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Billionaire Who Cleaned Up on Subprime Mortgage Foreclosures Hosts Secret Romney Fund Raiser

Posted: April 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Surreality, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance | Tags: , , , , , , |42 Comments

I just came across this in The Daily Beast and had to share.

Mitt Romney held a high-dollar fundraiser Thursday night at the home of John Paulson, the controversial hedge-fund billionaire who made a fortune shorting the housing market and subprime mortgages in 2007.

New York grocery billionaire John Catsimatidis told The Daily Beast the fundraiser, at Paulson’s posh townhouse at 9 East 86th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was a “big-dollar event” for wealthy donors like himself “fighting for the soul of America.” The Romney campaign did not return requests for information about the fundraiser—which was not listed on the candidate’s public schedule. Paulson’s publicist, Armel Leslie, also did not return calls seeking comment.

A neighbor who witnessed the event from across the street described it to The Daily Beast as a large crowd of “older white people, mostly men,” who started showing up around 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Around 8 p.m., sirens started blaring as more and more people started to show. There was security at the door as well as a police car on the street.

Then things became quiet until the sirens started up at 9:30 p.m. An SUV tried to block 86th Street, but New York drivers characteristically went around it. Then, as the security stood in the street, Romney emerged from the townhouse, “looking tall and neat.” He took off his suit jacket and climbed into the SUV.

The Daily Beast says this is a departure for Romney, since Paulson is one of the people who caused the economic crisis and who made obscene profits from it–Paulson made 3.7 billion on foreclosures. But I googled and found that Paulson also hosted a ritzy fundraiser for Romney at his (Paulson’s) Southhampton home last summer.

Interestingly, Paulson and fellow hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer (another big Romney donor) also made big bucks from the auto industry bailout, according to a February article by Greg Palast.

Gov. Romney…asserted that the Obama Administration’s support for General Motors was a, “payoff for the auto workers union.” However, union workers in GM’s former auto parts division, Delphi, the unit taken over by Romney’s funders, did not fare so well. The speculators eliminated every single union job from the parts factories once manned by 25,200 UAW members.

The two hedge fund operators turned a breathtaking three-thousand percent profit on a relatively negligible investment by using hardball tactics against the US Treasury and their own employees.

Under the control of the speculators, Delphi, which had 45 plants in the US and Canada, is now reduced to just four factories with only 1,500 hourly workers, none of them UAW members, despite the union agreeing to cut contract wages by two thirds.

It wasn’t supposed to be quite so bad. The Obama Administration and GM had arranged for a private equity investor to provide half a billion dollars in new capital for Delphi, but that would have cut the pay-out to Singer and Paulson. The speculators blocked the Obama-GM plan, taking the entire government bail-out hostage. Even the Wall Street Journal’s Dealmaker column was outraged, accusing Paul Singer of treating the auto company, “like a third world country.”

Romney and Paulson both graduated from Harvard Business School and each went to work for The Boston Consulting Group soon after. I don’t know if they were at Harvard and BCG at the same time, but it seems possible. Wikipedia has a list of famous people who came out of BCG, including Jeffrey Immelt and Benjamin Netanyahu. These are truly Romney’s people.

As I’ve written a number of times, Barack Obama was Wall Street’s candidate in 2008, but Mitt Romney IS Wall Street. Just reading about these guys scares the sh%t out of me!

42 Comments on “Billionaire Who Cleaned Up on Subprime Mortgage Foreclosures Hosts Secret Romney Fund Raiser”

  1. bostonboomer says:
    April 28, 2012 at 8:04 pm

    Feel free to mock the WH correspondent’s dinner on this thread. I wasn’t sure if anyone would want a live blog of it, but it’s streaming at C-span.org.

    http://www.c-span.org/WHCD/

  2. bostonboomer says:
    April 28, 2012 at 8:36 pm

    Michelle looks nice.

  3. NW Luna says:
    April 28, 2012 at 8:57 pm

    Romney actually gets crowds to roar for him? He must be paying them.

  4. bostonboomer says:
    April 28, 2012 at 9:20 pm

    “Mr. President, remember when everyone rallied around you in hopes of a better tomorrow? That was hilarious!”

    Obama is smiling, so far….

  5. bostonboomer says:
    April 28, 2012 at 9:32 pm

    The Mitt Romney jokes are great!

    • ecocatwoman says:
      April 28, 2012 at 9:46 pm

      Overall, it was worth watching & there were several really funny lines. Thanks, bb, for posting the link so that I could watch it. I’ve never been a fan of Jimmy Kimmel’s but I think he did a pretty good job. The Unnecessary Censorship clip at the beginning cracked me up.

      • RalphB says:
        April 28, 2012 at 9:54 pm

        It was quite good and Kimmel did well I think. I even liked Obama’s dog jokes. He put that conversation where it belongs.

        • ecocatwoman says:
          April 28, 2012 at 10:05 pm

          While I understand where you are coming from, personally I rarely find “animal” jokes funny. And, possibly if he’d picked another breed – other than pit bulls – it may not have upset me as much. Two words: Michael Vick. That’s what came to mind for me & probably many others like me who put animal issues high on our priority lists. I realize that pit bull was part of Palin’s schtick, but I think it would have been better not to go there. I had just read this yesterday: http://badrap-blog.blogspot.com/2012/04/vick-dogs-five-years-post-seizure-has.html

      • bostonboomer says:
        April 28, 2012 at 10:20 pm

        I thought the jokes about Obama being starved to the point that he looked like the winner of the Boston Marathon were pretty funny.

  6. northwestrain says:
    April 28, 2012 at 10:37 pm

    “We’re not stupid” –That’s what I heard from a lot of people over the winter. “We aren’t as stupid as the politicians think we are. . . .”

    Many people are very aware that the politicians make money off of the laws they write. . .

    Could be that “We’re not stupid” may be the chant of the voters come November.

  7. RalphB says:
    April 28, 2012 at 11:38 pm

    I hope we’re not stupid. Just for the hell of it …

    Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity, Vol. XV

    • dakinikat says:
      April 29, 2012 at 1:01 pm

      That is a huge list of lies. It should be required reading for any one who thinks this guy is a viable candidate. I don’t think any of us really have any idea what he would do if elected.

      • northwestrain says:
        April 29, 2012 at 1:53 pm

        And then there is the list of the 0bowma lies. Both dudes are expert liars — lying has become acceptable to the point that anyone who is a truth teller is considered odd.

        I don’t see much hope for the future with either of these guys in charge.

      • dakinikat says:
        April 29, 2012 at 1:59 pm

        I think Obama makes promises he doesn’t keep. That’s completely different from just continually saying things in speeches that aren’t factual. Romney keeps repeating things that aren’t factual. Obama just does the usual political promise ’em anything and then don’t deliver.

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