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Subject: McCain and "Media" Lobbies / Alcalde & Fay / Conrad Black + Richard
Perle
Did Iseman and McCain
Enable
Conrad Black to Commit Fraud with
CanWest?
By: emptywheel
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/02/21/iseman-and-mccain-enable-conrad-black-to-commit-fraud-with-canwest/
February 21, 2008 11:21 am
On July 31, 2000, Alcalde & Fay--and their lobbyist Vicki
Iseman--terminated their lobbying activities for CanWest, a big Canadian media
company. That day, CanWest had achieved the goal Alcalde & Fay had been
assisting with: the acquisition of much of Conrad Black's media empire in
Canada.
Iseman and her colleagues had been lobbying the FCC, the House of
Representatives, and the Senate (including John McCain, with whom McCain's
advisors believed Iseman had an inappropriate relationship at the time) to win
approval for the foreign purchase of American broadcast companies--that is,
Conrad Black's properties, which were headquartered in Chicago.
Iseman's role in the deal is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the
deal greatly contributed to the consolidation of media in Canada:
In the largest media deal in Canadian history, CanWest Global
Communications, a company that started 20 years ago with a North Dakota
television station, is to pay $2.36 billion for dominant dailies in 8 of
Canada's 10 provinces. Mr. Black is to gain a seat on the CanWest board and
is
to become the second-largest shareholder, after the family of the company
founder, Israel H. Asper.
''The borders are gone, we have to grow,'' Mr. Asper, Global's chairman,
told a news conference in Toronto today, comparing his acquisition to Tribune
Media's recent purchase of The Los Angeles Times. ''We don't intend to be one
of the corpses lying beside the information highway.''
Mr. Black said in a statement that his company, Hollinger International,
''believes this intimate association with a highly successful telecaster
built
by an entrepreneurial spirit compatible with Hollinger is the best possible
assurance of the strength of the newspaper franchises.''
Like Conrad Black before them, the family running CanWest exerts a great deal
of editorial control--going so far as to distribute corporate editorials to be
run in all their
properties.
CanWest set off the media furor in December
[2001, a year after the purchase] with its a decision to require all of its
daily newspapers to run corporate editorials produced in its Winnipeg head
office. Initially, the company sent out one editorial weekly, but said this
would increase to three times a week. The company also said locally-written
material should not contradict the party line handed down in corporate
editorials. Ownership and management have clashed with journalists and
columnists who’ve cringed under the new controls.
More interesting still, the deal lay at the core of the charges (and
conviction) of Conrad Black for fraud. CanWest paid $60 million to Black and
other Hollinger
executives that they hid as non-compete agreements.
Canwest purchased the newspapers for $3.5-billion in a deal that also
included $80-million in non-compete payments. Black, Atkinson and Boultbee
pocketed $60-million in fees from the sale - money the U.S. prosecutors are
alleging should have gone to Hollinger International.
Now, there is absolutely no reason to believe that McCain
and Iseman had anything to do with the fraudulent aspect of this deal--or that
they even knew about it. Many of Hollinger's board members testified they had
no
clue about the fraud, so there's almost no way CanWest's lobbyist knew about
it.
Iseman simply helped make sure the deal got the regulatory approval it needed
in
the US.
As with my post on the ties between Stolen Honor and
Iseman's lobbying of McCain, I'm not so interested in the deals themselves--I'm
interested in the folks bankrolling the Iseman-McCain relationship. And as with
the Sinclair and the Paxson lobbying, what Iseman was working to accomplish was
the consolidation--and with it, the politicization--of the media. There's no
evidence the people behind the deals are the same. But the ultimate goal of
their lobbying does appear to be the same.
Responses
chrisc February 21st, 2008 at 11:44 am
Computer Sciences Corp might be interesting too.
They
have been raking in a lot of homeland security contracts.
Some of their major projects for 2007
CSC is on the Verizon Business team that won GSA’s Networx Universal
contract. CSC is providing Verizon with network design support and
engineering
services, managed-tiered security services and anti-virus managed services.
