Sen. Ted Cruz Has an Unstable Glenn Beck Problem – The Beck, Barton and Mercer Connections

[Mixin]

Posted on January 21, 2016 by sundance

In response to Sarah Palin’s endorsement of candidate Donald Trump, an apoplectic Glenn Beck has announced his intent to rally with Ted Cruz in Waterloo Iowa.

However, the event itself is being organized by a pro-Cruz group ‘Keep the Promise 1’ (KtP1), a Super-pac originally started by billionaire hedge-funder Robert Mercer, who eventually turned over control of the Political Action Committee (PAC) to David Barton.

David Barton is Co-Chair for Glenn Beck’s Mercury One charity, and the assembly of interests provides an opportunity to explain how all of these entities connect.

Billionaire Robert Mercer originally started KtP to promote candidate Ted Cruz. Eventually three pro-Cruz KtP enterprises were started but not before $500,000 was transferred to start up another Super-PAC for Carly Fiorina, “Carly for America” (CfA).

The Federal Election Commission sent an inquiry directed to Mercer’s KtP, requesting an explanation of why a Pro-Cruz Super-PAC would be funding the start up of a Pro-Carly Super-PAC. -LINK-

The financial transfer remains a mystery, but common sense and a look at the timing of the transfer, would indicate this was a way for Robert Mercer to hedge his bets (no pun intended) in the event Fiorina gained more traction than Cruz. Mercer obviously wanted to have self-interested influence with both candidates.

The extraordinarily wealthy influence agent, Robert Mercer currently owes the IRS somewhere between $6 billion and $10 billion dollars. If he can help purchase a White House victory for either candidate, obviously the scales could be tipped in his favor.

However, as noted, not long after founding the political committee, Mercer turned over the Super-PAC to Glenn Beck’s friend and business partner David Barton.

But the Mercer influence didn’t just stop with the KtP organization.

The billionaire also purchased a controlling stake in Breitbart.Com, who then began promoting a years’ long poll of presidential candidates.

Unknown throughout most of 2015 – in the background for the poll data was actually a secondary Mercer enterprise, Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica is a rather spooky enterprise consisting of a massive data-mining operation collecting the information of Breitbart.Com poll users. This data was then organized, packaged and used for social media micro-targeting and Ted Cruz campaign donation requests.

It is from the Cambridge Analytica data that millions of targeted GOP voters are inundated with Ted Cruz campaign donor requests.

In essence Robert Mercer used his financing to create a massive data set which targeted voters and then, in order to work around FEC limits on campaign finance rules, Mercer (via Cambridge Analytica) sells the data to the Ted Cruz campaign via KtP. See example FEC filing.

The purchases of Mercer’s data are made by KtP1 (Barton). It’s a money circle. The benefactor of the KtP1 data is the Ted Cruz campaign. By all appearances the financial exchanges are circular where FEC legal financial rules are avoided by laundering the origin of the money through the third party before returning the purchase to the intended recipient.

By taking his name of the Super-PAC KtP, and by using the cover of Cambridge Analytica, Mercer avoids having connection and curious eyes upon his (self-interest) motives.

Which brings us to Waterloo Iowa this weekend. Where Glenn Beck is scheduled to appear with Ted Cruz for an endorsement, and KtP is putting on a campaign event with Robert Mercer and Glenn Beck’s guy, David Barton, paying for it.

WATERLOO — Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz will return to Waterloo for a rally on Saturday night.

The event, hosted by the Keep the Promise political action committee that is supporting Cruz, will also feature radio personality Glenn Beck, Cruz national co-chairs Steve King and Bob Vander Plaats, and conservative author David Barton. (link)

Glenn Beck has a history of influencing Senator Ted Cruz and by all appearances becomes rather unstable when his personal associations with Cruz are tested. Last year Glenn Beck felt he did not get enough attention from Ted Cruz and a group of conservative leaders including Sarah Palin during a DC rally against the Iran Deal.

