Tag: FEC

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

People camped out last night outside the FEC headquarters in Washington,DC to get a seat in the hearing room this  morning. Why? Because Stephen Colbert would be testifying about his request to form a super PAC to raise campaign money. This morning the FEC approved his request:

Stephen Colbert learned an important lesson Thursday at the Federal Election Commission: Even a gifted comedian can’t make campaign-finance law funny.

In a meeting devoid of anything beyond a gentle chuckle, the FEC decided that Colbert could go ahead with his plans to form a self-titled “super PAC” that could raise and spend unlimited money on the 2012 elections.

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The real parody came outside the FEC building, where Colbert began accepting donations from fans for the newly registered “Colbert Super PAC.”

“Some people have said, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ ” Colbert told the crowd. “I for one don’t think participating in democracy is a joke.”

Colbert continued being coy about the ultimate goal of his new PAC, and whether he would take advantage of a loosened campaign-finance environment to solicit big money from corporations and others. When asked by a reporter when the first ad might run, Colbert said: “I’ve got to get some money first.”

How low can you go to make billions? By quite literally bleeding the poor and selling their blood to the people who need it to stay alive. Sound like a plot from HBO’s “True Blood”? No. It is the business practice of Cerberus Capital, a Wall St. hedge fund firm. Cerberus recently made $1.8 billion on a mere $82.5 million investment four years ago when they bought a company called Talecris.

Cerberus Capital, one of Wall Street’s most notoriously ruthless leveraged-buyout firms (or “private equity firms” in PC-speak), recently made a $1.8 billion killing on its human plasma investment, a company called Talecris. Talecris was purchased for a mere $82.5 million just four years earlier, meaning Cerberus made 23 times its investment on human plasma.

This was accomplished by the most savage, heartless means possible: by paying peanuts to impoverished human plasma donors, who increasingly come from Mexican border towns to blood-pumping stations set up on the American side, jacking up the price of plasma by restricting supply (a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission accused Cerberus Plasma Holdings of “operat[ing] as an oligopoly”), and then selling the refined products to the most desperately ill-patients suffering from hemophilia, severe burns, multiple sclerosis and autoimmune deficiencies. The products cost so much-one, IVIG (intravenous immunoglobulin) cost twice the price of gold as of last summer-that American health insurance companies have been dropping or denying their policyholders in increasing numbers, endangering untold numbers of people.

(emphasis mine)

Cerberus is the same hedge fund that drove auto makers Chrysler and GMAC into the ground. It’s Republican “players” are former Treasury  Secretary, John Snow, Chairman, former V.P. Dan “potatoe” Quayle, International Chairman, and Founder of Cerberus, billionaire Stephen Feinberg, “a major Republican Party campaign donor with a hardcore fetish for Harleys and big guns”.

H/T to Hecate