December 5, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Tucker Carlson, Paul
Singer, and the Future of the Republican Party
Friends,
Tucker Carlson continues to be one of the few on-air
television personalities who is not afraid to address the very real profound
issues and questions which confront this decaying and corrupted American nation…issues
which most Republicans AND conservatives studiously avoid or refuse to address.
That is not to say that everything Carlson reports or says is cutting edge—after
all he still must manage to navigate the perilous Neocon “glass ceiling” which
increasingly dominates at Fox News. Yet, he has one major advantage which,
hopefully, will insure his survival: his prime time program, “Tucker Carlson
Tonight,” is top-ranked, and to attempt to end it, well, there would be a
tsunami backlash against Fox if that were to happen.
On Tuesday night, December 3, Carlson was in rare form. Midway
during his program he launched a very powerful monologue, accompanied by a
filmed special report on what occurred in and to the town of Sidney, Nebraska,
when its main employer, Cabelas, was taken over by a hedge fund manipulator,
then merged, with the resultant job loss of almost the entirety of the town’s
workforce.
The object of his powerful slings and arrows? Republican
fat-cat hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer and the cynical devastation his financial
actions have wrought on Middle America—and Sidney—that is, on many of the very citizens who voted for
Donald Trump.
And Carlson took no prisoners.
A little background—here are snippets of what Wikipedia (not a
“right wing” source) says about Singer:
Singer has contributed more than $1
million to the political efforts of the Koch brothers. In 2014, Singer led a group of major
Republican donors to form the American Opportunity Alliance, a group that
brings together wealthy Republican
donors who share Singer's support for LGBTQ rights, open borders immigration
reform and Israel. During the 2016 Presidential election
campaign Singer
supported Marco
Rubio and donated
a million dollars in March to the Our Principles PAC, a
PAC attempting to derail Donald
Trump's election
campaign…. Singer was a major contributor to George
W. Bush's presidential
campaigns. On March 14, 2008, Singer hosted a Republican National Committee luncheon in his home for 70 guests that
raised $1.4 million for Bush. Bush appointed Singer to serve on the
Honorary Delegation to accompany him to Jerusalem for the celebration of the 60th anniversary
of the State
of Israel in May
2008…..In 2011 Singer donated $1 million to Restore Our Future, a Super
PAC created to
support Mitt
Romney in
the 2012 U.S. Presidential
election….. He has
also donated millions of dollars to organizations that advocate for a strong
military and for supporting Israel.… He also served on the board of directors for
the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs…..
As well as contributing to private
initiatives, Singer also actively seeks
to persuade other Republicans to support gay marriage. He has
joined other Wall Street executives in support of LGBT equality
and stated that same-sex marriage promotes "family stability" and
that in a time when "the institution of marriage in America has utterly
collapsed," the fact that gay couples want to marry "is kind of a
lovely thing and a cool thing and a wonderful thing."
Singer, whose son Andrew married
his husband Corey Morris in a same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2009, has
also financially supported the legalization of gay marriage in New York and Maryland. In 2011
this advocacy included supporting legislation allowing same-sex marriage in the state of New
York.
In 2012 Singer provided $1 million
to start a Political Action Committee named American Unity PAC. According to
the New York Times, the
PAC's "sole mission will be to encourage Republican candidates to support
same-sex marriage, in part by helping them to feel financially shielded from
any blowback from well-funded groups that oppose it." In 2014 Singer
urged Republicans to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This bill requires workplace protections to
extend to the LGBT community. As of
June 2014 Singer had donated an estimated $10 million to the gay rights
movement. In 2015 Singer, Tim Gill and Daniel
Loeb helped
fund Freedom For All Americans to promote LGBT issues in states and local communities in the United
States. [bolding mine]
There you have it: a cosmopolitan,
hedge fund financial capitalist manipulator, a zealous advocate for same sex
marriage, and a globalist internationalist. In other words, your ideal
Establishment Republican. And Singer makes his wishes become real—he contributes
heavily to Republican senators to insure that his views continue to dominate.
In other words, he is a kind of “Republican George Soros”!
In the segment on Tuesday night,
Carlson also took a much-deserved swipe at Nebraska GOP Senator Ben Sasse.
