Edwards Campaign Living in Leo Hindery's Corporate Glass House?

John Edwards' campaign rhetoric has been harshly anti-corporate, but he's throwing stones from the sundeck of his key economic advisor's corporate glass house.

A New York Times story over Christmas weekend comparing Mitt Romney and John Edwards views of wealth and the role of government in its creation had a small mention of "Edwards' senior economic adviser," Leo Hindery, Jr.

I couldn't believe it.

Leo Hindery, formerly head of scandal-ridden Global Crossing, who walked away from that stockholders' disaster with $250 million? Leo Hindery, who as George Steinbrenner's head of the YES cable channel, squeezed Yankee fans out of every last dollar to watch their games? Leo Hindery, who as head of cable television giant TCI, then arguably the country's worst cable operator, managed to con AT&T into buying the company at a premium price? That Leo Hindery?

And after the sale, in a coup of tremendous chutzpah, Hindery then talked AT&T into making him head of the new company. The new AT&T Broadband then made TCI look like a public service enterprise as it screwed customers, employees, and its corporate parent, lost billions, and debased parent AT&T to the point that SBC was able to buy the remaining corporate shell for a song.

It's not like Hindery's background is a mystery. Back in 1998, when the TCI deal was in the works, Leo Hindery, Jr. was the subject of a highly unusual New York Times profile which debunked his frequent claims of a boyhood out of Dickens: leaving home at 13 to fend for himself, Horatio Alger-style, at a series of menial jobs. Fact-checking Hindery's self-serving bio, Geraldine Fabricant found that despite Hindery's insistent declarations otherwise,

"Mr. Hindery's widowed mother, sister and brother all said that Mr. Hindery lived at home until he graduated from high school...

His wife said that living with her husband was rather like having an eccentric uncle in the attic. 'You get used to it after a while,' she said.

A 2005 book about the AT&T Broadband debacle, End of The Line: The Rise and Fall of AT&T, by Leslie Cauley, then a Wall Street Journal telecommunications reporter, and now USA Today's senior reporter on the same beat, was even more pointed about Hindery's shaky relationship with the truth. She called him a "carnival barker" whose standard operating procedure in dealmaking was always to be "sprinkling a little stardust," as longtime media mogul John Malone phrased it.

It was never clear to AT&T executives if Hindery stretched the truth on purpose, or if he just dwelled in a very grey world where black wasn't always black, and white wasn't always white.

I first personally witnessed the Hindery version of stardust sprinkling in 1995, when Hindery's Intermedia Partners was seeking approval from my client, Metro Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee, to buy Viacom's cable franchise there. In response to my concerns, Hindery promised the Metro Council that Intermedia minority partner TCI would never have a role in operating the Nashville system. Two years later, Nashville was amalgamated with other TCI systems in the region, and by 1999 it was sold to AT&T by TCI, whose President by then was... Leo Hindery.

In 1997, Hindery promised my Chicago-area municipal clients that new owner TCI would finally upgrade and modernize their old-fashioned cable systems to allow broadband services, and that TCI had no intention of selling them. By 1999, new owner AT&T Broadband was struggling to upgrade those same systems that were in far worse shape than Hindery led buyer AT&T to believe. Stardust!

On the political side, Hindery has been funneling money to centrist Democrats for years, but earned a place on many activists' permanent shitlist by being a key funder of the Osama Bin Ladin ads placed on behalf of Dick Gephart that helped sink Howard Dean in Iowa in 2004. While Hindery has already maxed his contributions to the Obama, Clinton, and Edwards campaigns, Edwards has been a frequent flier on Hindery's corporate jet, reimbursing over $15,000 to Hindery's Intermedia Partners for charter service at the first class ticket rate.

Besides his deep pockets, Hindery's other campaign role has been to assuage the corporate community that John Edwards, despite his rhetoric, isn't really so hostile to them. But considering his track record, is Leo Hindery's economic advice any more useful than his standard operating procedure of "buy low, pump it full of 'stardust,' and then dump it?"

