-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 11:34 am 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! It's Tax Time! Get tips, forms and advice on AOL Money & Finance.