I'm hardly even shocked anymore...
Posted on 03/26/2009 3:22:28 PM PDT by Liz
EXCERPT Rahm Emanuel was director when Freddie Mac board was tipped to a fraudulent bonus scheme. On Rahm Emanuel's watch, the Freddie Mac board was told by executives of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.
The accounting scandal wasn't the only one that brewed during Emanuel's tenure. During his brief time on the board, the company hatched a plan to enhance its political muscle. That scheme, also reviewed by the board, led to a record $3.8 million fine from the Federal Election Commission for illegally using corporate resources to host fundraisers for politicians.
Emanuel was the beneficiary of one of those parties after he left the board and ran in 2002 for a seat in Congress from the North Side of Chicago. The board was throttled for its acquiescence to the accounting manipulation in a 2003 report by Armando Falcon Jr., head of a federal oversight agency for Freddie Mac. The scandal forced Freddie Mac to restate $5 billion in earnings and pay $585 million in fines and legal settlements. It also foreshadowed even harder times at the firm. Many of those same risky investment practices tied to the accounting scandal eventually brought the firm to the brink of insolvency and led to its seizure last year by the Bush administration, which pledged to inject up to $100 billion in new capital to keep the firm afloat. The Obama administration has doubled that commitment.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
In 1999, "Rahm The Perfect" became managing director at their Chicago office. According to Congressional disclosures, Emanuel made $16.2 million in his 2 1/2 year stint as a banker AND he paid all his taxes. Amazingly, Rahm "The Perfect" became a multi-millioniare overnight----and he wasn't even voted "Most Likely To Succeed" (sniffle). At Wasserstein Perella, Rahm worked on eight deals, including the acquisition by Commonwealth Edison of Peco Energy and the purchase by GTCR Golder Rauner of the SecurityLink home security unit from SBC.
Rahm "The Perfect" then ran for Congress (successfully, OF COURSE). Luckily members of the securities and investment industry became Rahm's biggest backers, donating more than $1.5M to back to 2002, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Rahm also leaned heavily upon the industry as 2006 Dem Congressional Campaign Committee Chair. Financial industry donors contributed more than $5.8M to the Dem committee, behind only retirees.
Pres Bill Clinton in 2000 named Rahm to the Board of Directors for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation ("Freddie Mac"). Rahm's position paid him $31,060 in 2000 and $231,655 in 2001 and paid all his taxes. During the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities......(and precipitate the toxic mortgage banking crisis taxpayers are forced to bail out). The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) later accused the board of having "failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention." Emanuel resigned from the board in 2001 when he successfully ran for Congress. In between Rahm's career choices, he won a coveted scholarship to the prestigious Joffrey School of Ballet; he was THAT good in a tutu.
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Selfless, altruistic Rahm even found time to serve with (or in) the Israeli military. Course he's given out several stories about that----probably because the Mossad does not allow public scrutiny of agents it stations in the WH (sniffle).
SELFLESS RAHM HAS GIVEN OUT THIS VERSION He did not serve in the Israeli army. He was a civilian volunteer assisting the Israel Defense Forces during the 1991 Gulf War, repairing truck brakes in one of Israel's northern bases.
ALTRUISTIC RAHM HAS GIVEN OUT THIS VERSION During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was asked by the United States not to militarily respond to the Scud missiles that Iraq was hurling at them. Israel did not .........and Rahm was in Israel to assist them in not responding militarily.
Obama can settle this Islamic smear jihad ONCE AND FOR ALL. Obaba should obtain copies of Rahn's paychecks paychecks to demonstrate that payments to Rahm were NOT coming out of the IDF military budget. Cause if they did, that would wipeout Rahm's US citizenship (sniffle)
So we have a tax cheat(Geithner), a swindler (rahm), an abortion cheerleader (sebelius), an illegal alien marxist (Ears) and a dumb guy with bad hair plugs running the show?
Just great.
You forgot about Madam Wide-Load at Dept of State
Sounds like a cell block at San Quentin.
“So we have a tax cheat(Geithner), a swindler (rahm), an abortion cheerleader (sebelius), an illegal alien marxist (Ears) and a dumb guy with bad hair plugs running the show?”
