House Leader McCarthy's family benefited from U.S. program for minorities based on disputed ancestry
Source: LA Times
A company owned by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthys in-laws won more than $7 million in no-bid and other federal contracts at U.S. military installations and other government properties in California based on a dubious claim of Native American identity by McCarthys brother-in-law, a Times investigation has found.
The prime contracts, awarded through a federal program designed to help disadvantaged minorities, were mostly for construction projects at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in McCarthys Bakersfield-based district, and the Naval Air Station Lemoore in nearby Kings County.
Vortex Construction, whose principal owner is William Wages, the brother of McCarthys wife, Judy, received a total of $7.6 million in no-bid and other prime federal contracts since 2000, The Times found. The Bakersfield company is co-owned by McCarthys mother-in-law and employs his father-in-law and sister-in-law, Wages said. McCarthys wife was a partner in Vortex in the early 1990s.
Vortex faced no competitive bids for most of the contracts because the Small Business Administration accepted Wages claim in 1998 that he is a Cherokee Indian. Under the SBA program, his company became eligible for federal contracts set aside for economically and socially disadvantaged members of minority groups, a boon to its business.
Wages says he is one-eighth Cherokee. An examination of government and tribal records by The Times and a leading Cherokee genealogist casts doubt on that claim, however. He is a member of a group called the Northern Cherokee Nation, which has no federal or state recognition as a legitimate tribe. It is considered a fraud by leaders of tribes that have federal recognition.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-na-pol-mccarthy-contracts-20181014-story.html
Zambero
(8,964 posts)George II
(67,782 posts)*not meant to be offensive to Native Americans.
AZ8theist
(5,470 posts)Maybe you can start calling McCarthy "Sitting Bull".
(please, no offense to actual native Americans. But as long as he continues to insult Sen Warren he should show the same stupidity towards his own partys' members. After all, the Repukes NEVER demonstrate hypocrisy, right????)
yellerpup
(12,253 posts)No need to insult the memory of Sitting Bull.
"Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children." Sitting Bull
irisblue
(32,980 posts)calimary
(81,304 posts)Since that's what runs in the extended McCarthy family, evidently... Certainly covers Kevin McCarthy himself.
yellerpup
(12,253 posts)dalton99a
(81,514 posts)George II
(67,782 posts)CatMor
(6,212 posts)favoring McCarthy's family is so blatant it's downright criminal.
yellerpup
(12,253 posts)There is no such tribe as the Northern Cherokee Nation. (Cherokee residing in California are members of Cherokee Nation-West)
madville
(7,412 posts)Or just have ancestors? I've never really thought about what the qualifications are.
yellerpup
(12,253 posts)by identifying your actual ancestors. If you don't know the name your Native ancestor, then you have no chance of finding them on the various census rolls, (i.e., Guion-Miller, Dawes Rolls, etc) and no chance of being accepted into the tribe.
turbinetree
(24,703 posts)And has a descendant from the Eastern Tribe, there is no such thing as a "Northern Tribe"...............just a flippant comment from a non-native......................show us your great great grand parents records.....................that means five generations if your 1/8 , that means census records...........................
Siwsan
(26,266 posts)He called them 'Generokees'.
Seriously, just about every single apparently white person I know who claims NA genealogy, says they are 'part Cherokee'. And every time they do, I think of dear Charley and smile.
Response to Siwsan (Reply #18)
geralmar This message was self-deleted by its author.
Siwsan
(26,266 posts)At one point in my life, I was friends/acquaintances with a number of Native Americans in the film industry. We used to hang around at Pow Wows, together. I was fully accepted in the gang - despite being the only non-NA. Some people from outside of our little circle thought it was odd that I was treated as just one of the bunch. What they were told was, with me being of Welsh ancestry, in the long run we were 'all tribal'.
madville
(7,412 posts)That's what they always demand Warren do.
Racerdog1
(808 posts)Fuck this piece of shit and his family.
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)TexasBushwhacker
(20,194 posts)It means one of your great grandparents was full blood. There's a damn good chance they died before you were born.
7962
(11,841 posts)And woe unto anyone else to call them out on it.
