Billionaire Super Pacs Are Big Losers in Iowa
Hillary’s Super Pac, Priorities USA, was legally required to update its filings with the Federal Election Commission on January 31, 2016. Those filings make for some very interesting reading. Over 90 percent of the $41 million the Super Pac raised during the full year of 2015 came from a handful of billionaires and the super rich.
George Soros, the hedge fund billionaire, gave a total of $7 million to Priorities USA in 2015, writing one check in the second half of the year for an astonishing $6 million. The second largest bundle came from Haim Saban, a billionaire entertainment mogul, and his wife, Cheryl, who gave a combined $5 million in 2015. Another hedge fund mogul, David Sussman, operator of Paloma Partners, kicked in $2.5 million to Priorities USA in 2015.
Hedge fund operators are depending on Hillary Clinton not to repeal their tax perk windfall known as “carried interest,” which allows their profits to be taxed at a lower rate than wage earners like nurses and plumbers.
One eyebrow-raising donor to Hillary’s Super Pac is former World Savings Bank CEO Herbert M. Sandler, who chipped in $2.5 million to Priorities USA in 2015. Time Magazine credits Sandler and his now deceased wife, Marion, as two of the top 25 people responsible for the 2008 financial crash, writing as follows:
“In the early 1980s, the Sandlers’ World Savings Bank became the first to sell a tricky home loan called the option ARM. And they pushed the mortgage, which offered several ways to back-load your loan and thereby reduce your early payments, with increasing zeal and misleading advertisements over the next two decades. The couple pocketed $2.3 billion when they sold their bank to Wachovia in 2006. But losses on World Savings’ loan portfolio led to the implosion of Wachovia, which was sold under duress late last year to Wells Fargo.”
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