They call themselves “Democrats”.
In between gigs of selfless public service, Rahmbo set himself up well
Altruistic Rahm - with no banking experience- made up to $18 MILLION in 4 years as an “investment banker”- he brokered 8 deals using his best Chicago pay- to- play technique. Anyone want to compute his hourly billing?
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/rahm-emanuel-former-investment-banker/
So we have a tax cheat(Geithner), a swindler (rahm), an abortion cheerleader (sebelius), an illegal alien marxist (Ears) and a dumb guy with bad hair plugs running the show?
Just great.
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In a word......yes.
Not only that - he set up his house in Chicago as the headquarters of a non profit that has his name on it. As a result - he doesnt pay property taxes on the property.
And - guess what? They have doled out less than $50,000 during the same four years.
There's a great story there for any journalist willing to investigate it.
Gorelick earned an estimated $26,000,000 serving as vice chair of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2003.
The Clinton administration's White House Budget Director Franklin Raines ran Fannie and collected $50,000,000.
Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama's VP search committee, has hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae CEO job. Johnson earned $21,000,000 in just his last year at Fannie Mae.
I am probably gonna go against the grain on this particular point. Ha!!
Personally I think Rahm is an American hating marxist.....but as I mentioned...on the point of his setting up his house as a non-profit....I'd rather he gave ( IF, he actually did give...) his money to private charities...than the city of, or state of "any state" in the Union.
The point is....I can direct my monies better than any state or federal entity. Period!
...”Sounds like a cell block at San Quentin.”
Seems like every damn one has a history of felonious activity that is far from patriotic.
He should be in jail, not one of the men behind the teleprompter. Besides being utterly corrupt, he is one of the ugliest men I have ever seen. It as if evil just oozes out of his pores and creates a look of pure depravity that would make a horror monster cringe with fear.
In late 1998, while Washington was in the throes of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Rahm Emanuel, a departing senior political aide to President Bill Clinton, ventured out to an elegant restaurant in Dupont Circle for something of a job interview, The New York Times’s Michael Luo writes.
John Simpson, who ran the Chicago office of the investment banking boutique Wasserstein Perella & Company, had flown to Washington to meet with Mr. Emanuel at the behest of Mr. Simpson’s boss, Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and renowned Wall Street dealmaker who had gotten to know Mr. Emanuel. “I had this idea that this could work and that it had upside,” Mr. Wasserstein, now chairman and chief executive of Lazard, the investment bank, told The Times. “It worked out better than I could have hoped.” And better than Mr. Emanuel could have imagined as well.
Over the course of a three-hour-plus dinner, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Emanuel discussed how they might work together. Shortly afterward, Mr. Emanuel accepted an offer, nudging him down what has by now become a well-trodden gilded path out of politics and into the lucrative world of business.
Mr. Emanuel, who was chosen last month to become President-elect Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, went on to make more than $18 million in just two-and-a-half years, turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients and directing his negotiating prowess and trademark intensity to mergers and acquisitions. He also benefited from the opportune sale of Wasserstein Perella to a German bank, helping him to an unusually large payout.
The period before he was elected to a House seat from Illinois is a little-known episode of Mr. Emanuel’s biography. Former colleagues said the insight it afforded him on the financial services sector is invaluable especially now. But Mr. Emanuel built up strong ties with an industry now at the heart of the economic crisis, one that will be girding for a pitched lobbying battle next year as the incoming Democratic administration considers a potentially sweeping regulatory overhaul.
After Mr. Emanuel left banking to run for Congress, members of the securities and investment industry became his biggest backers, donating more than $1.5 million to his campaigns dating back to 2002, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mr. Emanuel also leaned heavily upon the industry while he was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 midterm elections. Financial industry donors contributed more than $5.8 million to the committee, behind only retirees. Friends of Mr. Emanuel’s from his private-sector days said he still checks in with them regularly to plumb their insights on economic issues. “He asks me what am I seeing, what business is like, what’s the climate, where are the weak spots,” John A. Canning Jr., chairman of Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago private equity firm that is in the same building as Wasserstein’s offices, told The Times.
