Who Owns Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, The Wall Street Shill Challenging AOC?

On Monday, we broke the story that one of Andrew Cuomo's top political operatives, Maggie Moran, is helping Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a corporate hack Wall Street is running against AOC, to raise money and find staff for the June 23 primary. Moran has been working surreptitiously but the cat is out of the bag now. [Note: Moran doesn't do anything without Cuomo's approval.]

On Wednesday, investigative journalist Lee Fang followed up at The Intercept by exposing Caruso-Cabrera's financial backers-- basically Wall Street titans who AOC has rubbed the wrong way by standing up for working families from her position on the House Financial Services Committee. "Disclosures," wrote Fang, "show that at least two dozen finance industry professionals, including several prominent private equity executives and investment bankers, made early donations to Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC contributor who is challenging Ocasio-Cortez. Caruso-Cabrera was a registered Republican until a few years ago and authored a 2010 book advocating for several conservative positions, including an end to Medicare and Social Security, which she called 'pyramid schemes.'" Fang didn't mention Cuomo or Moran, nor the role of the DCCC, which has forbidden Democratic operatives to work for candidates challenging incumbents-- although they seem to have made an exception for operatives who work against AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Among the big donors Fang found were major Cuomo backers like Glenn Hutchins, the billionaire co-founder of Silver Lake Partners (who gives to Dems), James Passin of Firebird Capital (who gives mostly to Republicans), Ken Langone, a Cuomo intimate and founder of Home Depot (who has given hundreds of thousands dollars to the NRCC), Bruce Schnitzer of Wand Partners (who gives mostly to Republicans), Steve Holzman Vantis Capital hedge fund manager (who gives mostly to Republicans), Jeffrey Rosen of Lazard (who gives mostly to Democrats), Bradley Seaman, managing partner of Parallel49 Equity (a Mitt Romney donor), scumbag lobbyist and former Dick Cheney staffer Ron Christie (who gives only to Republicans), Doug Cifu, CEO of Virtu Financial (who gives to crooked Democrats), Facundo Bacardi, an heir to the Bacardi fortune (who gives mostly to Republicans), Thaddeus Arroyo, a leading executive at AT&T (who gives to Republicans + Hillary Clinton), and Jeff Kwatinetz, a top entertainment industry promoter, business partner of Ice Cube's, crony of Steve Bannon's, big Mayo Pete donor and old friend of mine.

The Caruso-Cabrera campaign announced last week that it had collected nearly $1 million in fundraising over the first quarter of this year. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is funded by anonymous corporate donations and has spent tens of millions of dollars electing congressional Republicans, also said recently that it would mobilize business interests in support of Caruso-Cabrera.

In her first year in office, Ocasio-Cortez has used her perch in Congress to eviscerate leading figures on Wall Street. During congressional hearings last April, she pushed JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon over whether bankers should have been criminally prosecuted over the 2008 financial crisis.

“I wasn’t sent here to safeguard and protect profit, I was sent here to safeguard and protect people,” said Ocasio-Cortez in November during a hearing over the conduct of the private equity industry and its role in downsizing companies.

Ocasio-Cortez has served as a lightning rod in the Democratic Party, attracting criticism from more business-friendly elements of the establishment over her outspoken support for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and her advocacy for policies such as Medicare for All.

The lurch towards that left has provoked some traditionally Republican interests, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to use the New York primary this summer as an opportunity to push back on the ideological shift represented by Ocasio-Cortez.

...Caruso-Cabrera does not have a policy page outlining her beliefs or positions on her campaign website. In recent radio interviews, she has positioned herself as a stalwart of the moderate faction of the Democratic Party, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Joe Biden. “I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-same sex marriage, I’m very pro-immigrant, I am centrist for sure,” Caruso-Cabrera said on New York’s AM 970.

But the candidate’s beliefs are explained in detail in a book she authored in 2010 titled, You Know I’m Right: More Prosperity, Less Government, which included a forward by Larry Kudlow, who now serves as President Donald Trump’s director of the National Economic Council.

In the book, Caruso-Cabrera calls Medicare and Social Security “the country’s biggest pyramid schemes,” and wrote that she would end both programs in favor of a privatized voucher system. Medicare, Caruso-Cabrera wrote, “is another pay-as-you-go Ponzi scheme” that should be replaced with a health savings account that gives “seniors $1,000 or $2,000 a year to start.” Social Security, she notes, should be replaced with a private account system, in which Americans are incentivized to invest in the stock market.

Caruso-Cabrera devotes an entire chapter to the many policy successes of the Reagan administration, and writes that she favors tax cuts and deregulation, including eliminating entire federal agencies such as the Labor Department.

Some of the most strident language in the book is reserved for the Obama administration’s attempts to crack down on wealthy individuals who had taken advantage of offshore tax havens. The push to force Switzerland to hand over the names of U.S. nationals using secret bank accounts to dodge taxes, she wrote, put America on a “dangerous path” that would enable foreign dictatorships to similarly seize wealth kept abroad.

“Freedom and democracy are best secured when banking secrecy and tax havens exist,” Caruso-Cabrera wrote.

Please consider contributing to the AOC campaign by clicking on the Blue America Worthy Incumbents thermometer above. Oh, and I knew Jeff Kwatinetz before he was a major mogul. At the time, he managed Korn and they started a label which was distributed by Reprise. The first release was by Orgy. Remember this?