Dick Armey’s Clients Required The Bailouts That Armey’s FreedomWorks Is Now Protesting
Dick Armey’s Clients Required The Bailouts That Armey’s FreedomWorks Is Now Protesting
As ThinkProgress has been documenting, the anti-Obama “tea parties” going on today are not the “grassroots” effort that organizers claim, but are actually the work of corporate lobbyists, aided and abetted by Fox News. Lee Fang pointed out that one of those lobbyists — former Majority Leader and current FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey (R-TX) — is one of DC’s top “hired guns,” and FreedomWorks is one of those orchestrating the “grassroots” tea party movement.
With the tea parties, FreedomWorks is organizing protests against “a federal government run amok with economic bailouts.” However, Armey’s lobbying firm represented three of the financial behemoths that brought the economy to its knees, necessitating such a widespread government response in the first place. In just the last year, Armey’s firm, DLA Piper, has represented:
The reasons for the lobbying listed on these institutions’ disclosure forms range from “Congressional hearings on financial services crisis” and tax issues to simply “policies affecting securities firms.” DLA Piper also represented TARP recipient Discover Financial Services.
Let’s look at these institutions for a moment. AIG attached a hedge fund to its insurance company, and wound up with $40 billion in credit default swaps that it couldn’t honor. It then paid out $165 million in bonuses, after being kept alive with $170 billion in taxpayer money.
Merrill Lynch incurred catastrophic losses on subprime mortgages, and was rescued by Bank of America, which needed an infusion of taxpayer money upon realizing the extent of Merrill’s losses. Merrill also paid out $3.6 million in bonuses right before merging with BofA. Lehman, meanwhile, went bankrupt after mucking about in subprime mortgages, sending a shock through the financial system, and ensuring that the government would not allow another big investment bank to fail.
These are the kinds of characters that Armey’s firm represents, and its a safe bet that DLA Piper wasn’t enlisted to push for tougher regulations or more stringent capital requirements. And now Armey is helping to orchestrate “protests” against the very actions taken to bring the economy back from the brink to which these financial institutions helped push it.
4 Responses to “Dick Armey’s Clients Required The Bailouts That Armey’s FreedomWorks Is Now Protesting”
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Another hiccup in the script of the Red team is Ken Duberstein. He sat on the board of Fannie Mae from 1998-2007. SEC filings indicate Mr. Duberstein got over $1.8 million in consulting fees for regulatory consultation.
Ken was President Reagan’s Chief of Staff and chaired the George W. Bush transition team in 2000.
I’ve noticed a pattern in the media. Presidential Chiefs of Staff are rarely mentioned as likely influence peddlers. Clinton’s Mack McLarty is up to his boots in corporate machinations as Senior Adviser to The Carlyle Group. What did Mack do to help his and Carlyle’s auto related investments since Wall Street imploded and people parked their wallets? You won’t see that story in the media.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:56 amDick’s Tea Parties are the front stage action, intended to involve and manipulate the masses.
His money changing at DLA Piper is the back stage stuff. That’s where the Reds and Blues compete hardest. It’s over Greenbacks.
When a “communist, socialist, fascist” President Obama meets with CEO’s and talks about lowering corporate income taxes over time, that’s back stage stuff. It also shows the front stage to be an abject farce.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:59 amNotice also the rising focus on bogus protest groups and organizations? Speaking of that, recall the massive but now-silent “911 Truth Movement”, another well-funded “protest group” with a rather Orwellian agenda? Or how about the “public protest” of Clinton in the late 1990s? Then you’ve got undercover police dressing up in black masks at NAFTA and G20 protests and going on rampages for the cameras? See the Guardian UK:
“The police have been talking up violence at the G20 protests for weeks,” writes Monbiot. “The way officers tooled themselves up in riot gear and waded into a peaceful crowd this afternoon makes it look almost as if they were trying to ensure that their predictions came true.”
Or how about the curious “Recreate 68″ campaign sponsored by the Amy Goodman’s Ford Foundation-financed Democracy Now! outfit? Set up to target Democrats, not Republicans – ever wonder about that? In 1968, the party in power was the Democrats, true – but any real “Recreate 68″ campaign in 2008 would have targeted Republicans, not Democrats.
There’s a lot of propaganda on the left and on the right – much of it financed by opaque private foundations.
April 15th, 2009 at 12:00 pmI’d hardly call the protest groups ‘bogus’.
The right-leaning people I know who are participating are angrier with the Repooplicans for selling them out.
They also go out of their way to point out that at least the Democraps were up front about it.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:54 am