agha Hassan Abedi, the Pakistani founder of BCCI, in Washington, D.C. and Islamabad, Pakistan, over a three-year period in the 1980s. Casey and Abedi talked about Iran-Contra arms deals, the Agency-funded war in Afghanistan, and the ever volatile situation in the Persian Gulf. Abedi even made arrangements for Casey’s travels in Pakistan.1

1. For the Casey-Abedi meetings, see Peter Truell and Larry Gutwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 133; and NBC News, Sunday Today, February 23, 1992.

Abedi founded BCCI in 1972 in Pakistan, but the bank’s main office was in London. BCCI also had major international banking centers in the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, where banking regulations are virtually nonexistent. By 1991, when it was shut down by international banking regulators, BCCI had branches in more than 70 countries. This far-flung network was well suited as a clandestine conduit for financing weapons transactions, arranging bribes, and laundering money. Not surprisingly, the CIA had accounts at BCCI branches around the world, including more than 40 separate accounts at First American in Washington.

BCCI, utilizing its operations in the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, escaped the scrutiny of international banking regulators. It moved money around the world for weapons merchants and intelligence operatives through a convoluted web of BCCI accounts and shell companies designed to camouflage the transactions. The bank’s good connections in the Third World enabled it to provide local financing for arms deals and covert operations.

“What Abedi had in his hand was magic,” said a former BCCI official. “Abedi had branches and banks in at least 50 Third World countries. The BCCI people in all of these countries were on a first-name basis with the prime ministers, the presidents, the finance ministers, the elite in these countries--and their wives and mistresses.” Casey could ask Abedi whether a country’s leader had “a girlfriend or a foreign currency account,” the BCCI official continued. “Abedi could say: ‘We’ll tell you how much he’s salted abroad and how much money he gives to his girlfriend.’“ 2

CONTINUED...

BUSTED link, Internet Archive spammed by bots...

Original DU2 thread from 2007:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5205337

Thank you for the heads's up on Worthen's evolution into the Too Big To Fail universe spun by Capitalism's Invisible Army.

[JEB]

10. Money and power,

one hand washing the other.

[Octafish]

12. The Cement Life Raft - Prof. Elizabeth Warren briefs First Lady Clinton on Bankruptcy Bill

Elizabeth Warren describes briefing First Lady Hillary Clinton about a bankruptcy bill that would hurt single mothers and children:

In this excerpt from Warren and Tyagi's 2003 book The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, the authors lay out their arguments against the "predatory" lending practices of the mortgage and credit card industries and their effect on American families. The authors maintain that re-regulation of consumer lending is needed to level the playing field between creditors and families and reverse a disturbing trend: the transfer of wealth away from lower- and middle-income families, "directly into the pockets of giant lenders and their shareholders." Read Elizabeth Warren's interview with FRONTLINE elsewhere on this site.


EXCERPT...

Mrs. Clinton's newfound opposition to the bankruptcy bill surprised me. Given her legal training and her devotion to women's causes, I had certainly expected her to grasp the importance of the issue. But President Clinton's staff had been quietly supporting the bankruptcy bill for several months. Bill Clinton wanted to show that he and other "New Democrats" could play ball with business interests, and the major banks were lobbying hard for changes in the bankruptcy laws. I had expected that it would take a lot more than thirty minutes to convince Hillary Clinton to depart from the position widely rumored to be supported by her husband.

But Mrs. Clinton stayed firm in her fight against "that awful bill." She was convinced that the bill was "unfair to women and children," and she intended to stand by her principles, even if it cost some Democratic party candidates campaign contributions. Over the ensuing months, she was true to her word. With her strong support, the Democrats slowed the bill's passage through Congress. When Congress finally passed the bill in October 2000, President Clinton vetoed it. The following summer, an aide explained to me the abrupt about-face: "A couple of days after Mrs. Clinton met with you, we changed sides (on the bankruptcy bill) so fast that you could see skid marks in the hallways of the White House." Thanks to Mrs. Clinton, families still had one financial refuge left -- at least for the moment.

But the story doesn't end there. The banking lobbyists were persistent. President Clinton was on his way out, and credit card giant MBNA emerged as the single biggest contributors to President Bush's campaign. In the spring of 2001, the bankruptcy bill was reintroduced in the Senate, essentially unchanged from the version President Clinton had vetoed the previous year.

This time freshman Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the bill.

Had the bill been transformed to get rid of all those awful provisions that had so concerned First Lady Hillary Clinton? No. The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not. As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs. Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York's newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn't coming from families in financial trouble. Senator Clinton received $140,000 in campaign contributions from banking industry executives in a single year, making her one of the top two recipients in the Senate. Big banks were now part of Senator Clinton's constituency. She wanted their support, and they wanted hers -- including a vote in favor of "that awful bill."

CONTINUED...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/more/cement.html

What Machiavelli taught Karl Rove's bosses: "Money to gain power. Power to protect wealth."

[JEB]

13. Everything is for sale including

the well being of women and children.

[KoKo]

14. ...!

[MisterP]

15. the Clintons' only criterion is personal loyalty: if you give 100% they trust you

101% back; if you only gave 99%--well, anything bad that happens is your fault

I'd highly suggest that we all make the superdelegates aware of this little nugget

[amborin]

17. thanks for posting, Octafish

[asuhornets]

18. Didn't the LA Times endorsed Hillary this week...n/t