Exposing Herman Cain: The Koch Candidate
A little dirty history of Cain:
Herman Cain was the Godfather Pizza CEO a long time ago. More recently, he has been a talking head for Koch front group Americans For Prosperity but his career has been very interesting and tied to position after position of directorships in both business and business lobby groups.
Cain resigned as CEO of Godfather Pizza in 1996. After that, he became the CEO of the national restaurant association, a lobby group for corporate food interests. He had been a chairman concurrently while still at Godfather.
It is interesting that in 1992 also, that Cain became a member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, where Koch Industries, has a great deal of influence. He left in 1996.
Being the busy, DC/corporate player that he was, he also got on the board of directors of the now defunct, and corrupt, Aquila Inc. in 1992. He was there until 2008. Aquila was an energy corporation tied up in the Enron scandal amongst other dirty dealings while Cain was on the board of directors.
From Wiki, a brief history of Aquila.
In 2001 UtiliCorp spun off Aquila but then bought it back in 2002 and then renamed the entire corporation Aquila, Inc. Aquila’s stock price peaked at $37.55 in May 2001 and it ranked #33 on the Fortune 500. The stock plummeted to $6.75 in July 2002 in the wake of the Enron scandal which had called into question business practices of all electric utilities.[3] In 2004, five lawsuits were filed in federal court alleging that Aquila’s board of directors steered employees into heavily investing their retirement savings in company stock. On Jan. 26, 2005, these suits were folded into a single class action[4] alleging top company officials violated the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act requiring that employers manage employees retirement programs responsibly.[5] The company settled the case for $10.5 million in April 2007.[6] The company began selling its assets and dropped to 891 on the Fortune list in 2007.[7]
Notice the bold… That was on Cain’s watch!
It was in this period that Cain became a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity. Given his directorship at Aquila, it is not hard to see the connections he made to Koch industries.
Speculations about that aside, at some point, Cain became directly involved with Koch organizations. Through Americans for Prosperity, he officially began working for them in 2005. His campaign manager is the former director of an AFP branch. Also from the wiki,
Starting in 2005, Cain worked for the Koch family funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) alongside Mark Block. Block would later become campaign manager for Cain’s 2012 Presidential run and would be joined in Cain’s campaign by several other AFP employees. Cain continued to receive honorariums for speaking at AFP events until he announced his campaign for the Republican nomination.[55] Cain’s senior economic advisor during his 2012 presidential campaign, Rich Lowrie, who helped devise Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan, had served on the AFP board. [56]
Now what is AFP?
As a Koch astroturf/lobby organization, they strongly support taxing the poor and middle class while putting more money into the hands of the wealthy, cutting corporate taxes and regulations and opposing any sort of action on climate change. They are not above shady and illegal actions to promote their agenda.
They are powerful and they are the backbone of Cain’s campaign.
A short list of AFP’s activities include:
Fake eviction notices in Detroit, mislabelled ballots in Wisconsin, anti union initiatives in Wisconsin, 40 million dollars spent on campaigns for teabags in congress in 2010, astroturf campaigns against healthcare reform via subgroup Patients United Now, authoring and pushing the No Climate Tax pledge, the Hot Air tour which propagandises climate science denial across the nation and internationally, and they hosted the “Defending the American Dream Summits”, which involved many of the current GOP crop currently running for office.
Lovely folks…
They are also funding and creating Cain’s campaign. He is a ready made and paid for Koch lackey and the Kochs are his campaign.
Rachel Maddow has more:
According to her, Cain’s campaign is non-existent in several key primary states. She speculates that in the new post Citizen’s United environment, he doesn’t need to campaign that hard given the current field of opponents. He has a ready made and powerful infrastructure that has picked him as their candidate.