Rubio Follows the Big Money
Sen. Marco Rubio is the new favorite of
the Republican establishment, a shift away from Jeb Bush signaled by
hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer’s embrace.
By Jonathan Marshall
November 03, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Consortiumnews"
- - On the morning of Halloween, the New York Times broke
the scary
news that Republican presidential contender Marco Rubio
had won a big jackpot: the endorsement of billionaire hedge fund
investor Paul Singer. But aside from citing Singer’s praise for
Rubio’s “message of optimism” and “work on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee,” the story offered little explanation of what
could prove to be a decisive turning point in the GOP primary race.
On the policy front, Rubio clearly meets Singer’s
requirement for a candidate who favors lower taxes on the rich and,
even more important, a blank check for Israel’s right-wing
government. With his hawkish stands on the Middle East, including
fervent opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, Rubio had already
won over another leading Republican “bundler,” New York
attorney
Phil Rosen, former chairman of American Friends of Likud
and a believer that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians “was,
and will always be, a holy war.”
Rubio is a protégé of Florida billionaire Norman
Braman, who has contributed at least six figures to support the
expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Rubio
reportedly
leads the all-important “Adelson primary,” the race to
tap the virtually unlimited cash box of gambling billionaire Sheldon
Adelson, the single most prominent U.S. supporter of Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
All that is music to Singer’s ears, but Rubio’s
“work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee” is about something
else altogether: his political support for Singer’s efforts to drain
more than $1.5 billion dollars from Argentina in payments on old
bonds that lost most of their value after the country defaulted in
2001.
Singer’s Elliott Management bought that debt
several years ago for less than $50 million, and then successfully
sued in U.S. court to demand full recovery of the face amount — in
the face of opposition from the Obama administration, most other
bondholders, and, above all, Argentina’s government, led by
President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
Singer, who is famous for his bare-knuckles
tactics against foreign governments, has gone after Kirchner’s
government on all fronts. Most strategically, he supported the
highly questionable claims by an Argentine prosecutor
that the Kirchner government tried to cover up the involvement of
the Iranian government in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community
center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people.
The issue was perfect for a smear campaign:
targeting alleged Iranian terrorism and government anti-Semitism,
Singer could undercut the legitimacy of the one entity standing
between him and huge profits on his speculative bond purchases.
Singer’s Elliot Management is a major backer of American
Task Force Argentina, which advocates for full repayment of
the Argentine bonds and has spent millions of dollars lobbying
Congress. It also spends big bucks to blacken Argentina’s
reputation.
As Huffington Post
reported in 2013, the group “has launched a broad attack
on Argentina in its PR campaign. … Politico ad, paid for by ATFA,
slammed the country as a safe haven for narcotics traffickers. Another
ATFA ad accuses Argentine President Cristina Kirchner of
making a ‘pact with the Devil,’ pointing to a legal memo between her
country and Iran involving Argentina’s effort to prosecute Iranian
defendants in a terrorism case.”
As one of its lobbyists told Huffington Post, “We
do whatever we can to get our government and media’s attention
focused on what a bad actor Argentina is.”
An
investigation by Charles Davis for Inter Press Service
showed that employees of Singer’s Elliott Management contributed
more than $95,000 to Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois, who wrote a letter
denouncing President Kirchner’s agreement with Iran to investigate
the 1994 bombing.
Rep. Michael Grimm, R-NY, who received $38,000
from Elliott Management employees, co-sponsored legislation
demanding that Argentina’s bondholders receive full compensation,
and called for an investigation of Argentina’s ties with Iran. Other
recipients of Singer’s largesse — including AIPAC, The Israel
Project and the American Enterprise Institute — also hammered the
Kirchner government, virtually accusing it of anti-Semitism.
Last year, another member of Congress got in on
the act: Sen. Marco Rubio. While grilling President Obama’s nominee
as U.S. ambassador to Argentina, Rubio
complained that Buenos Aires “doesn’t pay bondholders,
doesn’t work with our security operations. . . . These aren’t the
actions of an ally.”
Adding a dig at President Kirchner, he added, “We
have this trend in Latin America of people who get elected but then
don’t govern democratically. Argentina is an example of this.” His
speech triggered an angry
response from Kirchner’s Foreign Minister Hector Timerman
— an Argentine Jew — calling Rubio an “extremist.”
This May, Rubio introduced a
resolution in the Senate suggesting that Kirchner
conspired to “cover up Iranian involvement in the 1994 terrorist
bombing.” Rubio
declared that the issues in the case “extend well beyond
Argentina and involve the international community, and more
importantly, U.S. national security.”
As Eli Clifton
noted, “It turns out that Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott
Management, was Rubio’s
second largest source of campaign contributions between
2009 and 2014, providing the presidential hopeful with $122,620,
according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.”
When Kirchner herself had the temerity this spring
to
link Singer to various neoconservative attacks on her
policies, citing a “global modus operandi” to coerce
foreign states, the reliably neoconservative editorial page of the
Washington Post published an
editorial reply titled, “Argentina’s President Resorts to
Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories.”
To which Jim Lobe and Charles Davis, citing a long
list of Singer connections to Kirchner’s critics,
replied, “follow the money.” That advice, made famous in
the movie version of Watergate’s Deep Throat, remains the best guide
to understanding billionaire funding of candidates in the 2016
election.
Jonathan
Marshall is an independent researcher living in San Anselmo,
California. Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were “Risky
Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons
Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi
Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The
Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi
Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The
US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and
“Hidden
Origins of Syria’s Civil War.” ]