Sasse, of course, is touted in the “conservative mainstream” as an
up-and-coming star, a Never Trumper who boasts all the necessary credentials
for advancing in the ranks to prime time, perhaps even to a future presidential
run (on behalf of the Republican and conservative establishment). He’s
pro-globalist and interventionist, shares all the domestic narratives of the
establishment, won’t rock the boat and disturb things…oh, and he received big donations
from…Paul Singer.
At the end of his commentary and
report about the disastrous effects, not only economically but socially, on
Sidney, Nebraska, which Singer’s cold manipulations had produced, Carlson
mentioned that he had reached out to Sasse for comment. Sasse’s staff finally
got back to Carlson Wednesday, and his response—if you want to call it that—was
that he was “sorry” about what happened to Sidney, and that we needed to look
for “creative solutions”!
Not a word, nothing critical of
Singer and his veritable financial rape of American business (and destruction
of Sidney), nothing about these new heartless and ruthless “robber barons” who
care not a whit for us “deplorables.” As Carlson added, at least the older
generation of millionaires, the Henry Fords and the Andrew Carnegies had a
sense of social duty to the nation that had enabled them to make their fortunes,
and at least they endowed universities, supported education, and paid their
employees well. Not today, not with the GOP fat-cat ravages by the likes of
Paul Singer and others like him. Singer gives capitalism a deservedly bad name,
in fact, his praxis is the perversion of it.
Yesterday, briefly while in my car,
I caught a bit of the Rush Limbaugh program. Asked about who could or might
succeed Donald Trump in 2024 and continue the Trumpian revolution (with all its weaknesses and U-turns) against the
Deep State, Limbaugh declared that there
was no one on the horizon, yet, who might fill that bill. Indeed, the
Republican Establishment continues to flex its muscle: Georgia Governor
Brian Kemp has just appointed pro-Planned Parenthood businessman (and
sometime Never Trumper) Kelly Loeffler to the United State senate position
vacated by the ailing Johnny Isakson…despite the recommendation of President
Trump that he appoint Georgia Representative Doug Collins, a staunch supporter of the
president.
There is a memorable epigram
attributed to French journalist, Jean-Baptiste Karr (circa 1848): "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même
chose"— that is, "the more things change, the more they
stay the same." Apparently, this is the motto of the establishment
Republican Party, despite the advent of Donald Trump: first, oppose him strenuously;
then, when he becomes president, attempt to surround him and influence him (cf.
John Bolton, General Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and the various apparatchiks of the
administrative Deep State who continue to exercise unelected power in the Trump
White House); next, turn on him when he might be down; and, finally, retake
complete control when he departs…as if the “Trump Episode” was just a bad
nightmare. Ah, and then, roll out a Ben
Sasse or a sycophantic (“former” Never Trumper) like Nikki Haley.
Maybe
we should begin asking, imploring Tucker Carlson to consider running in 2024?
Right now, I cannot think of anyone else with the necessary level of
intelligence and understanding to take the reins of this failing nation….
*****
Here
is a partial text of Carlson’s commentary of Tuesday night, December 3; please access the video link…the
segment is about eleven minutes long, but well worth the time.
Tucker
Carlson: How Paul Singer, Hedge Funds Are Destroying Rural America
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: If
you’ve spent any time driving around America recently, you may have noticed
that an awful lot of the country seems to have shriveled up and died. Take
a trip on route two in Maine some time and count the boarded-up paper mills and
abandoned houses. Or head down route 23 in Michigan or Ohio and consider the
empty factories ringed with barbed wire. Outside the coastal cities, scenes
like this are everywhere. Shuttered car dealerships, next to defunct
restaurants, across the street from thrift stores and methadone clinics.
Community after community, desiccated. Empty husks, with nothing left. Huge
swaths of the United States look like this now. What happened?
A lot of things, some of them complicated and hard to change. But one of the big factors in this slow-moving disaster is the utter transformation of the way our leaders think about the American economy. During the last gilded age, 125 years ago, America’s ruling class may have been ostentatiously rich, but it was still recognizably American. Tycoons accumulated fortunes, but they also felt some obligation to the country around them. Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie famously built stone libraries around the country, for the edification of the poor. John D. Rockefeller and many other so-called robber barons set aside huge portions of their wealth to make the country better. In January of 1914, Henry Ford more than doubled the prevailing factory wage, to a then-astounding five dollars for an eight hour day. Ford didn’t have to do it, but his company was succeeding and he thought he should. Some historians trace the creation of the American middle class to Henry Ford’s decision. Either way, it’s nearly impossible a big company doing anything like that today. Attitudes are just too different. Your average finance mogul looks at workers merely as costs to be reduced or eliminated. Private equity isn’t building a lot of public libraries these days.
