More on rigging Town Halls by Wall Street - Think Progress

[Scuba]

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/22/american-action-network-talking-points-town-hall/

<snip>
The Ryan plan repeals provisions in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law that allow “the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) to designate some firms as systemically significant and subject them to stiffer regulation” — a major reform Wall Street has lobbied aggressively to stop.

The American Action Network board features a number of executives and lobbyists with a potential interest in rolling back financial regulations:
– American Action Network board member Fred Malek is chairman of the investment firm Thayer Capital Partners.
– American Action Network board member Isaac Applbaum the founding General Partner of Opus Capital.
– American Action Network board member Dylan Glenn is the Senior Vice President of Guggenheim Advisors.
– American Action Network board member C. Boyden Gray is a director of FreedomWorks and founder of a lobbying firm called Gray and Schmitz. Gray recently penned an article calling financial reform unconstitutional.
– American Action Network board member B. Wayne Hughes Jr. is the founder of American Commercial Equities Inc.
– American Action Network board member Ken Langone is the chairman of investment banking firm Invemed Associates LLC.
– American Action Network board member former Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) is an executive at JPMorgan Chase.
– American Action Network board member Vin Weber is a lobbyist for a number of banks and insurance companies.

During the debate over health reform legislation, health insurance companies contracted a number of lobbying firms to bring people to congressional town halls and ask industry-friendly questions. Similarly, banks like JP Morgan and Bank of America worked through fronts like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to battle financial reform during the legislative debate last year
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[starroute]

1. What a rogues' gallery!

I don't know all the names, but a bunch of them jump out at me as being both extremely high-level and extremely hard right. These guys have had a very specific agenda for a long time, and it's coming to fruition now.

Fred Malek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Malek):

In the first Nixon administration, Malek designed and directed the "Responsiveness Program", a strategy to replace civil servants with Nixon supporters and to steer government resources to benefit Nixon's 1972 re-election. According to the Senate Watergate report, Malek wrote in a 1972 memo to Haldeman that someone was needed to "take the lead in the program to politicize Departments and Agencies" and to "supervise the patronage operation and closely monitor the grantmanship operation." In advocating the plan, Malek wrote of "substantial risks" to politicizing the Executive Branch and expressed concern that the plan would "undoubtably backfire" if made public; therefore he recommended that "to minimize any links to the President, there should be no directions on this project in writing."

C. Boyden Grey (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=C._Boyden_Gray):

"In a lengthy profile of Gray in 1997, The New Republic magazine wrote "So many different money trails lead to, by and through Gray it is bewildering." There is Gray the lobbyist, Gray the lawyer, Gray the former White House Counsel, Gray the chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), Gray the head of the Alliance for Reasonable Regulation, Gray the co-chair of the Air Quality Standards Coalition, Gray the board member of Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, Gray the major soft money contributor to the Republican Party, Gray the friend of judges and justices (many of whom owe their jobs to him), to name but a few." . . .

"Even natural-born policy aristocrats such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune, have been co-opted, the author charges, presenting themselves as disinterested public servants while shilling for corporate clients.

Vin Weber (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Vin_Weber) (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Empower_America):

Weber is a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was one of the signatories to the January 26, 1998, PNAC letter sent to President Clinton urging him "to seize that opportunity" in his upcoming State of the Union "to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." . . .

Weber is co-founder and co-director of Empower America and co-director of the Aspen Institute's Domestic Strategy Group. . . Weber is a member of the Board of Directors of Citizens Against Government Waste. . . .

Empower America was a right-wing think tank established in 1993. In July 2004 it merged with Citizens for a Sound Economy to form a new group called FreedomWorks. . . . According to its web site, Empower America was "devoted to ensuring that government actions foster growth, economic well-being, freedom and individual responsibility. The ideas that have fueled America's stunning economic expansion - opportunity, competition, ownership and freedom - must be the framework for reform of century-old public systems such as K-12 education, the tax code and social security."

[starroute]

2. Add this on B. Wayne Hughes (and his father)

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/07/23/rove_group_billionaire_donors

Virtually all of the $4.7 million raised by Karl Rove's new conservative outfit was contributed by just four billionaires, three of whom are based in Dallas, Texas, and two of whom made their fortune in the oil and gas industry. . . .

Bradley Wayne Hughes, chairman of Public Storage Inc, is American Crossroads' biggest donor, contributing $1.55 million to date. Hughes founded Public Storage in 1972 and the company has grown into a self-storage behemouth with over 2,000 locations. Worth $3.9 billion, he lives in Lexington, KY, where he actively raises thoroughbred horses at Spendthrift Farm. (Hughes' son, B. Wayne Hughes Jr., is on the board of former Senator Norm Coleman's new conservative group, the American Action Network.)

[Scuba]

3. Thanks for amplifying!!!!

[Rectangle]

4. My apologies, I accidently hit the unrecommend link on this thread!

Please disregard the 1 unrecommend.
Sorry

(I don't know how to un-unrecommend):dunce:

[Scuba]

5. You are forgiven.

[louslobbs]

6. Scuba, thanks for the information, will they ever stop the scams? Their phony gatherings are as

obvious as they are psychotic. They just have to win the game, not the argument, the game. Where would the right be without millionaires and billionaires and corporations to provide free lunches and bus rides to fake astroturf gatherings and phony town halls with questions prepared by Republican Operatives. It's getting a little old now. Here we have real people taking on Republicons as town halls, and here they go again trying to hire people and give them scripts to ask questions that make the fraud answering questions look good.
Lou

[butterfly77]

7. K&R..

[Kurovski]

8. K&R

[me b zola]

9. K&R