During his Iran Rally meltdown Glenn Beck lashed out at Sarah Palin calling her “a clown”. – Full Story–

But 2015 wasn’t the only Beck meltdown surrounding Ted Cruz. Beck demanded Cruz attend a Mercury One charity event in Texas (July 2014) where he was passing out “Soccer Balls and Teddy Bears” to illegal aliens from South America.

Beck became rather upset the mainstream media were not giving him enough attention, and was further angered when Senator Cruz’s appearance wasn’t broadcast strongly enough. – Link –

The overall border welcome event was met with quite a bit of controversy at the time and led to Beck’s counterpart Dana Loesch attacking various people who disagreed with the overall premise of the event.

An example of the ridiculous pettiness was Beck’s media enterprise even attacked American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson just because Lifson allowed a counter position article showcasing the illogical and counter-intuitive notion of welcoming Illegal Aliens.

Using religion to promote their political enterprises David Barton, Glenn Beck and Raphael Cruz present a very narrow prism that turns off many voters. It was something we warned about long before the primary season heated up.

Proselytizing as an electoral strategy is divisive because it eventually creates supporters who will ridicule and marginalize their political opponents from a position of questioning their faith.

Religion, faith and the expressions therein, is a profoundly personal issue for most voters and not something that should be used as a weapon to marginalize political opponents. It also turns people off very quickly; which, in this authors opinion, is exactly what’s happening right now.

Glenn Beck seeing his influence -yet again- limited to a very narrow audience, has begun to lash out in every direction. Hence, he’s going back to a traditional track record of highly unstable behavior.

Unfortunately for Ted Cruz, the Senator and presidential candidate has enmeshed himself with Beck to such a degree there is no way to escape him.

Mr. Glenn Beck will continue to circle the drain of irrelevance, make very consequential enemies, and promote an air of intense polarization for his candidate Senator Ted Cruz.

Yes, there is a profound irony in the venue for this latest meltdown, Waterloo Iowa.

….Glenn Beck is indeed Senator Ted Cruz’s Waterloo !

http://theconservativetreehouse.com...oblem-the-beck-barton-and-mercer-connections/

 

[Baloo]

Beck was great when on FOX but he jumped the shark after he got kicked off. Don't pay attention to him anymore.

 

[Millwright]

I wonder if Cruz is aware of how toxic Beck really is?

 

[Countrybumpkin]

I have to feel sorry of Cruz...Beck is insane...

 

[packyderms_wife]

I wonder if Cruz is aware of how toxic Beck really is?

apparently not. His people have called here twice today and both times I told them he wasn't qualified to run because his dad wasn't a natural born citizen when he was born. Only one of his peeps responded and it was with a "you can't know that for sure" comment. Dumbasses.

 

[Hansa44]

I wonder if Cruz is aware of how toxic Beck really is?

Well, he's about to find out.

 

[Mixin]

So I was curious about Mercer's hedgefund business and found the following from last spring when the whole problem cropped up:

New Money, New Problems
04.10.15
Meet Ted Cruz’s Tax-Dodging Sugar Daddy
Cruz rails against ‘crony capitalism’—and counts a CEO under investigation for unpaid billions in taxes as a mega-donor. Awwwwwkward.

Hedge fund CEO Robert Mercer is all in for the conservative Texas Republican Ted Cruz, and the billionaire will have unusually substantial influence in how his contributions get spent.

But the billionaire also has some baggage—like, the avoiding billions in taxes kind of baggage.

His alleged failure to pay those taxes led to substantial congressional scrutiny in 2014—and it’s not clear the investigation is over.

This, and some of Mercer’s side projects, could present interesting challenges for Cruz’s campaign. Especially since Cruz has been a vocal opponent of those who “give favors to Wall Street” and engage in “crony capitalism.”