Instead the model is ruthless economic efficiency: buy a distressed company, outsource the jobs, liquidate the valuable assets, fire middle management, and once the smoke has cleared, dump what remains to the highest bidder, often in Asia. It has happened around the country. It has made a small number of people phenomenally rich. One of them is a New York-based Hedge Fund manager called Paul Singer, who according to Forbes has amassed a personal fortune of more than $3 billion dollars. Singer made a lot of his money by purchasing sovereign debt from financially-distressed countries, usually at a massive discount. Once a country’s economy regained some stability, Singer would bombard its government with lawsuits, until he made his money back with interest. The practice is called vulture capitalism — feeding off the carcass of a dying nation. In some ways, it’s not so different from what Singer and his firm, Elliott Management, have done in this country. Over the past couple of decades, Elliott has made billions by buying large stakes in American companies, firing workers, driving up short-term share prices, and in some cases, taking government bailouts. Bloomberg News has described Singer as “the world’s most feared investor,” which tells you a lot. No one’s even pretending Paul Singer’s tactics are good for anyone but Paul Singer and his fund.
Consider the case of Delphi, the automotive parts supplier. During the last financial crisis, a consortium of hedge funds, including Singer’s Elliott Management, purchased Delphi. With Singer and the other funds at the helm, the company took billions of dollars in government bailouts. Obama’s auto-czar compared the tactics to extortion. Once they had the bailout money, the funds moved most of Delphi’s jobs overseas, and then either cut retiree pensions entirely or shifted the costs to taxpayers. With lighter financial commitments at home, and cheap factories abroad, Delphi’s stock soared. According to investigative reporter Greg Palast, of the 29 Delphi plants in operation when the hedge funds started buying Delphi debt, only four were still operating in the United States by 2012. Tens of thousands of unionized and white-collar workers lost their jobs. Paul Singer’s hedge fund cashed out for more than a billion dollars.
Some countries, including the United Kingdom, have banned this kind of behavior. It bears no resemblance to the capitalism we were promised in school. It creates nothing. It destroys entire cities. It couldn’t be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in this country? Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our political process. Singer himself was the second biggest donor to the Republican Party in 2016. He’s given millions to a super PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never have heard of Paul Singer. But in Washington, he’s rock star famous. That may be why he’s almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate than your average fireman. Just in case you’re still wondering if the system is rigged.
Tonight we want to tell you a little more about how Paul Singer does business. The story begins in a small town called Sidney, Nebraska, population 6,282. Two hours outside Denver, Sidney is the longtime home of the sporting goods retailer Cabela’s.
In October 2015, Singer’s hedge fund disclosed an 11 percent stake in Cabela’s and set about pushing the board to sell the company. Cabela’s management, fearing a long and costly fight with Singer, announced it would look for a buyer. At the time, Cabela’s was healthy. The company was posting nearly $2 billion a year in gross profits, off $4 billion in revenue. There was no immediate need to sell. But they did anyway. One year after Singer entered the equation, Bass Pro Shops announced the purchase of Cabela’s. The company’s stock price surged. Within a week, Singer cashed out. He’d bought the stock for $38 a share. He sold it for $63. His hedge fund made at least $90 million up front, and likely more over time.
But in Sidney, Nebraska, it was a very different story. The residents of Sidney didn’t get rich. Just the opposite. Their community was destroyed. The town lost nearly 2,000 jobs. A heartbreakingly familiar cascade began: people left, property values collapsed, and then people couldn’t leave. They were trapped there. One of the last thriving small towns in America went under. We recently sent two producers to Sidney, to survey the wreckage and consider what happened. Our producers talked to more than a dozen former Cabela’s employees. Almost all of them refused to speak on camera, fearful of legal retribution from the famously vicious Paul Singer…. [continue with the video access above listed]
A lot of things, some of them complicated and hard to change. But one of the big factors in this slow-moving disaster is the utter transformation of the way our leaders think about the American economy. During the last gilded age, 125 years ago, America’s ruling class may have been ostentatiously rich, but it was still recognizably American. Tycoons accumulated fortunes, but they also felt some obligation to the country around them. Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie famously built stone libraries around the country, for the edification of the poor. John D. Rockefeller and many other so-called robber barons set aside huge portions of their wealth to make the country better. In January of 1914, Henry Ford more than doubled the prevailing factory wage, to a then-astounding five dollars for an eight hour day. Ford didn’t have to do it, but his company was succeeding and he thought he should. Some historians trace the creation of the American middle class to Henry Ford’s decision. Either way, it’s nearly impossible a big company doing anything like that today. Attitudes are just too different. Your average finance mogul looks at workers merely as costs to be reduced or eliminated. Private equity isn’t building a lot of public libraries these days.