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)and I am proud of the % of Genes I share with her albeit minute!
nycbos
(6,034 posts)Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)deurbano
(2,895 posts)Last edited Sun Oct 14, 2018, 04:06 PM - Edit history (2)
From Washington Post (having trouble linking it
)
Kevin McCarthys stint as a small-business entrepreneur
Fact Checker Analysis
By Glenn Kessler
February 2, 2018
I opened my own deli, it was like Subway before Subway, even built the counter in my dads garage. And I did it for two years and I was pretty successful. I now had enough money that I could pay my whole way through college.
So I sold my business.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), interviewed by Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2015
After the the Washington Post wrote yet another article (to add to all the articles in its own and other publications) lazily accepting McCarthys lifelong claims about his early history as a small businessman, a reader wrote in to provide evidence that he was wildly exaggerating (shall we say). While sucking at the governments teat for nearly his entire adult life (first working for Congressman Bill Thomas), he has continuously lied about how much of a business owner he actually was, about when he started this short-lived business, about when he began his degree program at Cal State Bakersfield
and about other points of fact
in order to paint a more compelling (and inaccurate) picture of what really transpired. So, for the first time (it seems), the back story of My Kevin was subjected to some fact checking, and is as usual for the tall tales of these bottom feeders, it couldnt withstand the scrutiny. (My Kevin is what the vile thing occupying the White House calls this lying sycophant.)
McCarthy started his college education at Bakersfield Junior College while living at home-- an education that was basically free, except for books. (Thanks to the damn government!) According to the Post, at this time, He made money by going to car auctions in Los Angeles, bringing them back to Bakersfield and then flipping them to private buyers for a profit a practice he acknowledges was probably illegal. (And how much do you want to bet he didnt pay taxes on those profits, either?)
Then McCarthy won $5000 in the California Lottery, and thats when the myth-making began:
1. Even though the lottery didnt start in CA until McCarthy was almost 21, he has continuously claimed he was 19 when he won
probably because it fits his bullshit narrative better.
On numerous occasions, McCarthy has described these events as taking place when he was 19. He even corrected Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal during a 2015 public event when Seib said he was 21 when he opened the deli. No, no, I was 19, McCarthy interrupted.
Numerous news stories have taken him at his word. But the California lottery started on Oct. 4, 1985, when McCarthy was four months shy of turning 21. The week McCarthy became majority leader, in August 2014, the biography on his website was changed to make it clear he was 21 when he opened the deli, but he still slips into old habits. You know, I started my first business when I was 19 years old, McCarthy said on the House floor on April 27, 2016.
2. He also says he invested in the stock market and made another 30% on his initial winnings, then decided to open a business, then sold it a couple of years later after having made enough to put himself through Cal State Bakersfield. At the time, Cal State was just $338 per quarter (damn government handouts, again!)and he was living at home, and he had started out at a community collegeso he didnt really need to open a business to put himself though college, even without the lottery money
but with the lottery money, he could have easily attended without working at all. He now says the money allowed him to intern for Bill Thomas for free while in college, but again, the lottery winnings alone would have achieved that at that time in that place. (I know something about living at home and attending college in Bakersfield in roughly that era, since I did it, too, before transferring to Berkeley--with a few years in between; I also graduated from BHS, and my mother considers My Kevin and his wife and his mother to be good friends, though I was outta there before the two sandwich shop years.)
"I was successful enough to have enough money to pay my way through college. So, I sold my business because I wanted to finish college, he said during the interview with [Chris] Wallace.
3. McCarthys fabled business was actually just a counter at his uncle and aunts yogurt shop, McCarthys Yogurt! According to a review in 1986 by Peter Tittl, the deli was located in a corner of McCarthys Yogurt.
The full official name is Kevin Os Delicatessen but thats an exaggeration. The deli is only a counter and refrigerator in McCarthys [the yogurt store owned by his relatives] dining room.
4. While McCarthy has often referred to his deli (counter) as Subway before Subway (with fresh baked bread), a Subway had opened in Bakersfield in 1984.
