Edwards Campaign Living in Leo Hindery's Corporate Glass House

John Edwards' campaign rhetoric has been harshly anti-corporate, but he's throwing stones from the sundeck of his key economic advisor's corporate glass house.

A New York Times story over Christmas weekend comparing Mitt Romney and John Edwards views of wealth and the role of government in its creation had a small mention of "Edwards' senior economic adviser," Leo Hindery, Jr.

I couldn't believe it.

Leo Hindery, Jr., formerly head of scandal-ridden Global Crossing, who walked away from that stockholders' disaster with $250 million? Leo Hindery, who as George Steinbrenner's head of the YES cable channel, squeezed Yankee fans out of every last dollar to watch their games?  Leo Hindery, who as head of cable television giant TCI, then arguably the country's worst cable operator, managed to con AT&T into buying the company at a premium price?  That Leo Hindery?

And after the sale, in a coup of tremendous chutzpah, Hindery then talked AT&T into making him head of the new company. The new AT&T Broadband then made TCI look like a public service enterprise as it screwed customers, employees, and its corporate parent, lost billions, and debased parent AT&T to the point that SBC was able to buy the remaining corporate shell for a song.

it's not as if Hindery's background is a mystery. Back in 1998, when the TCI deal was in the works, Leo Hindery, Jr. was the subject of a highly unusual New York Times profile which debunked his frequent claims of a boyhood out of Dickens: leaving home at 13 to fend for himself, Horatio Alger-style, at a series of menial jobs. Fact-checking Hindery's self-serving bio, Geraldine Fabricant found that despite Hindery's insistent declarations otherwise,

"Mr. Hindery's widowed mother, sister and brother all said that Mr. Hindery lived at home until he graduated from high school...

His wife said that living with her husband was rather like having an eccentric uncle in the attic. 'You get used to it after a while,' she said."

A 2005 book about the AT&T Broadband debacle, End of The Line: The Rise and Fall of AT&T, by Leslie Cauley, then a Wall Street Journal telecommunications reporter, and now USA Today's senior reporter on the same beat, was even more pointed about Hindery's shaky relationship with the truth. She called him a "carnival barker" whose standard operating procedure in dealmaking was always to be "sprinkling a little stardust," as longtime media mogul John Malone phrased it.

It was never clear to AT&T executives if Hindery stretched the truth on purpose, or if he just dwelled in a very grey world where black wasn't always black, and white wasn't always white.

I first personally witnessed the Hindery version of stardust sprinkling in 1995, when Hindery's Intermedia Partners was seeking approval from my client, Metro Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee, to buy Viacom's cable franchise there. In response to my concerns, Hindery promised the Metro Council that Intermedia minority partner TCI would never have a role in operating the Nashville system. Two years later, Nashville was  amalgamated with other TCI systems in the region, and by 1999 it was sold to AT&T by TCI, whose President by then was... Leo Hindery.

In 1997, Hindery promised my Chicago-area municipal clients that new owner TCI would finally upgrade and modernize their old-fashioned cable systems to allow broadband services, and that TCI had no intention of selling them. By 1999, new owner AT&T Broadband was struggling to upgrade those same systems that were in far worse shape than Hindery led buyer AT&T to believe. Stardust!

On the political side, Hindery has been funneling money to centrist Democrats for years, but earned a place on many activists' permanent shitlist by being a key funder of the Osama Bin Ladin ads placed on behalf of Dick Gephart that helped sink Howard Dean in Iowa in 2004. While Hindery has already maxed his contributions to the Obama, Clinton, and Edwards campaigns, Edwards has been a frequent flier on Hindery's corporate jet, reimbursing over $15,000 to Hindery's Intermedia Partners for charter service at the first class ticket rate.

Besides his deep pockets, Hindery's other campaign role has been to assuage the corporate community that John Edwards, despite his rhetoric, isn't really so hostile to them.  But considering his track record, is Leo Hindery's economic advice any more useful than his standard operating procedure of "buy low, pump it full of 'stardust,' and then dump it?"

Can't the Edwards campaign do any better than this?

- Barry Orton

UPDATE: Cross-posted at the Huffington Post.

Comments

[George H.]

That's kinda scary.

[Brian]

What a bummer. There's no one to vote for, then. Hillary is a triangulator with a campaign reliant on corporate funding. And Obama is even worse. That guy is already the best triangulator, maybe even better than Bill Clinton. Clinton was easier to reject because he never claimed to be a progressive. And you could always spot his dash to the conservative side of middle. With Obama, due to his BaRockStar appeal and celebrity glitz it is sometimes hard to realize how "deeply conservative" (Paul Street) he actually is. Obama is widely thought of as a progressive but has positions that are outdated or just plain without merit (nuclear power, free trade, merit pay, etc.).

So, if we can't vote for the most electable---according to the Public Policy Polling Survey out today, Edwards does the best against all Republicans---progressive, who can we vote for?

[Dan Sebald]

Your process of elimination didn't rule out Kucinich, Brian. How about Ron Paul? Kucinich and Paul have been "correct" on more issues over the past eight+ years than any other candidates in the race. But I guess that doesn't count for much in politics. It's strange watching the Democratic party fall back into its same pattern of choosing a candidate. Rationalizing this, triple thinking that. And then they are left with no substance whatsoever in the end; no issues that all of America can go along with. Even the Republican candidates are tossing about the "change" mantra now; there's a difference between an empty call for change and backing it up with proposals.

The way I look at it, Paul or Kucinich are the only sure bets of leaving Iraq. That's probably the best to expect. There is talk of universal health insurance, etc. But we are a broke country. Where is the money for this going to come from without a tax increase? Even if we bring the American troops home (and hopefully set the stage for a nice regional political dialog in the Middle East) and stop the expenditures there, we're now so far in a debt and we are entering that period that usually follows wars where inflation accelerates.

In the snippets I saw of the Republican debate this past weekend, they looked pathetic. Maybe Paul can get momentum from the other's childishness.

[Peter]

The naivete of thinking Ron Paul is anything resembling progressive is stunning. He's not even a libertarian, he's just an old school Robert Taft right-ist paleoconservative. He hasn't been right on anything but the war - and he was "right" on that for the wrong reasons.

[Brian]

Lookee here: Obama's top economic advisors.

Let's see one guy doesn't like Michael Moore's Sicko, one guy favors privatizing SS and the other one believes in high health care costs.

This is the "change" everybody on Facebook wants? I doubt it.
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/obamas-economic-advisers/