Posted on 08/29/2015 12:01:34 PM PDT by Theoria
When Ready for Hillary, a pro-Hillary Rodham Clinton super PAC, wanted to take out a million-dollar loan five months before it planned to go out of business, it turned to a bank that was founded to guard the savings of New York City garment workers.
When the Democracy Alliance, an influential club of liberal donors, sought to recruit members in advance of the 2016 elections, the banks president helped to make introductions.
And when workers-rights groups wanted to embarrass Walmart and the Gap for unsafe working conditions at factories supplying their stores, Amalgamated Bank, which manages $40 billion in pension fund assets, stepped in again, rounding up fellow investors to warn the companies that they could face lawsuits and shareholder actions.
Four years after nearly collapsing amid the financial crisis, Amalgamated has aggressively carved out a position as the lefts private banker, leveraging deep connections with the Democratic establishment to expand rapidly in a niche long dominated by larger but less nimble financial institutions.
The banks rise has been driven not only by the pace and complexity of modern campaigns, which demand increasingly specialized financial services, but by their vastly expanded scale: Billion-dollar presidential campaigns are expected for both parties in 2016, bolstered by super PACs raising hundreds of millions of dollars more.
And with Republican outside groups raising substantially more than their left-leaning counterparts this year, Democratic strategists viewed Amalgamated as a tool to leverage the financial clout of labor unions and left-leaning philanthropists.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And how much is Keith Mestrich compensated to manage the Amalgamated bank?
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