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Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Matt Bevin backed TARP & stimulus bill, liked the Fed’s aggressive balance sheet growth

It's deja vu all over again. A Tea Party candidate challenges a Republican Senator who has a well documented career of moderation and cooperation with the Washington establishment and solely on that candidate's word normally straight thinking Tea Party people buy into the novelty until at some point they are into too deep to back out. We witnessed this in Indiana when perennial office seeker Dick Mourdock challenged and beat Dick Lugar only to lose to Democrat Joe Donnelly. The faithful remained faithful until the end even as Rebel Pundit produced a video showing Mourdock denying his Tea Party affiliation when it was convenient, when documented evidence that Mourdock was cheating on his property tax was presented, and when Mourdock showed his lack of the Tea Party's history by attributing Rick Santelli's famous tea party rant to Jim Cramer.
In Kentucky Matt Bevin has put on his Tea Party colors and challenged Mitch McConnell. Again, many in the Tea Party are willing to overlook what I consider to be serious character flaws and an out and out falsification of his political principles.. Let's begin with his Linkedin profile  where under "education" he listed MIT at the top when in fact he had graduated from Washington and Lee and later attended a 3 week seminar called MIT Entrepreneurial Master’s Program which is not affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From Bevin's web site;
Matt Bevin grew up in a financially humble home, built on a bedrock of strong Christian values, and was encouraged by his parents to pursue the American Dream.
Yeah, a regular Abraham Lincoln.
His family of eight lived in an old farmhouse with three bedrooms and one bathroom. The home was heated only by day with two small wood stoves, and they raised a variety of animals for meat, milk and eggs, and grew most of what they ate each year in their own gardens.
How many employees did your dad have? When your home was heated by coal did someone stay up all night to keep the fire going? Bevin neglects to mention that his family owned and controlled Connecticut based Bevin Brothers Manufacturing Company since it was founded in 1832. True, it was a small company and Bevin let the insurance lapse so when the factory burnt down Bevin solicited the aid of Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal "Because he’s been an advocate of the little business guy for years." The company also got a grant from the city of East Hampton, Connecticut for the sum of $100,000. No crony capitalism here!
So what does Bevin actually do for a living? He's a hedge fund manager. He started two investment companies, Integrity Asset Management and Veracity Funds. Bevin is a partner at Waycross Partners, a Louisville hedge fund. But, you say, he has been a consistent critic of TARP which McConnell supported. True only if we define consistent as something that started after 2008. From Politico;
An Oct. 28, 2008, report for investors of Veracity Funds obtained by POLITICO — signed personally by Bevin as president of the fund — praised the federal government’s unprecedented intervention in the U.S. financial markets at that time.
“Most of the positive developments have been government led, such as the effective nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the passage of the $700 billion TARP (don’t call it a bailout) and the Federal Reserve’s intention to invest in commercial paper,” wrote Bevin and Daniel Bandi, chief investment officer and vice president of the fund. “These moves should help to stabilize asset prices and help to ease liquidity constraints in the financial system.”
And since when is the Tea Party for nationalizing publicly traded companies as in the effective nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? You remember the Stimulus Bill that birthed the Tea Party? It got 3 Republican votes in the Senate from Snowe, Collins and Specter. Damn shame Bevin wasn't there when Obama needed him.
A Bandi-signed report from April 10, 2009, praised the Democratic-backed $787 billion stimulus bill — which McConnell opposed.
“Some of the positive developments include the numerous programs from stimulus to the various Treasury acronyms (TARP, TALF, PPIP) to the Fed’s aggressive balance sheet growth. To what degree is open to some debate, but our government has taken the challenge head on and has responded like no other country,” Bandi wrote.
Bevin later filed a Securities and Exchange Commission certification — as required by law — saying he had reviewed both reports and that they were accurate.
I wish Kentucky had 2 Rand Pauls but if you confuse Bevin as the authentic conservative in the Republican primary it is only willful blindness.

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