Instead the model is ruthless economic efficiency: buy a distressed company, outsource the jobs, liquidate the valuable assets, fire middle management, and once the smoke has cleared, dump what remains to the highest bidder, often in Asia. It has happened around the country. It has made a small number of people phenomenally rich. One of them is a New York-based Hedge Fund manager called Paul Singer, who according to Forbes has amassed a personal fortune of more than $3 billion dollars. Singer made a lot of his money by purchasing sovereign debt from financially-distressed countries, usually at a massive discount. Once a country’s economy regained some stability, Singer would bombard its government with lawsuits, until he made his money back with interest. The practice is called vulture capitalism — feeding off the carcass of a dying nation. In some ways, it’s not so different from what Singer and his firm, Elliott Management, have done in this country. Over the past couple of decades, Elliott has made billions by buying large stakes in American companies, firing workers, driving up short-term share prices, and in some cases, taking government bailouts. Bloomberg News has described Singer as “the world’s most feared investor,” which tells you a lot. No one’s even pretending Paul Singer’s tactics are good for anyone but Paul Singer and his fund.
Consider the case of Delphi, the automotive parts supplier. During the last financial crisis, a consortium of hedge funds, including Singer’s Elliott Management, purchased Delphi. With Singer and the other funds at the helm, the company took billions of dollars in government bailouts. Obama’s auto-czar compared the tactics to extortion. Once they had the bailout money, the funds moved most of Delphi’s jobs overseas, and then either cut retiree pensions entirely or shifted the costs to taxpayers. With lighter financial commitments at home, and cheap factories abroad, Delphi’s stock soared. According to investigative reporter Greg Palast, of the 29 Delphi plants in operation when the hedge funds started buying Delphi debt, only four were still operating in the United States by 2012. Tens of thousands of unionized and white-collar workers lost their jobs. Paul Singer’s hedge fund cashed out for more than a billion dollars.
Some countries, including the United Kingdom, have banned this kind of behavior. It bears no resemblance to the capitalism we were promised in school. It creates nothing. It destroys entire cities. It couldn’t be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in this country? Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our political process. Singer himself was the second biggest donor to the Republican Party in 2016. He’s given millions to a super PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never have heard of Paul Singer. But in Washington, he’s rock star famous. That may be why he’s almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate than your average fireman. Just in case you’re still wondering if the system is rigged.
Tonight we want to tell you a little more about how Paul Singer does business. The story begins in a small town called Sidney, Nebraska, population 6,282. Two hours outside Denver, Sidney is the longtime home of the sporting goods retailer Cabela’s.
In October 2015, Singer’s hedge fund disclosed an 11 percent stake in Cabela’s and set about pushing the board to sell the company. Cabela’s management, fearing a long and costly fight with Singer, announced it would look for a buyer. At the time, Cabela’s was healthy. The company was posting nearly $2 billion a year in gross profits, off $4 billion in revenue. There was no immediate need to sell. But they did anyway. One year after Singer entered the equation, Bass Pro Shops announced the purchase of Cabela’s. The company’s stock price surged. Within a week, Singer cashed out. He’d bought the stock for $38 a share. He sold it for $63. His hedge fund made at least $90 million up front, and likely more over time.
But in Sidney, Nebraska, it was a very different story. The residents of Sidney didn’t get rich. Just the opposite. Their community was destroyed. The town lost nearly 2,000 jobs. A heartbreakingly familiar cascade began: people left, property values collapsed, and then people couldn’t leave. They were trapped there. One of the last thriving small towns in America went under. We recently sent two producers to Sidney, to survey the wreckage and consider what happened. Our producers talked to more than a dozen former Cabela’s employees. Almost all of them refused to speak on camera, fearful of legal retribution from the famously vicious Paul Singer…. [continue with the video access above listed]
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