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Madoff’s Stolen Ponzi Loot Funneled to Obama Campaign Through Daley — by NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)
Nearly $1 million of Bernard Madoff’s stolen Ponzi-scheme profits went to elect US President Barack Obama. JP Morgan Chase paid it directly to his campaign, and President Obama just appointed JPMC’s executive William Daley (of the infamous Daley Machine) to be his new White House Chief of Staff. Daley himself skated with $7.6 million in the Madoff swindle. Yep, he just made off with it. Morgan Chase made $1 billion. Hillary Clinton got some, but gave it back, and the President’s new “Competitiveness” nominee Jeffrey Imelt got plenty.
You can’t make this stuff up.
According to OpenSecrets, William Daley’s JP Morgan Chase gave $695,132 to the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=n00009638
Through recent revelations…
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/4864051
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/madoff-jpmorgan-chase_n_818591.html
…I learned that despite the fact that Daley’s Morgan Chase knew Bernie Madoff was running a [$65 billion] Ponzi scheme, JPMC conspired to keep the crimes secret until after Obama’s November 2008 election (an apparent Obstruction of Justice), because JP Morgan Chase made at least $1 billion (that we know of) on the scheme. Morgan Chase spent much of that money promoting Obama.
Firedoglake’s masaccio was onto it when it happened:
http://firedoglake.com/2009/05/03/how-chase-bank-made-money-with-madoff/
No one stopped Madoff until December 2008, after Barack Obama was elected, albeit just a few weeks after.
On Daley’s appointment in January 2011, Huffington Post said “President Barack Obama’s next Chief of Staff holds more than $7.6 million worth of stock in JP Morgan Chase, according to a regulatory filing …William M. Daley, vice chairman at JP Morgan Chase, holds 175,678 shares in the $2.1 trillion behemoth, the nation’s second-largest bank by assets. Daley headed the firm’s Corporate Responsibility division, which included oversight of the firm’s lobbyists and relations with government officials.”
This means that Daley still has Ponzi loot: His $7.6 million, out of JPMC’s $1 billion, out of Madoff’s $65 billion.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/10/william-daley-jp-morgan-stock_n_807161.html
But the Obama Administration’s dirty dealings with Madoff don’t end there, not by a long shot! Madoff gave $50,000 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and at least $600,000 to lobbyists:
“Madoff Investment Securities made campaign contributions totaling $372,100, with about 89 percent of those funds directed to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets.org, the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics.” (That’s how PoliticalTicker put it, but the OpenSecrets headline says Madoff spent $1 million.)
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/12/17/madoff-was-major-democratic-campaign-contributor/
Much of that political campaign money went for and continues to go for buying ads on NBC and MSNBC, the head honcho of which is GE Chairman Jeffrey Imelt, whom President Obama just appointed to head his new White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Competitiveness?! According to Forbes, GE is the world’s second-largest company, after JP Morgan Chase. In the Obama Administration, we see Conflict of Interest running off the scale, but Imelt’s MSNBC just keeps MSNBC-ing it.
“MSNBC-ing” is the type of propaganda that tries to make it look like the Obama gang of crooks is on our side, our good guys, looking out for our interests. It’s as if, like the Egyptian propaganda claiming that Mubarak’s Suleiman goon squad is needed to hold back the evil Muslims, the White House wants us to think that our crooks are the only possible heroes who can save us from the bad Republican Cheney TeaBag Beck.
So, not only did MSNBC (in a partisan move) refuse to air Michele Bachmann’s alternative State of the Union response (as it had aired Senator Obama’s alternative State of the Union response in 2006), Chris Matthews (apparently trying to out-juvenile the newly removed Keith Olbermann) called Ms. Bachmann a “Balloon Head!” and told her “Go back to grammar school!”
At the exact same time that the President tapped Imelt to “oversee” “competitiveness” (or overlook the lack thereof), Imelt’s firm dumped Olbermann, and at the same time Comcast announced its working relationship with MSNBC (further limiting competition, but making profit for the Administration’s cronies) … as Rayne pointed out:
Speaking of Conflict of Interest: Both GE and Morgan Chase are heavily involved in the Nuclear industry and the Wind industry, two of the dirtiest forms of energy generation. When Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show comes on, a Wind Farm masquerading as Clean Energy steps up to fight for GE/JPMC energy profit, and supposedly against the bad Republican Cheney TeaBag Beck. The President frequently lies about both Wind and Nuclear being “Clean.” He claims that both are free of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, and that they therefore help fight Global Warming. This is completely false.
For details on the emissions, use the fdl search window and search “normanb ghg nuclear wind.” Wind energy causes massive emissions of the worst GHG known, Sulfur Hexafluoride, or “Air Jordan.” One pound of SF6 warms our planet more than 17 tons of Carbon Dioxide (CO2); and 20 million pounds of it are made every year. The so-called “Smart Grid” is stupid, but, hey, it makes money for the President’s men.