Mr. Canning was one of many financial executives Mr. Emanuel met with soon after he left the White House to discuss job prospects, with Mr. Emanuel’s political connections often opening doors. Mr. Canning agreed to sit down with Mr. Emanuel at the recommendation of several friends, including Stanley S. Shuman, an investment banker at Allen & Company and a major Democratic donor who once stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House as a guest of President Clinton’s. Mr. Canning could not offer him a job, but Mr. Emanuel came to pitch deals to him and they became friends. Employees of that particular firm became Mr. Emanuel’s biggest financial supporters in Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
When the House was weighing a measure last year to significantly increase the tax rate on profits earned by private equity firms, Mr. Canning said Mr. Emanuel attended a luncheon with Madison Dearborn executives, first reported by Bloomberg News, to listen to their arguments against the changes. Mr. Emanuel, however, wound up joining other Democrats in voting for the measure.
In an interview, Mr. Emanuel, pointed to other actions he had taken over the objections of the financial industry, including sponsoring a bill last year to curb the ability of hedge fund managers to defer paying taxes on compensation they stashed in offshore tax havens and another measure that imposed new reporting requirements on financial firms for what investors pay on stocks and mutual funds. “I would say I’ve been as tough on my friends as others,” Mr. Emanuel told The Times. “I call it like I see it.”
Confidants of Mr. Emanuel’s said he decided to try his hand at business because he wanted financial security for his family, before eventually returning to public service. “He had a number in his head to make enough for the family,” Ezekiel J. Emanuel, one of Rahm’s two brothers and a prominent bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, told The Times.
It was Morton L. Janklow, the literary agent for several former presidents, who introduced Mr. Emanuel to Mr. Wasserstein. Erskine B. Bowles, the White House chief of staff and a former investment banker, also said he recommended Mr. Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel met in Mr. Wasserstein in his New York office, where they had a wide-ranging discussion about the future of financial regulation, as well as Mr. Emanuel’s plans.
Jeffrey A. Rosen, now deputy chairman of Lazard and a former managing director of Wasserstein Perella’s international practice, said Mr. Emanuel was “both a developed and a raw talent.” “His years in the White House and what he’d done before that really honed what I’d call deal-making instincts, which could be easily translated into the business arena,” Mr. Rosen told The Times. “Plus, he was someone who was well connected in Chicago and highly respected.”
Mr. Emanuel turned out to be an effective banker, proving a quick study with financial concepts, even as he relied on others in his office for heavy number crunching, former colleagues said. He worked 12-hour days and was known among clients for his relentlessness, constantly on the phone or sending e-mail, and being unafraid to pitch deals. Revenue in Wasserstein’s Chicago office climbed significantly after his arrival.
There is no evidence Mr. Emanuel used his political clout on behalf of his clients, but his connections certainly helped drum up business and contributed to his hiring, former colleagues said. Indeed, a partial list of clients from Mr. Emanuel’s Congressional financial disclosure in 2002 is easily linked up to the various strands of his political career, including his time as a fund-raiser for Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago and then for Mr. Clinton’s first presidential run.
The clients included Loral Space & Communications, run by Bernard L. Schwartz, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, who said he got to know Mr. Emanuel while he was in the White House; the Chicago Board Options Exchange, whose chairman and chief executive, William J. Brodsky, became friends with Mr. Emanuel while he was working for Mayor Daley; and Avolar, a business aviation company whose top executive, Stuart I. Oran, was formerly in charge of governmental affairs for United Airlines, a role in which he said he interacted with Mr. Emanuel at the White House.
One of Mr. Emanuel’s major deals was the purchase in 2001 of a home alarm business, SecurityLink, from SBC Communications, the telecommunications company that was run by William M. Daley, the former secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and the brother of Chicago’s mayor.
Mr. Emanuel represented GTCR Golder Rauner, a Chicago private equity firm that was buying the business for an affiliate. Bruce Rauner, the firm’s chairman, had first met Mr. Emanuel when he was still exploring job prospects in Chicago after getting a call from Mr. Bowles, an old friend. Instead of private equity, Mr. Rauner advised Mr. Emanuel to pursue investment banking, where his political experience might be more valuable in landing deals in regulated industries.