On the one hand, Mercer’s support is fantastic for Cruz for all the obvious reasons (having a billionaire in your corner is nice). On the other hand, Mercer’s hedge fund—Renaissance Technologies—recently faced an unflattering congressional investigation, the results of which indicated that it used complex and unorthodox financial structures to dramatically lower its tax burden.This drew scorching bipartisan criticism from investigators on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

“Renaissance profited from this tax treatment by insisting on the fiction that it didn’t really own the stocks it traded—that the banks that Renaissance dealt with, did,” said Sen. John McCain during a hearing on the issue, per Mother Jones. “But, the fact is that Renaissance did all the trading, maintained full control over the account…and reaped all of the profits.”

In his opening statement for that hearing, then-subcommittee chair Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said that Mercer’s business avoided paying more than $6 billion in taxes between 2000 and 2013.

Since then, Levin has retired from the Senate and Republican Sen. Rob Portman has taken his place as subcommittee chair. When I called the subcommittee’s Capitol Hill office to see if any investigation into Renaissance was still underway, the person who answered the phone said he couldn’t comment on active investigations. I then asked if that meant the investigation was in fact active.

“I can’t say whether it’s active, I can’t say whether it’s inactive, I can’t even say whether we’ve investigated them,” he said.
Meet Ted Cruz's $11 Million Money Man, Bob Mercer
Bloomberg

Later, Portman’s spokeswoman, Caitlin Conant, emailed to say that the committee doesn’t comment on its work beyond what’s in the public record. Renaissance Technologies didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether they’re currently being investigated.

Given this probe into his company’s books, it’s no surprise Mercer has invested heavily in keeping financial industry watchdogs from gaining political power. However, you’d think this might conflict with his candidate’s populist zeal.

“[M]y criticism with Washington is they engage in crony capitalism,” Cruz told Bloomberg Politics. “They give favors to Wall Street and big business and that’s why I’ve been an outspoken opponent of crony capitalism, taking on leaders in both parties.”“Renaissance profited from this tax treatment by insisting on the fiction that it didn’t really own the stocks it traded—that the banks that Renaissance dealt with, did,” said Sen. John McCain.

But the Cruz campaign doesn’t seem to see any problems with the arrangement. When I asked Rick Tyler, the campaign’s senior communications adviser, if he was worried about potential conflicts, he said, “No way.”

Mercer has long backed conservative candidates, and he’s spending heavily on Cruz through a new breed of super PACs started by the super rich.

An anonymous Cruz source told Bloomberg on Wednesday that a franchise of pro-Cruz super PACs—formed just this week—will have raised $31 million by end of the day on Friday. There are four super PACs, called Keep the Promise, Keep the Promise I, Keep the Promise II, and Keep the Promise III.

This is not normal; presidential candidates usually give their imprimatur to one such group, which then rakes in contributions and makes independent expenditures to help the candidate. After all, there are legal limits on how much donors can give to presidential candidates, but no limits on how much they can give to these PACs.

One longtime campaign lawyer said the widespread Republican donor buyer’s remorse exists from the the 2012 general elections—when a few powerful super PACs spent massive sums of money to get Mitt Romney elected, and were left empty-handed on Election Night. As a result, billionaires are starting their own PACs to fund political campaigns to have more control on how their money gets spent.

It’s worth noting that this explanation doesn’t make sense to everyone. Dan Backer, an attorney who’s worked extensively with Republican and Tea Party groups on campaign finance issues, said he thought having multiple super PACs could make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone involved.

“All you’re doing is multiplying your reporting and compliance burden for no good reason,” he said. “At first blush, it just strikes me as a little weird.”

Regardless, the operating assumption seems to be that having a cadre of super PACs will give mega-donors like Mercer more power over the dynamics of the presidential election. Saul Anuzis, a Michigan Republican operative who started a Mercer-funded super PAC in the 2014 midterms, indicated as much in an interview with Mother Jones. He told the magazine that he expected to see "more and more super-PACs starting that are donor-centric or district-centric.” In Cruz and Mercer’s case, that prediction seems remarkably prescient.