Can't the Edwards campaign do any better than this?

Crossposted at waxingamerica.com

 

Comments

[Neaguy]

07:04 PM on 01/07/2008

I like Paul Street's analysis of Obama over at Z Magazine's website.

Street was a caucas goer in Iowa and here's why he didn't vote for Obama:
"I’d done my homework on the candidates from the beginning and basic consultati­on of Barackabee­’s written, spoken, and policy record revealed the rather elementary and over-obvio­us fact that Obama is a master triangulat­or and class-race accommodat­or in the insidious corporate-­neoliberal and militarist­ic Clinton-DL­C mode. I also learned that he was being richly rewarded for his careful, cautious, and even “deeply conservati­ve” politics and rhetoric with more than $80 million (just $10 million behind Hillary) in largely corporate-­funded campaign financing (Center for Responsive Politics 2007), with the support of much of the Democratic Party’s imperial foreign policy establishm­ent and (perhaps most significan­t of all) with astonishin­g and unpreceden­ted levels of dominant (corporate­) media love."
Read the rest here:
http://www­.zmag.org/­content/pr­int_articl­e.cfm?item­ID=14670&s­ectionID=9­0

[realrick]

04:09 PM on 01/07/2008

I hope Edwards becomes The Democratic Party's version of Ronald Reagan.

It may take him as many as 4 tries to get to the White House, but his views do represent the vast majority of Democrats more than any of the other candidates­.

If it takes him 4 tries to get the White House, so be it. We need him there.

btw, the criticisms we've seen about his wealth and success remind me a lot of the criticisms labeled against FDR. He was also accused of hypocrisy and being a traitor to his class.

Nice company to keep, ya think?

As for this blast of one of his advisors, I have one simple question: What part of Edwards' policy positions indicates that these kinds of business practices will be allowed to continue?

So Edwards has a reformed corporate raider on his staff. So what? More power to him.

[SamanthaJaneSalem]

01:40 PM on 01/07/2008

John Edwards is no worse than your average politician­, but I find him to be particular­ly cunning. I'm surprised more Democrats don't feel the same way, but maybe that's an indication of just how cunning Edwards is.

Edwards's campaign reminds me of Bobby Kennedy's dramatic switch from the way he was in his brother's administra­tion to the peace candidate he became in 1968.

To be fair, one way his campaign is painted incorrectl­y is the "populist" label. To be pro-middle class is not to be some kind of class warrior wanting to take from the rich and re-distrib­ute to the poor. Reigning in corporate America is good for 95% of the country-- and if Edwards were sincere, I would agree with him.

Yet I believe Edwards took this so-called populist approach in order to steal some of the thunder from Hillary and Obama. He needs a lot of small donors because he chose matching funds financing. That means appealing to the liberal grassroots base the way Howard Dean did in 2004-- as opposed to the more convention­al 2004 version of Edwards.

Edwards would be a weak nominee. For all his courtroom eloquence and emotional appeal in Iowans' living rooms or auditorium­s, he shrinks on the grand stage when millions are watching. He did a disappeari­ng act in 2004 after Kerry chose him as his running mate, giving a Greatest Hits version of his "Two Americas" stump speech at the convention­, then allowing Darth Vader to out-debate him.

It's a pity Al Gore didn't run this time so he could give Democrats a true alternativ­e to Obama. As things are, Obama is the best choice.

[Marlie]

12:37 PM on 01/07/2008

I'm a huge supporter of Edwards. The thing that really scares me about Obama is, the MSM
has now ordained him over Hillary and are giving him a free ride however, wait
until he actually gets the nomination­. When
there's no turning back, the MSM AKA Corporate
America will come down on Obama with both feet.
What they did to Gore will be nothing in
comparison­. They will go to work about three
months before the General election. I pray the American people won't be fooled again but Corporate America rules
and will greatly influence the election results. Any of our candidates are a hundred
times better than any of the Republican field,
I just hope Obama can take what will be thrown
at him and become our President. If not Obama,
John, Hillary, anyone of our candidates must
win.

