The Jeb and Mitt club
by digby
If the donor class has its way and nominates one of their two fair haired boys, Mitt or Jeb, it’s going to be a free-for-all for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton is far from above reproach and may be filthy rich from books and speeches these days, but the GOP establishment’s greedy private sector graft that directly hurts average people is populist gold by comparison:
After attending his second meeting as a board member for InnoVida, a Miami-based company that marketed prefabricated housing materials for use in disaster zones and other places in need, Jeb Bush had some follow-up questions.
“Fine board meeting,” Bush wrote in an e-mail to the chief financial officer before requesting details about the company’s liability insurance and politely nudging him that cash-flow data “would be appreciated.”
Bush wouldn’t get his answers until a week after his September 2009 e-mail, and then only in part — the CFO provided him with an “unaudited” financial spreadsheet and said no insurance details were immediately available.
If Bush was troubled by the response, it didn’t prompt him to pull away from InnoVida. He remained on the board for an additional year, leaving after a fellow board member started to unravel the widespread fraud that eventually led to the firm’s demise and the criminal convictions of two top executives.
Previously unreported court documents suggest that Bush was more involved with the company than has been publicly known — and that he deepened his role even as others associated with InnoVida grew concerned about its financial practices.
Documents show that the company listed Bush in internal records as a “key manager” who had been given options to buy 250,000 shares of stock and later stood to make more money looking for partners to build factories overseas.
Bush aides say he broke from InnoVida and voluntarily repaid consulting fees as soon as questions arose, and there is no evidence that he knew of the fraud that led to the criminal conviction of the company’s chief executive, Claudio Osorio, in 2013.
Nevertheless, Bush’s involvement with InnoVida, which he joined as a $15,000-a-month consultant in 2007 after completing two terms as governor of Florida, provides insight into his approach as a businessman and illustrates how his corporate ties could affect his presidential aspirations.
That’s probably the tip of the iceberg. And we already know about Mitt’s 100 million dollar “401K” and that he refused to show his tax returns in every election he’s run. Those questions aren’t going away either. I guess they can dredge up Clinton’s cattle futures trades from 1979, but the amount of money involved was a joke.
Clinton has long been a friend to Wall Street having been part of the Democratic Party of the DLC years when the shift to the Big Money Boyz was embraced as an important “new direction.” (And with the tsunami of 1% money flooding the political system these days I’ll guess that all the Democrats would take a similar approach, unfortunately. Obama certainly did.)But for all her Wall Street friendliness, she hasn’t been mucking around with the stuff Mitt and Jeb have been mucking around with and I think it’s going to be fun to watch the fireworks when they try to go after each other.
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