The company is also providing systems engineering and integration support to
the Defense Department’s Missile Defense Agency under a $151 million
contract.
---
EW - Agreed, Conrad Black needed no help to rip off shareholders, pension
plans, widows, fellow students at Upper Canada College, he’s been doing it
since
he was 13. But you are right to focus on the connections between the right wing
media elements here. The Asper family, Israel’s children especially, have been
vehemently pro-Israel (not that there is anything wrong with that), and were
involved in the bogus Star-of-David story floated in the Asper-owned Jerusalem
Post. Conrad Black had mastered the art of providing “consulting” fees to the
likes of George Will long before Armstrong Williams came along. Black also gave
sinecures on Hollinger boards to Kissinger, Perle, and (I think) Margaret
Thatcher. So it is not at all far-fetched to focus on the links between McCain,
the neocons and the consolidation of media interests.
---
The Aspers, like the majority of the Canadian Jewish community, have been
long-time supporters of the Liberal Party in Canada, but since patriarch Israel
(Izzy to everyone) died, they have been tinging Tory, in concert with Stephen
Harper’s attempts to win Jewish votes in Montreal and Toronto - yes, they are
closet Likudniks, IMHO. There are times when Canada’s foreign policy under the
Tories has been more pro-Israel than the US position (which is contrary to the
traditional Canadian position at our international affairs
dept.)
---
Paul Cofoni (CACA Intl. head) campaign
donations:
http://www.campaignmoney.com/p.....p?cycle=08
---
Richard Perle’s business deal with Conrad Black were always of interest..
The Curse of Black’s Perle
http://www.slate.com/id/2106175/
But alas,
the Black-Perle marriage soured. Hollinger Digital, which got started in the
late 1990s, was a disaster. “Of the forty-five investments the Digital
executives made, only five have resulted in gains,” according to the report. By
the end of 2003, the fund had lost $68 million on investments of $203 million,
“yielding a total return of -33%.”
Unchastened by the losses, Perle started his own private equity firm, Trireme
Partners, which he founded in 2001 along with Gerald Hillman, a fellow member
of
the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Perle tried to hit up Hollinger for a $25
million commitment, with $2.5 million up front. Black resisted, in part because
Black, a world-class chiseler himself, felt he was getting chiseled by Perle.
On
Feb. 1, 2002, Black wrote a memo questioning Perle’s habit of submitting
personal bills for reimbursement: “I have been consulted about your American
Express account which has been sent to us for settlement. It varies from $1,000
to $6,000 per month and there is no substantiation of any of the items which
include a great many restaurants, groceries and other matters.”
---
“As Hilzenrath noted, the two met at (natch!) the Bilderberg Conference.
Perle joined the Hollinger board in 1994 and quickly became part of Black’s
inner circle, serving on the company’s executive committee. In the late 1990s,
as the section of the report beginning on Page 339 shows, Perle got it into his
head that Hollinger should form a unit to invest in Internet companies. And who
better to run it than a former assistant secretary of defense?”
http://www.slate.com/id/2106175/
---
The main change in editorial policy at the
National Post, which was Conrad’s dream of a neo-con national paper for
a while, is that they have been forced to become more tabloid, more extreme and
silly, as they have lost circulation. Very briefly, Black gave that paper its
head (by overspending, of course, because he was hoping to drive the Globe
and Mail under, which was always a kind of silly project), and it was fun
to read (in parts, especially the entertainment/culture sections). But that was
long ago, and pre-9/11.
Ishmael is right: since 9/11, our foreign policy has been even more closed to
debate about uncritical support for what EW is calling Likudnik politics than
has yours, and that has been true of senior figures in the Liberal Party, not
just the Tories. Ishmael, I’m thinking of Irwin Cotler, Michael Ignatieff, Bob
Rae.
---
Thanks for reminding me that the issue was media, not
telecoms, consolidation.