Nuclear Energy causes massive emissions of Nitrous Oxide, which is 310 times as bad as CO2. Yet President Obama had the EPA reclassify it officially as “Clean Energy,” just as he did for “Clean” Coal. President Obama even appeared on a TV commercial for Clean Coal, just weeks after taking office, just days after the Coen Brothers had released a widely circulated commercial reminding us all that Clean Coal doesn’t exist.
Athough lying about climate and energy causes disease epidemics, insect infestations, and environmental devastation, even so, President Obama still doesn’t mind lying about climate and energy when it profits his allies. Just ask BP:
http://my.firedoglake.com/normanb/2011/02/02/new-orleans-judge-rules-that-obama-ken-feinberg-bp-lied-about-kfs-neutrality-orders-kf-bp-to-stop-lying/
So, who’s keeping score here? Madoff stole $65 billion –> then, with Obama in the White House, and with his appointees in charge of regulating things, less than $10 billion got paid back to the poor set-up victims of the famous Madoff-Morgan Chase-Daley-Obama-Imelt Ponzi Scheme.
Where’s the rest of the stolen money? Well, President Obama’s sitting on $695,132 of it; or he was before spending it on Imelt’s and other networks’ commercials for the 2008 campaign. Secretary of State Clinton (who posed as an opposing candidate during the campaign) got $50,000; Chief of Staff William Daley has $7.6 million; his company JCMC, the President’s 6th-highest contributor, got $1 billion. I’ll bet others on the President’s top contributors list Made Off with some too! (i.e. GE, who gave half a million dollars!)
Madoff’s family officially got to keep $2.5 million of the stolen funds, but I suspect more of that money is still somewhere corrupting our political system. And Madoff’s son conveniently got dead a few weeks ago, conveniently partially covering up the White House connection. And somehow those “investigating” the killing quickly called it “suicide.” Never mind who’s behind the curtain. No reason to investigate this.
Oh, and let’s remember that JP Morgan Chase didn’t hire Daley because he’s a famous banker; he’s not. They hired him for the Organized Crime connection: They hired him to pull strings for them politically. And they sure got what they paid for: A billion dollars in stolen funds, out of which they only had to give the Obama cartel a few million. A body or two along the way. Banker plus Gangster equals Bankster.
“Madoff founded the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960, and was its chairman until his arrest on December 11, 2008 … JP Morgan Chase & Co. may have also benefited from the scheme – through interest and fees charged – to the tune of a billion dollars.”
http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/24/news/newsmakers/madoff.fortune/index.htm
Along with the family of one of President Obama’s major financial appointees (Mary Schapiro, whom President Obama appointed to head the Securities and Exchange Commission), Bernie Madoff started the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in 1971 as National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). Madoff was its President and Chairman. The economy collapsed and the President of the Stock Exchange made off with $65 billion at the same time, and at the same time, more than $1 billion were being funneled to the cronies of and the Presidential campaign of the winning candidate, Barack Obama, who had just appointed Madoff’s partner’s kid:
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/12/17/sec-nominee-has-madoff-connection/
“Two years after Madoff’s $65 billion fraud was revealed, its victims are trying to move on. It was good news indeed to hear over the holidays that Irving Picard, the trustee hired by the Securities Investor Protection Corp., or SIPC, has recovered $9.8 billion so far – much more than some had expected. Yet many of Madoff’s neediest victims might never benefit from Picard’s settlements, and in fact some are being sued to give back gains from the sceme, funds already spent on retirement or taxes.”
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jan2011/pi20110111_367252.htm
February 10, 2009, a few days after taking office, President Obama said “There are a lot of banks that are actually pretty well-managed – JP Morgan being a good example … I don’t think [CEO Jamie Dimon] should be punished for dong a pretty good job managing an enormous portfolio.”
http://www.fool.com/investing/dividends-income/2009/02/11/obama-endorses-jpmorgan.aspx
Well, Madoff’s victims have only been compensated 15% of what they lost. Immediately after JPMC gave $7 hundred thousand to Obama, and Madoff gave $1 billion to JPMC, all to help to get BO elected, then President-elect Obama, when the Madoff Ponzi news broke, said “In the last few days, the alleged scandal at Madoff Investment Securities has reminded us yet again of how badly reform is needed when it comes to the rules and regulations that govern our markets…
“…Charities that invested in Madoff could end up losing savings on which millions depend – a massive fraud that was made possible in part because the regulators who were assigned to oversee Wall Street dropped the ball. And if the financial crisis has taught us anything, it’s that this failure of oversight and accountability doesn’t just harm individuals involved; it has the potential to devastate our entire economy.”
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2008/12/18/4423447-obama-on-madoff-scandal-rick-warren
Indeed, Mr. President indeed. Give the money back to the destitute widows and orphans that your gang helped to steal it from. Order Daley and Imelt to give back theirs too. If memory serves, Hillary Clinton has already returned the Madoff contribution, but what about that $6 hundred thousand to the lobbyists? And after you give it back, come clean: Tell the truth about what you know about the crimes, and make Daley and Imelt do the same.
So, the profits from the biggest theft that ever happened helped elect our current President. GE is pouring even more into lobbying since the 2008 elections. The co-conspirators in this story, General Electric, Morgan Chase, and Madoff, together poured more than $1 billion into campaigns and political lobbying over the past few years, and lots of it went right back to GE and Imelt through purchase of airtime on MSNBC. And our President is in cahoots with these thieves. You just can’t make this stuff up.
