Washington Times reporter and friend of RedState Amanda Carpenter has a front page story in tomorrow’s paper on the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee’s (DSCC) refusal to return $100,000.00 in donations made by disgraced and indicted ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff.
The DSCC, led by Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, received four payments of $25,000.00 from Madoff between 2005 and 2008, with the most recent coming in September of the latter year — just three months before his $64 billion fraud was exposed.
“We have not returned the money yet,” Carpenter reports DSCC communications director Eric Schultz as telling The Washington Times, despite the fact that most “lawmakers quickly purged Madoff cash from their campaign accounts after the news broke in December that Madoff bilked his investors.”
The vast majority of that cash — 88% of it — was returned by Democrats, who benefited from Madoff’s illegal dealings to the tune of $210,000.00 since 1991, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. “The couple donated $238,200 to federal candidates, parties and committees since 1991, and Democrats received 88 percent of those donations,” Carpenter writes. “Madoff gave $11,400 to nine Republicans in the same time period.”
How ironic is this? A national Democratic campaign committee is holding on to donations tainted by the second-biggest known Ponzi scheme of the modern era (behind only Social Security), while Democratic members of Congress are bouncing off the walls in an effort to recoup bonuses paid to AIG executives that were not only legal, but that were legal only because Democrats voted to make them so, in the face of united Republican opposition.
Seriously — you can’t make this stuff up.
Moe Lane
Neil Stevens
Steve Maley
Dan McLaughlin
Small point
Yil Wednesday, March 25th at 12:45AM EST (link)“but that were legal only because Democrats voted to make them so”. I don’t think that is correct. As I understand this, and the point Treasury made, is that existing employment contracts had to generally be honored. Oh, Congress could pass whatever legislation they wanted but that doesn’t mean it would be legal. In fact I think the proposed 90% tax on some bonuses is a prime example. You could pass it but it wouldn’t stand up in court because it isn’t constitutional.
Now, had the company gone into bankruptcy these could be re-negotiated or eliminated but if that had happened trillions in CDS would have triggered and half the banks around the world would have instantly had issues which is why we ended up bailing AIG out. Since AIG isn’t a bank the FDIC couldn’t step in and take it over and decide what to do with existing contracts, accounts, etc which is why they are now asking for this power over companies that sell financial instruments but aren’t technically banks.
So, your right that AIG bonuses were legal, but they were legal no matter how D’s voted or what they said. I think most D’s wanted to MAKE them illegal. The fact that R’s wanted that as well doesn’t make it any more constitutional and I’m not sure that pointing out how being for something that’s unconstitutional is a good thing.
I don’t know what’s wrong with just laying off the whole branch of people that got AIG into trouble and hiring back a few people on a short term basis to finish cleaning up the mess. That would be legal and get rid of any existing employment contracts. But I bet we just loaned money and/or took non-voting shares and stuff in the company because we didn’t want to deal with “nationalization” and thus we can’t force them to do this by replacing the board if they didn’t go along. But that’s a different issue…
Yil, they were legally protected as part of the Porkulus package
Jeff Emanuel (Diary) Wednesday, March 25th at 7:41AM EST (link)that the Ds passed and Obama signed into law.
JE