Mr. Emanuel called him back after starting at Wasserstein and asked if he could take over coverage of GTCR for his new employer. That eventually led to the nearly $500 million SecurityLink deal. Mr. Emanuel’s biggest transaction came in late 1999 when he landed an advisory role for Wasserstein in the $8.2 billion merger of two utility companies, Unicom, the parent company of Commonwealth Edison, and Peco Energy, to create Exelon, now one of the nation’s largest power companies.
John W. Rowe, the former chief executive of Unicom who now holds the same position at Exelon, sought out Mr. Emanuel after he went to Wasserstein. Mr. Rowe said he believed Mr. Emanuel would offer a different dimension, providing wisdom on what might pass muster at the governmental level. “You can’t understand utility transactions without thinking about whether they’ll play or not play in legal and political circles,” said Mr. Rowe, who was first introduced to Mr. Emanuel by Lester Crown, the billionaire scion of Chicago’s influential Crown family.
Tax returns Mr. Emanuel released while first running for office and reported in news articles, along with Congressional financial disclosures, reveal his steep financial ascent while working at Wasserstein. He earned more than $900,000 in 1999, his first year at the firm; nearly $1.4 million in 2000; and $6.5 million in 2001, when he left the firm in midyear to run for Congress. He collected $9.7 million more from the firm in deferred compensation in 2002.
Mr. Emanuel’s annual salary was not especially large but his hefty paydays came from bonuses for the business he brought in, as is customary in investment banking, along with the company’s sale in 2001 to the German Dresdner Bank, which allowed him to benefit from an equity stake, as well a large retention bonus paid to him based on his prior performance. The bonanza Mr. Emanuel reaped would come in handy when he ran for the House seat vacated by Representative Rod R. Blagojevich, now governor.
Mr. Emanuel contributed $450,000 out of his own pocket to his campaign in the primary, and his leading rival accused him of trying to buy a seat in Congress. --SNIP--
I'm hardly even shocked anymore...
Obama's closest advisors-----Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Dennis Ross, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton----reflect a neocon orientation, even though none of these individuals are actually card-carrying neocons.
White House COS "pledging allegiance" to the USA on inauguration day.
SNARKEY WHINEY EMAIL received from one of the Trip Reporters:
“Sorry if we are not as prescient as you. Emanuel did not support Obama in the primary and Obama did not choose him for chief of staff until after the election. As for failing to expose problems with Chicago politicians, where did you learn about the hiring scandals in the Daley adminatration, or Obama’s ties to Tony Rezko, or all the malfeasance connected to Blagojevich. Those stories all emanated from tough and difficult reporting uncovered by the Tribune that was based on facts, not someone’s hunches.”
Bob Secter
Chicago Tribune
312 222 3297
Bsecter@tribune.com
Madam Wide-Load is running errands for Billy Bob, using the diplomatic pouch to bring back the "payoffs" for all the favors Billy Bob did while in office. She was the bag lady for him in Arkansas and she's his bag lady again. Vince Foster had that job while Billy Bob was in the white house but was retired because he was going to blow the whistle. They blew his brains out first.
I would agree with you except for the fact that this “charity” gave away less than 50K in four years. With all that money he made - you’d think he would given away a bit more than that.
“On Rahm Emanuel’s watch, the Freddie Mac board was told by executives of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass”
His nonprofit charity donates to his synagogue where his kids go to private school. Does his charity pay their tuition?
And his wife is on the board. Does his charity pay her expnses?
Charity begins at home, so the old saying goes.
Does his charity pay her expnses?
You'd think one of these newspapers that are going out of business would dedicate a team to exposing this and the other corrupt fools in this administration to increase their circulation. But - I guess the cause is greater than going out of business
Wonder if that's more than the property taxes would have been?
Personally I'd do the same thing....as it appears it's within the law.
Now as far as giving money away....I've read various reports that Rahm has made millions of dollars in the last few years...And yes, I would have expected him to give away more than $12k a year...
Libs are historically horrible givers...they want Government to do that.
FWIW-
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