Posted on 10/10/2011 10:42:09 AM PDT by Maneesh
Herman Cain isn’t as laughable as I originally affronted. He has been making the media rounds and impressing a few people along the way, even earning himself a flock of supporters. After a recent Fox News presidential debate, a focus group overwhelmingly declared the black Republican and former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza victorious. So now that Cain has proven his candidacy as one to be take notice of (but can you blame us for brushing him off at first? Most of president Obama’s would-be contenders were just laughable.), it is only natural that the serious smears of campaign season would arise against him. First up: A business scandal that so closely mirrors the travesty at Enron, it warranted this headline from Mother Jones Magazine: “Herman Cain’s Enron-esque Disaster: The Story the GOP presidential candidate won’t tell you about his years in corporate America.” If our skepticism of him before was baseless, it certainly isn’t now. “Cain clearly believes that his pro-business message is what GOP voters want to hear. So much so, in fact, that on Saturday he officially unveiled his candidacy for the 2012 GOP nomination. But scrubbed from Cain’s official story is his long tenure as a director at a Midwest energy corporation named Aquila that, like the infamous Enron Corporation, recklessly drove into the wild west of energy trading and speculation – and ultimately screwed its employees out of tens of millions of dollars,” Mother Jones reports. According to a massive class action lawsuit against Aquila’s board of directors – including Cain – he allegedly steered employees into heavily investing their retirement savings in company stock, while at the same time shifting their business model from straightforward energy generation to risky energy trading – the kind of corporate greed that infamously brought down Enron, Mother Jones reports. In the suit, it claims that Cain and other top officials violated a 37-year-old federal law that requires employers to responsibly manage the retirement programs for their employees. Their pensions and life savings were lost. Thus far, Cain has been running as the pro-business candidate who successfully turned around the failing Godfather’s Pizza franchise after working in the corporate offices of the Pillsbury Company. His lack of political experience is always countered by touting his decades’ worth of success in business. Positions at Godfather’s, Pillsbury and his post as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City are listed as part of his official campaign biography. His part in the major downfall of Aquila – where he was on the board of directors for much of the 1990s and early 2000s – is nowhere to be found. Yes, it is expected for a candidate to try and hide his skeletons, but he should also expect to eventually be exposed. Herman Cain, you are exposed.
I am no zot. I like Cain but it is best if our nominee is thoroughly vetted. This story has the potential to devastate Cain and ignoring it does not mean that the Obama regime and media will ignore it too.
I am aware that the smears against him have commenced.
The story has been out there for awhile but I have not heard Cain discuss it.
Au contraire. IBTZ.
Did not bother to check your source did you? This is a Leftist propaganda cite pretending to be “news”
bfl
Mother Jones? Cut me a break. And do a better job vetting your sources. Cain had no involvement in basic operations of Aquila, from what I have seen from other posters who bother to do some homework on this subject instead of posting hatchet jobs from far-left wingnut sites.
This is a story from MAY and the reason it never gained traction is because Cain was not directly involved in the Aquila mess.
When the lawsuit was filed, everyone was named. Herman was exonerated and dropped from the suit because it was learned that he had no knowledge of that end of the business. He was on a different board within the company that didn’t have anything to do with stocks, etc.
The Atlanta Post article is based on a MotherJones article whose took a few general details and then made all sorts of claims that weren’t in the lawsuit they referenced. It is typical of liberal writers being lazy.
Here is the link to the lawsuit paperwork. https://motherjones.com/files/1232_cid_3_amended_consolidated_complaint.pdf
I stopped reading at “Mother Jones.”
Truly amazing . . . scandalous stories about the Republican candidates are, daily, surfacing for public scrutiny. Where were all these same investigative reporters when Hussein Obama was running for President during the ‘08 election?
Check the source of your post. The Atlanta Post is a racist, anti-conservative “It’s all Whitey’s Fault” rag.
This thread needs to be pulled.
The vaunted Romney oppo research apparatus must be hard at work for its desperate boss.
I have to disagree. This wasn't a function of the writers being lazy. This was a function of the writers lying by omission to fabricate an attack on a conservative.
Yet still, some chumps on FR fall for it, probably because they want to.
Mother Jones is about two steps below the National Enquirer when it comes to integrity.
The source “Mother Jones” is indeed suspect. However Cain was a director at Aquila and Aquila did energy trading similar to Enron and worse the exact same thing with employee retirement funds. The left dismisses everything on the Fox News website. We should not automatically do the same...the facts here appear to be true. Nothing criminal but enough to link Cain to it and for the people who make decisions on sound bytes this is all it would take.
Mother Jones!! IBTZ!!
Um, "Mother Jones," Enron didn't collapse because of energy trading, they collapsed because they hid their losses in shell companies.
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