John McCain emphasized his role as former chairman of Senate Commerce Committee, ss pointed out by the FP story, by telling us how he invented the cell phone, the wifi, and the blackberry. But this also brings up our memory of Enron and Global Crossing and some of the biggest corporate collapses early in Bush presidency (but only to be dwarfed today by the collapses of the big investment banks).
It turns out, before Global Crossing went belly up in an Enron type scandal, McCain was its runaway top recipient of campaign money.
The Global Crossing implosion in 2002 was every bit as spetacular and painful to its employees and investors as Enron and Worldcom. Now it seems to also symbolize McCain's contribution to the telecommunication revolution.
In an online article by Business Week in 2002 titled "Global Crossing Tossed More Cash Around Town Than Enron," we learn that,
Global Crossing, founded in 1997 by Gary Winnick, a former junk-bond salesman and associate of Michael Milken, contributed $2.9 million to candidates and political parties during the 2000 election, up from just $34,000 in 1998, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). That made Global Crossing, based in Beverly Hills and Bermuda, the fifth-highest donor among communications companies--ahead of WorldCom and BellSouth. Global even topped Enron's $2.4 million in such donations for 2000. "They came out of nowhere and papered the town with money," says Larry Makinson, executive director of CRP.
and
Top recipients in Congress were key figures in telecom regulation: Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) got $31,000, and Representative Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), $12,500.
What did Global Crossing get in return? In 1999, after receiving the $31,000 contribution, McCain
urged the Federal Communications Commission to open the market for laying undersea fiber-optic cable, a market controlled by AT&T Corp. that Global Crossing was trying to penetrate.
And, after the collapse of the company in 2002,
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday that he had been "tainted" by donations from Global Crossing Ltd., but never acted improperly on behalf of the telecom firm.
So he tried to have it both ways.
And it doesn't end there. Today, his senior advisor Charles R. Black Jr., who has been lobbying for foreign dictators before joining the McCain campaign, his wife Judy Black works for a lobbying firm that represents Global Crossing before the Senate Commerce Committee.
So lobbying the FCC on behalf of a telecom company in return for cash, is McCain's idea of the "guiding hand" for creating the cell phones and wifi.