Does Everyone Know That Hillary’s Son-In-Law Is An Elite Wall Street Banker?
And That Clinton Is Accused Of Doing Business Favors For His Hedge Fund, Eaglevale Partners, As Secretary of State?
Marc Mezvinsky is a hedge fund manager and a veteran of the controversial Wall Street firm, Goldman Sachs. He is also married to Chelsea Clinton. The two share New York’s longest apartment. The $10 million “luxury fortress” occupies an entire block, from 26th Street to 27th Street off Madison Avenue. The couple and their daughter, Charlotte, share the building with 3 other residents: another hedge fund manager, NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon, and Jennifer Lopez.
In 2011, after eight years with Goldman Sachs, Mezvinsky formed a new hedge fund called Eaglevale Partners. He partnered with former Goldman colleagues Bennett Grau and Mark Mallon. “Investors include hedge fund managers like Marc Lasry and James Leitner; an overseas money management firm connected to the Rothschild family; and people from Goldman Sachs, including the chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein,” said The New York Times in 2015. The Times piece was entitled “For Clintons, A Hedge Fund In The Family.”
When Mr. Mezvinsky and his partners began raising money in 2011 for..Eaglevale Partners, a number of investors in the firm were longtime supporters of the Clintons..Tens of millions of dollars raised by Eaglevale can be attributed to investors with some relationship or link to the Clintons.
Many Eaglevale investors are also benefactors of Bill and Hillary Clintons’ political careers. “Some of the investors in Eaglevale have contributed campaign money to the former president and Mrs. Clinton, who is widely expected to run for president again in 2016. Some have also contributed to the family’s foundation,” said the Times.
The connections between the Clintons and Eaglevale caused alarm in 2015 when emails released from Hillary Clinton’s email server showed her actively pursuing business interests for Mezvinsky, her son-in-law, while acting as Secretary of State. According to the emails, Clinton “intervened in a request forwarded by her son-in-law on behalf of a deep-sea mining firm to meet with her or other State Department officials.” The company was Neptune Minerals, a business interest of Mezvinsky. “A lawyer for an environmental group opposing deep-sea mining said Clinton’s action was ’cause for concern that the State Department might take any action that could encourage such activity.’”
A suit had previously been brought against the US government by the Center for Biological Diversity, which accused multiple agencies of “failing to conduct comprehensive environmental tests before licensing..to mine for minerals in U.S. territorial waters in the Pacific Ocean.” The company in question in that case was Lockheed Martin. Said the AP in December 2015 in relation to the Neptune controversy, “Clinton’s willingness to intercede as a result of her son-in-law’s involvement is the latest example of how the Clinton family’s interests cut across intersecting spheres of influence in American politics, commerce and charity.” Into the current quarter of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Clinton has already raised $5.9 million from the securities and investment industry.
Mezvinsky was born in Iowa in 1977. His father, Ed, represented Iowa’s 1st District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973–1977. Ed Mezvinsky ran unsuccessfully for Senate several times in the 1980s. The family relocated to Pennsylvania. Mezvinsky and Chelsea Clinton met during a political retreat at Hilton Head in 1993. “Like others in political families before them, they made each other’s acquaintance in political circumstances through their parents’ friendships.” Both went to Stanford University in California. Mezvinsky graduated in 2000 and went to work for Goldman Sachs. Clinton graduated in 2001 and moved on to graduate study at Columbia and Oxford universities.
Marc Mezvinsky’s father, Ed, went to federal prison in 2003 after defrauding friends and strangers of over $10 million — including $309,000 from his 86-year-old mother-in-law — with a series of “get-rich-quick-schemes” involving bogus oil development and other trade deals in Africa. Prosecutors called him a “one-man crime wave.” He agreed to plead guilty to 31 counts of fraud in exchange for a reduced, 5-year sentence. Clinton and Mezvinsky married in 2010.
In 2014, John Cassidy wrote “Is America An Oligarchy?” for The New Yorker. He cited a study by two political scientists, Martin Gillens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. The study finds that “the opinions of lower-income groups..appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.” According to Page and Gillens: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites..they generally lose. Moreover..even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.” It would be a stretch to call such an arrangement a democracy.
According to Bloomberg Business, “The richest 0.1 percent of the American population has rebuilt its share of wealth back to where it was in the Roaring Twenties. And the richest 0.01 percent’s share has grown even more rapidly, quadrupling since the eve of the Reagan Revolution..16,000 American families have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 2/3 of the population.” Bloomberg offers a new formulation of The American Dream: “if you want to be very, very rich — start out very rich.”
*This essay features excerpts from this longer piece on oligarchy.