On that note, I would add to your point that media consolidation leads to
politicization, that the worry isn’t about traditional mergers like the NYT
buying the Boston Globe. It’s about the Clear Channels gobbling up stations and
changing the face of American radio. And media conglomerates like the Tribune
Company buying up and eviscerating or shutting down competing voices, like the
LA Times, formerly one of America’s top newspapers and the only one west of the
Rockies.
He who owns the message, controls the message. Own the sole or dominant
voice, and you own the cash and power that comes with it. The kinds of evil
legitimate competition was meant to forestall.
---
I worry McCain’s ladder to maverick clout has been comprised of the kind of
cronyist bedfellowism bruited in these media related threads. Consider the
skewed hype about Comcast recently
which instantPundits are prosecuting as evidence IPvideo and liveStreamingRadio
could generate a bytewise netBias to displace netNeutrality, a profiteering
framework the current FCC might like to see occur on its watch, given a
stronger
2009 Democratic party majority in the elective branches of the federal
government likely would protect net neutrality and suppress BytewiseTaxation.
The monopolists are trying to make a speciously extrapolated paradigm of
Comcast, which itself has its own private history of unseemly capitalist
wrestling arts which brought it to its present market dominant tier.
---
I note that Dick Cheney has a special interest in media matters. The FCC’s
chairman, Kevin Martin, reportedly has close ties with Cheney and his wife is
longtime Cheney aide, Cathy Martin (I believe she works for the Shrubster now),
a role the public learned more about during the Libby trial.
When young Kevin took over as FCC chairman from Colin Powell’s son a few
years back, he froze all decision making for weeks. Even routine actions such
as
one or two-day filing extensions had to be approved by the chairman’s office.
This was purportedly so that he could “get a handle” on his agency, even though
he had been a commissioner, and before that, the commission’s top lawyer.
It’s normal for a commissioner to change his or her top staff, revise
procedures and adjust priorities, but this action seemed well outside the norm.
Scuttlebutt explained it to Cheney - who is obsessed with controlling his
bureaucrats - wanting to get a better handle on things. In any event, more
matters went up to the chairman’s office and decisions took longer to come
down.
Pundits claimed this was owing to conflicts in Cheney’s schedule and his need
to
network with his media network.
Apart from a series of major telecoms mergers, Martin has presided
over a string of media consolidations. He recently held a nationwide
dog ‘n pony show, in which he sought input about enhancing media consolidation.
In hastily scheduled visits across the country, he repeatedly heard the case
against consolidation. Needless to say, on returning to Washington, he put
enhanced consolidation on the fast track.
Nothing like a guy who listens to his constituency. And Kevin Martin is
nothing like a guy who listens to his constituency.
---
Totally OT, but EW did have an interest in what Lockheed’s nefarious doings
consists of:
FBI awards Lockheed Martin $1B biometrics
contract
…The FBI said the new system will move beyond what it called a “dependency
on a unimodal (fingerprints) biometric identifier” and incorporate multimodal
biometrics such as iris and facial imaging. Indeed the deal is a major
upgrade
to the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System because
it
lets the agency more easily share anti-terrorism information with domestic
and
international partners and may include other identifiers, including palm
prints, iris scans and facial recognition, an Associated Press story stated.
It also will include data on known criminals and terrorists, as well as
information on foreign visitors to the U.S. whose fingerprints and digital
photographs were collected under a separate Department of Homeland Security
program that monitors people entering the U.S. via air, land and sea, the AP
said…
---
Compare that to the article I linked to @ 10. I think CACI has a subcontract
in this overall project.
---
More surreal Lockheed stuff:
Lockheed Martin Orincon and Authentica to
Develop Solution to Mitigate Insider Threats within Intelligence
Community
Lockheed Martin Orincon, a diversified systems integration and information
technology company, and Authentica, a leading provider of content security
software for enterprise messaging and document sharing environments, today
announced that the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) has
contracted with them to protect the intelligence community from insider
threats to information security.
The companies will work together on a joint program, VOLTAIRE, a system
that will provide next-generation protection against information attacks by
insiders - specifically with respect to document access - by reasoning about
insiders’ behavior…
Leakers and Whistleblowers, look
out!
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