In 2010, 2012, and 2014 the billionaire spent significant money trying (unsuccessfully) to take out Oregon Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio, who has made his support of higher Wall Street taxes a signature issue. And DeFazio has used the fact that he’s a Mercer target to burnish his fiscal-progressive bona fides.

Mercer helped Lee Zeldin defeat former Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutor George Demos in a 2014 Republican House race primary. Mercer also helped Zeldin win the general election, where he defeated a Democratic incumbent who was a vociferous defender of Dodd-Frank.

But his areas of interest are broader than just elections. He singlehandedly paid for a $1 million TV ad campaign opposing the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. And his affinity for conservative causes seems to go back to his early days doing research for the Kirtland Air Force Base’s weapons lab in New Mexico.

Mercer hinted at his political evolution in a 2014 speech he gave to accept the Association for Computational Linguistics lifetime achievement award. He described rewriting a computer program so that it worked more efficiently, and then said that his bosses at the lab decided to just make the program do more complicated computations.

“I took this as an indication that one of the most important goals of government-financed research is not so much to get answers as it is to consume the computer budget, which has left me ever since with a jaundiced view of government-financed research,” he said.

Excepting Zeldin, Mercer’s chosen candidates haven’t fared particularly well. The billionaire spent $1 million to help pay for the 2012 Republican National Convention, and also gave Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS significant funds to try to boost Republicans’ fortunes. And he spent $200,000 on Wendy Long’s Senate race. Who’s Wendy Long, you ask? Right.

There’s a kind of funny flip in the media narrative here, too. After Cruz announced that he would run, a Politico sub-hed blared that he was “months behind his competitors in recruiting mega-donors and bundlers.” If the storied $31 million materializes, then those concerns were probably meritless.

But, to paraphrase the poet, with new money comes new problems. And it remains to be seen how a cozy alliance with a guy whose hedge fund allegedly dodged $6 billion in taxes could play out for the senator.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/10/meet-ted-cruz-s-tax-dodging-sugar-daddy.html

 

[Mixin]

I haven't yet found out how this was settled. It sure shines the light on why Trump was so strong what the hedge fund guys were getting away with.

*********************

By Pam Martens: July 22, 2014

Senate: Renaissance Hedge Fund Avoided $6 Billion in Taxes in Bogus Scheme With Banks

Only one word comes to mind to describe the testimony taking place before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations this morning: Machiavellian.

The criminal minds on Wall Street have twisted banking and securities laws into such a pretzel of hubris that neither Congress, Federal Regulators or even the General Accountability Office can say with any confidence if the U.S. financial system is an over-leveraged house of cards. They just don’t know.

According to a copious report released last evening, here’s what hedge funds have been doing for more than a decade with the intimate involvement of global banks: the hedge fund makes a deposit of cash into an account at the bank which has been established so that the hedge fund can engage in high frequency trading of stocks. The account is not in the hedge fund’s name but in the bank’s name. The bank then deposits $9 for every one dollar the hedge fund deposits into the same account. Some times, the leverage reaches as high as 20 to 1.

The hedge fund proceeds to trade the hell out of the account, generating tens of thousands of trades a day using their own high frequency trading program and algorithms. Many of the trades last no more than minutes. The bank charges the hedge fund fees for the trade executions and interest on the money loaned.

Based on a written side agreement, preposterously called a “basket option,” the hedge fund will collect all the profits made in the account in the bank’s name after a year or longer and then characterize millions of trades which were held for less than a year, many for just minutes, as long-term capital gains (which by law require a holding period of a year or longer). Long term capital gains are taxed at almost half the tax rate of the top rate on short term gains.

There are so many banking crimes embedded in this story that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the one most dangerous to the safety and soundness of banks: extension of margin credit.

Under Federal law known as Regulation T, it is perceived wisdom on Wall Street that a bank or broker-dealer cannot extend more than 50 percent margin on a stock account. But since the banks involved in these basket options called these accounts their own proprietary trading accounts, even though the hedge fund had full control over the trading and ultimate ownership of profits, the banks were justified (in their minds) with thumbing their nose at a bedrock of doing business on Wall Street.