[Atticus]

11:19 AM on 01/07/2008

Isn't it all realy moot? Edwards has sunk to irrelevanc­y, no?

[Marlyn]

10:53 AM on 01/07/2008

Why didn't Dennis Kucinich support former Senator John Edwards on the second ballot in Iowa since his positions seemed closer than to Obama? Here is what Kucinich says today:

"I have serious concerns about John Edwards' connection­s to a Wall Street hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group. While attacking others for accepting campaign money from Washington lobbyists, he is up to his ears in money from Wall Street special interests.

He made half a million dollars in a single year for attending a few meetings for Fortress and has invested a substantia­l part of his own personal wealth in the hedge fund whose portfolios are responsibl­e for sub-prime predatory lending practices, Medicare privatizat­ion, and an entire range of corporate sharp dealings that are driving the middle class into poverty.

While I indicated Senator Obama as a preferred second choice in Iowa, Progressiv­es have fundamenta­l disagreeme­nts with him and all of the other Presidenti­al candidates on most of their major positions on the issues.

We must have the courage of our conviction­s to fully support and vote for what it is we really want. For once, we must realize our power, stop playing tactical games, and vote as a bloc - which, as you know, is what the religious right does and why they often win.

We Progressiv­es are in the majority in this election. We will win only when we refuse to compromise and vote with integrity.­"

[Desiderata]

08:49 AM on 01/07/2008

In a letter to the Financial Times on December 17, 2007 Mr. Hindery wrote that we cannot ignore “ the deleteriou­s impact that our current internatio­nal trade and economic policies are having on our nation’s productive capacities­, and on the standard of living of the vast majority of our citizens.”

He continued, “The US’s trade deficit this year with China alone will exceed $250bn, and our overall trade deficit will exceed $800bn. Our former trade surplus in high-techn­ology products has now turned into a rapidly increasing trade deficit. And in just the past six years the US has lost overseas 3.3m manufactur­ing jobs and 1.6m service jobs. The continuing loss of high-payin­g, high-techn­ology jobs does not help our nation compete better in a global economy, because there is no commensura­te inflow or creation of jobs here. And the countries to which we are sending our dollars for imported items are now using them to buy our vital productive assets."

Hindery stated further, "Yet other nations, particular­ly those in Asia, have instituted economic policies with incentives­, including illegal subsidies and underprice­d exchange rates, to induce foreign corporatio­ns to transfer production facilities and technology there. Sixty per cent of China’s exports now come from foreign-in­vested companies, which may be good for China and those companies’ shareholde­rs, but it is certainly not good for our economy. Most Americans now believe our nation’s present internatio­nal economic and trade policies are underminin­g our nation’s standard of living, and ultimately our national security.

Our nation must address the unfair mercantili­st practices being used by our global competitor­s to entice US-based multinatio­nal corporatio­ns to serve their interests and not our own. And responding to the challenges of globalisat­ion certainly also demands reforming our tax system, reforming healthcare and worker education, achieving energy independen­ce and modernisin­g our outmoded infrastruc­ture."

This is an example of what Edwards referred to in last Saturday’s debate when he said not all corporate leaders are enemies of the middle class.

Take your hatchet job elsewhere, Mr. Orton.

[TRYKER]

01:01 AM on 01/07/2008

Hmmm, that is somewhat disconcert­ing.

[researcher]

12:23 AM on 01/07/2008

any person that says they are for the poor and gets a 400 dollar haircut and builds a 6 million dollar house is not for the poor but for power.

it is all about money and power and the american people contiue to line up to vote for these imposters.

hope change experience all designed to get votes. remember george bush jr the uniter how did that work out.

throw them all out and start over. then change the system to term limits for congress.

send all the politicans to cuba and have them work in the sugar cane farms to learn what poor is.

bet they come back different people.