And you Democrats out there, in the Congress, and in the blogosphere and other media: Don’t you now have a responsibility to do something about this? Go ahead: Do what Democrats do.
13 Comments
Well, La Di Da!
Not surprising. Our government has been privatized by the financial sector.
Does it even make any sense that a “Financial Sector” exists? One of the biggest parts of our Economy is just moving money around?! What a farce!
highest paid jobs in the world …no less
normanb, you’re making an accusation without adequate substantiation.
First, note what OpenSecrets.org says about the data furnished at the first link you’ve provided:
OpenSecrets.org actually bolds, italicizes and prints in red some of that text to ensure readers understand that this is PAC money, received from numerous individuals and not from any one person or from the corporation.
To be blunt, any money from JPMorgan Chase’s PAC may not have been directly from Bill Daley or from Bernie Madoff. You’re going to have to show a better audit trail to make this case. Can you actually show a contribution to the PAC by Madoff or Daley which went through directly to Obama’s campaign? The data isn’t in this post if you can.
You can clearly show that Madoff made direct campaign contributions; I’m surprised you didn’t follow up on that and look to see who kept Madoff donations after his Ponzi scheme was revealed in December 2008. That’s damning enough — although I note the DNC in particular gave back $100,000 about three months after Madoff was arrested.
And I’m surprised you didn’t look at Bill Daley’s personal campaign contributions; he’s not the top giver to JPMC’s PAC, by the way. The PAC has historically given more to House Republicans and Senate Dems, who also bear some of the blame for the lack of adequate oversight and better regulation that might have prevented Madoff’s Ponzi scheme from growing so large, let alone better campaign finance regulations.
The real problem is right on the face of it: the same people who caused the systemic failure of the financial industry are more than adequately represented in this White House, and they continue to influence decision making about the financial industry. That’s a gross conflict of interest, and one with which people at both ends of the political spectrum have a problem.
Daley was nominally near the top of the top of Morgan Chase. Even if bookkeeping has removed his fingerprints from the money’s flow, that is what he was hired for. The fact remains, Daley’s company directed, or funneled $700,000 in campaign contributions to the Obama campaign as it received $1 billion for helping Madoff steal $65 billion. As top deal-maker at JPMC, Daley owes every bit of that $7.6 million to those victims. And President Obama owes every bit of that $695 thousand to the victims too.
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Is there a distinction between the donors involved with this money and those involved with the money you mentioned Clinton returning?
“nominally”?
That and a sawbuck will get you a beer at the corner pub.
“Daley’s company directed, or funneled $700,000 in campaign contributions to the Obama campaign” is not true unless you can prove it; PACs are wholly separate entities from the corporations for which they are named, and again I’ll point out that the PAC consists of donations of individuals, not the corporation.
Here, I’ll even make it very simple for you by giving you the link to the actual federal reporting by the PAC in question; you won’t find a check in here from JPMC, only individuals.
Unless you can show that money coming into the PAC from individual(s) went out to specific candidates or other PACs in a pattern, you don’t have a provable case.
The only legitimate case you have is that White House hired a guy with a massive conflict of interest.
Believe me, I would LOVE to show Daley bought the White House gig, but it’s not going to happen with the poor quality of information and analysis in this post.
You’re also missing another avenue of reporting here by ignoring the fact that the USDOJ could have pulled back any monies Madoff gave to campaigns or PACs within a reasonable period of time. Did that happen?
Before 2012, President Obama should announce that he is not going to seek reelection and that instead he is going to pour all of his energy into getting a 3rd party candidate elected, he should announce that he is going to support a Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders ticket, and he should apologize to all the people who put him into office for being such a fraud.
Chances are he won’t do that, so we’ll just have to do that or something similar on his behalf!
The Daily Beast has a story up, carried on Roadrunner news, asking if the revelations about JPMorgan’s suspicions about Madoff will “sink Jamie Dimon”.
http://www.rr.com/news/topic/article/rr/10374903/34000142/JPMorgan_and_Madoff_Will_the_Scandal_Sink_Jamie
Well, money moving around is a required part of any economy. But I hear ya, our bloated financial sector is a farce.
It’s pure overhead, so it should be a narrow slice of the economy. IMO, they need to go back to the old model of heavily regulated commercial banks being seperate from investment banks. And the investment banks themselves should be partnerships rather than publicly traded companies.
As for insurance, meh… get rid of private health insurance and the rest more or less makes sense provided that insurance is firewalled from the rest of finance.
If we had a healthy financial sector, it would only account for 5-10% of corporate profits rather than the bloated 20-40% we are currently seeing.
This is the court of public opinion. I find Norman’s case compelling. I find Obama guilty as charged.
The money H. Clinton returned was given to her campaign directly by Madoff, so it was publicly known as tainted, and she gave it back when the scandal broke. None of the other money came in official donations from Madoff like that. The other funds came from JP Morgan Chase and its PAC.