Fred Thompson, foreign agent
A while back, Karen Tumulty linked on Swampland to a Washington Post article about John Edwards' ties to hedge fund operator Fortress Investment Group and asked me to comment on whether we should care. I said we should, although I couldn't really tell how much, and both Karen and I got some grief from commenters for purportedly flogging the standard MSM line that Edwards is some kind of hypocrite (he's rich! yet he says he wants to help the poor!) and for paying attention to personal and financial matters when we should be writing about health-care policy.
But being on a particular company's payroll can have seriously affect your attitudes toward particular government policies. So here's some interesting information about how Fred Thompson made $760,000 between acting gigs over the past three years, from Jeff Birnbaum's column in today's Post:
According to people he lobbied with, Thompson was an access man. He contacted his old colleagues to learn the latest about bills his client cared about. Thompson was frequently responsible for finding out what [then Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist was planning for asbestos legislation, his spokesman said -- an easy task, given his eight years in the Senate representing Tennessee alongside Frist (both were first elected in 1994).
Thompson's client, London-based Equitas Ltd., held billions of dollars to pay off claims from people sickened by asbestos, a once-common building material. It wanted Congress to limit how much it had to pay into a trust fund to cover those liabilities.
In an earlier era, the term of art for what Thompson did would have been "foreign agent." But a law change in 1995 allowed lobbyists for foreign companies to register simply as run-of-the-mill lobbyists, which permitted them to sidestep detailed disclosure requirements about their activities and to avoid the politically charged "agent" designation.
I tend to think the foreign-agent thing is a red herring. A little background on Equitas, from the FT:
[Equitas was] set up in 1996 to save the Lloyd's insurance market from meltdown. Lloyd's nearly collapsed under claims from the US on policies written before 1993 stemming mainly from asbestos and other pollution-related illnesses. It established Equitas to reinsure these liabilities and give Lloyd's a new start.
There were a lot of Lloyd's investors ("names") in the U.S., too. Equitas is simply a global company, and I don't see how taking money from it is any worse (or better) than taking it from Goldman Sachs or State Farm or Fortress Investments. But I do think the wealth of financial firms, and the willingness of many of them to bestow at least some of it on politicians, is something the rest of us ought to be paying attention to.
In the interest of full transparency, I should note that one of the main guys at Fortress is a college classmate of mine, and paid for the musical entertainment (Dave Wakeling one night, Blues Traveler the next) at our recent 20th reunion. I was there with a seven-year-old and didn't stick around for these late-night performances, though, so I think I'm in the clear here.
Update: David Corn thinks the Washington Post should have given Birnbaum's article much better play.
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1
Fred Thompson is a puppet of Rove. Look into it.
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2
IIRC Dick Armey also lobbied on behalf of a British based reinsurance firm...
is this the same one?
(or am I just getting my Republican Dreadfuls confused again?)
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3
Yup, Armey's been working for Equitas, too. Alongside his DLA Piper colleagues Charles Baker (a big-time Massachusetts Democrat), Matthew Bernstein (a former aide to Ohio Democrat Howard Metzenbaum), and James Blanchard (the former Democratic governor of Michigan).
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4
You referred to this in your posts, but I think it deserves emphasizing - none of this matters unless you think it shows them to be a hypocrite.
In neither Edwards nor Tompsons case is there an actual conflict of interest, more of a bad appearance.
The issue that I think your post points to is publicly funding campaigns so that someone who isn't uber-rich and connected can actually hope to win office in the US.
At this point, we have a weak oligarchy.
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5
Let's see the equivalence here: Edwards worked as a consultant for Fortress, and discussed hedge fund oversight with people who were analysing hedge fund oversight. (Fortress, per the WaPo article, repatriates its profits so that the partners, at least, are paying US taxes on their gains.)
Thompson worked for Equitas, providing inside information on ongoing legislative discussions that materially affect the lives of thousands of others, as well as Equitas, which could use that information to make strategic contacts and donations.
Yeah; clearly the same thing. Next thing you know, you and Tumulty will discover that, back "when derivatives were still considered cutting-edge," Wendy Graham ran the CFTC and worked with her husband (then-Senator Phil) to ensure that derivatives would not be regulated.
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6
"Yup, Armey's been working for Equitas, too. Alongside his DLA Piper colleagues Charles Baker (a big-time Massachusetts Democrat), Matthew Bernstein (a former aide to Ohio Democrat Howard Metzenbaum), and James Blanchard (the former Democratic governor of Michigan)."
Justin... just curious where you get your information. Because while Blanchard is semi-famous, he left office over 15 years ago. The other two are national non-entities who happen to be democrats. So it looks like you either did a LOT of digging to personally come up with these minor democrats who work for Piper, or copied and pasted from some GOP website.
Regardless, however, the attempt to draw an equivalence between a likely GOP presidential candidate and a guy who was the GOP House Majority Leader until five years ago, and these three near-nobodies, is really kinda ridiculous don't you think?
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7
I was just looking at the lobbying disclosure form (there's a link to the pdf here) that DLA Piper filed for its Equitas work, running through the list of names of those working on the account, and clicking on bio pages at the DLA Piper website. Those happened to be the first three I clicked on, and it just kinda cracked me up that they were all Dems. It being the comments section of my own friggin' blog, I didn't think really hard about whether I was drawing an equivalence or not.
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8
"It being the comments section of my own friggin' blog, I didn't think really hard about whether I was drawing an equivalence or not."
sorry justin, but "the rules" are that while we commenters are allowed to say pretty much whatever we want without accepting any responsibility whatsoever, even in the comments section the blogger is held to a much higher standard.
Just think of it as the Paris Hilton rule of celebrity responsibility...
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9
Are you saying I've got to serve jail time?
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