We learn from a footnote in the Senate’s report that hedge funds have gamed Regulation T further. The report advises: “ ‘Joint Back Office’ (JBO) and international prime brokerage accounts offer two alternatives for hedge funds seeking higher leverage. JBO arrangements have been given an exemption from Regulation T and are permitted leverage of 6.7 times. JBO arrangements require the margin lender and margin borrower to form a joint venture, creating a closer association than is typical for a prime brokerage relationship.”

Another key issue is the falsification of books and records – a serious no-no for a bank. How can Federal regulators understand what is going on in a financial institution if the true ownership of accounts is not honestly indicated by name, address and tax ID number. This system sounds like a perfect cover for money launderers and insider trading.

According to the Senate’s report, at least 13 hedge funds engaged in these basket options to conduct over $100 billion in securities trades. Two banks mentioned by name for their involvement are Barclays and Deutsche Bank.

One hedge fund stands out in the report for using this strategy for more than a decade to obtain excess leverage with which to trade and to cut its tax burden. According to the Senate report, Renaissance Technologies may have engaged in “tax avoidance of more than $6 billion.”

It didn’t take more than a quick reading of the resumes of the multiple executives from Renaissance, who will be giving testimony before the Senate today, to see why it has landed in such hot water. One Executive Vice President, Mark Silber, wears all of the following hats: CFO, Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Legal Officer. And, by the way, he was previously a CPA with the accounting firm that now audits the books of Renaissance – BDO Seidman.

A CPA attempting to plead ignorance on what constitutes a long term capital gain should make for interesting theatre in the Senate today.

The potentially catastrophic danger these types of cavalier arrangements have on the overall U.S. financial system is impossible to quantify according to the Senate report. It tells us the following:

“Large partnerships – which include hedge funds, private equity funds, and publicly traded partnerships – are some of the most profitable entities in the United States. According to a 2013 preliminary report issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), ‘n tax year 2011, nearly 3.3 million partnerships accounted for $20.6 trillion in assets and $580.9 billion in total net income.’ That GAO report also found that the IRS was failing to audit 99% of the tax returns filed by large partnerships with assets exceeding $100 million.”

We don’t know what’s going on with those 3.3 million partnerships and their $20.6 trillion in assets. We don’t know if the biggest banks on Wall Street have similar arrangements where they are offering 20 to 1 leverage. Until we know, to borrow a phrase from bestselling author, Michael Lewis, we’re all “dumb tourists” when it comes to Wall Street.

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/...-billion-in-taxes-in-bogus-scheme-with-banks/

 

[Buick Electra]

apparently not. His people have called here twice today and both times I told them he wasn't qualified to run because his dad wasn't a natural born citizen when he was born. Only one of his peeps responded and it was with a "you can't know that for sure" comment. Dumbasses.

LOL! YOU GO PACKY!!!

 

[Buick Electra]

Great searching Mixin!! So Brietbart is tied up with this billionaire. Guess they doing a sellout and going FOX news on us.

I've been reading but my head is just swimming with all these companies!! One has to be really, REALLY devious to think up these actions, companies and shell games. Nice lot Cruz is running with! Then again, you can't serve two masters, even though Cruz does a lot of preaching. Looks like Cruz already chose his master.

 

[Hfcomms]

I have to feel sorry of Cruz...Beck is insane...

If Cruz was smart he would tell Beck that if Beck really wants to help him, that Beck should switch his support to Trump and go and rally with him.

 

[Be Well]

Great searching Mixin!! So Brietbart is tied up with this billionaire. Guess they doing a sellout and going FOX news on us.

I've been reading but my head is just swimming with all these companies!! One has to be really, REALLY devious to think up these actions, companies and shell games. Nice lot Cruz is running with! Then again, you can't serve two masters, even though Cruz does a lot of preaching. Looks like Cruz already chose his master.

I read weeks ago that the main financial backer behind Breitbart was a Cruz supporter. Didn't know details though.