Sept. 11 (LPAC)--Former Democratic national chairman Charles Manatt led the party into collaboration with the government/banker task force running the judicial railroad of Lyndon LaRouche in the 1980s. His Los Angeles-based law firm, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, has been a central player in creating the subprime mortgage business whose collapse is blowing up the world financial system.
Investors are now dumping the stocks of bond-rating agencies, such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's, which boosted the subprime mortgage ripoff by awarding high ratings to bonds backed by the fraudulent, usurious mortgages. The London Financial Times reports that the Ohio attorney general, and financial regulators in Europe and United States, are inquiring into the potential for conflict-of-interest cases against the rating agencies. The FT quotes Ellen Marshall, a partner of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, defending the agencies. She says the criticism is just some people "trying to point a finger," and she claims such criticism would not withstand legal challenge because the rating agencies "disclose a great deal of information to investors."
As the mortgage bubble started popping, Manatt Phelps annnounced August 21 that the firm had created "a subprime mortgage task force" for the crisis which would use "the firm's vast experience working with subprime mortgage companies covering corporate, finance, legislative advocacy, bankruptcy, and litigation matters.... Manatt is uniquely positioned, close to the action, in Sacramento, Albany and Washington, to track events where today's mortgage lending, banking and policy intersect."
Manatt clients include "several of the largest subprime lenders, as well as lenders to and servicers for the industry. Ms. Marshall [quoted above] has represented Option One Mortgage since its inception, "and other such firms which grew to be giants in the industry" under her guidance as a specialist in "securitization of unusual financial assets." Manatt partner Clayton S. Friedman "represented Ameriquest in its negotiated settlement with multiple states' attorneys general..." The firm "is special securitization counsel to New Century Mortgage in its bankruptcy proceedings and is counsel to the investment bank advising People's Choice Home Loan in its bankruptcy."
-The Bankers Who Poison the Democratic Party-
Firm founder Charles Manatt was chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the 1980s when the right wing got control of the party on the pretext that left-liberalism was responsible for the defeat of 1980 Presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Manatt demanded that the Ronald Reagan Administration repudiate Lyndon LaRouche and cut off the collaboration with LaRouche that had led to Reagan's proposal for sharing directed-energy-beam anti-missile technology with the Soviet Union. Chairman Manatt helped steer the Democrats into coordination with the bankers and intelligence agents running the attacks on LaRouche via the media and the courts. Charles Manatt was founding chairman of the National Democratic Institute, a global agency of the same notorious "private, parallel government" structure that ran the Iran-Contra adventures.
Just three weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, while Dick Cheney was conniving for war and dictatorship, Manatt set up Manatt Jones Global Strategies as a subsidiary to his law firm. His partner, James R. Jones, had been the U.S. ambassador to Mexico (1993-1997), who pushed hard for the North American Free Trade Agreement; NAFTA has smashed Mexican living conditions and promoted the wave of economic refugees flooding across the border. Manatt Jones Global Strategies took as a prime client Sol Kerzner's filthy Sun gambling casino business, operating in South Africa and in Sen. Joe Lieberman's Connecticut. Manatt Jones lobbied for Mexico to legalize casinos.
As a Manatt partner, James Jones also helped run a bizarre event in July 2000: an exercise of the Council on Foreign Relations, simulating the drastic political measures that bankers would have to take in the event of a melt down of the financial system. As Executive Intelligence Review reported in 2000, Jones played the role of National Security Adviser during the simulation of a coup against a U.S. President. Of course, the President at the time of the exercise was Bill Clinton, who was especially hated by the Rohatyn-Manatt wing of the Democrats. On July 12, 2000, Jones reported: "We assumed that the President of the United States was incapacitated. We assumed that either Clinton was depressed because he was denied his favorite part-time occupation -- and I don't mean golf -- or because Ronald Reagan was yearning for his old Hollywood movies. But we assumed the President was incapacitated. We had to decide whether to take powers from the President." The same simulation worked through how to bail out the financial markets under collapse conditions.