5. The Post reports: No ownership or sales records that can be located for a Kevin Os Deli in Bakersfield, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration
only a sellers permit can be found for a McCarthys Yogurt, owned by Patricia and Thomas McCarthy, with a start date of Nov. 11, 1982, and a closeout date of April 30, 1989
McCarthy said he paid his employees, not the yogurt shop, and he does not understand why there is no record of the business. He recalls vividly having to be prepared for unexpected food prep inspections. He also recalls spending $200 on a sign that the city made him take down after seven days.
6. McCarthy has frequently said he sold the deli after two years and used the money to go to Cal State, but according to school records, he started school in the winter quarter of 1987, just a year after the business opened, and then graduated in 1989.
7. My Kevin has gotten a lot of mileage out of that two years as a businessman with a counter in his relatives store (quotes aggregated in Post article):
In 2011, he told the Faith and Freedom Coalition Annual Conference: It taught me about regulations; taught me about every person I hired, I paid as much Social Security as they did; taught me those challenges I never forgot. He also mused during a House debate: When I think back to those days of the risk I took, I wonder if in todays environment, could I do the same? Unfortunately, the answer is no, I could not. I cringe at the thought of today, of the regulations, the challenges that small businesses face. Or, as he put it in a newsletter to constituents: It reminded me of when I operated Kevin Os Deli, where I experienced one of the greatest challenges to running a small business: overregulation by government.
So at the end of the semester I decided I wasnt going to go back to school. I took my money out of the market, refinanced my current car. I had about $15,000 to $20,000 then. And I went out to buy a franchise. But no one really sells a 19-year-old a franchise. So I didnt stop with that and I created my own deli, McCarthy told the City Club in Los Angeles in 2015.
One thing I will say, my history of getting here might be different than a lot of the others, McCarthy told other lawmakers during a House committee debate on financial reforms in 2009. When I was 19 years old I started my first business, no financial institution was going to lend to me. I did it on credit cards. I did it with a financial entity even loaning me the money to buy the meat to sell [at] the deli, the icemaker and beyond.
As a former small-business owner a deli here in Bakersfield I know that there is risk involved in turning a new idea into a successful business. There is no reward without some risk. My small business, like many small businesses, was started on credit, he said in a 2012 weekly Republican address.
Id gotten interested in politics at the deli, he told Los Angeles Times in 2003. If I just tried to put a sign outside my shop, a little guy would pull up from the city and give me a note saying I had to go get a permit.
Those lessons that I learned back at Kevin Os Deli have never left me. The higher the taxes, the less you have to pay your employees and the less you have to invest in new businesses, he said in 2011.
diva77
(7,643 posts)deurbano
(2,895 posts)slight brush with a non-government job ever since! And I'll bet the real reason he got out of "private enterprise" was because it was too hard for him and/or the "business" was failing. Once he got a look at Bill Thomas's gig, he probably realized that would be a much easier (and more lucrative!) path for someone with his low intellect, but with a great talent for shmoozing, sucking up, selling out, grifting and grafting. (And hypocrisy! See how these supposed haters of "big government" embrace that same enemy when they-- or family members-- can cash out!)
I felt the Fact Check didn't get enough attention back in February. It helps explain McCarthy's affinity for 45, since they have both created these myths about themselves that (for too long) went unchallenged. (In other words, he is also completely shameless, just on a smaller scale.) Of course, the main reason McCarthy sucks up is that he is a rank opportunist (again, like his Dear Leader), and at the moment, he can have no power in the GOP/Washington without that sucking up.
diva77
(7,643 posts)while lacking talent or intellect of any kind
K&R for exposure
lapfog_1
(29,205 posts)My mother's dad (my grandfather) was a full blood Cherokee from Georgia.
My dad's grandmother was a full blood Blackfoot.
This makes me 3/8ths Native American.
This is well established in my family and I was even invited (but declined) to attend Haskell Institute in Lawrence KS (I went to KU instead).
All this time I could have owned some bogus beltway bandit "minority" business and won no-bid contracts from the GSA?
Crap.
My mother looked Native American... but I look about as "white" as can be.