Unless you are a fan of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” you may not know Roger Altman. He has recently come out of the shadows of oblivion to serve as a spokesperson for one of the left’s latest political narratives – that the business community is breaking with the Republican Party.
It is one of those situations in which the left-leaning media offers a specious opinion in the hope that the mere allegation will make it happen. They are trying to create the schism by reporting it as fact – hoping others will follow their phony trend. Judging from the business contributions to Republicans in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections, it is not a fact – and the media’s effort is not working.
But still, they prop up guys like Altman to give mendacious analysis and explanation to their partisan reporting.
In essence, he claims that the big corporations are moving away from the GOP because of its racism. He says that the big guys in the wood-paneled offices know that if they do not stand up against Republican efforts to safeguard elections and secure the borders, the employees will “revolt.”
He hypothesizes that if a company was planning to move to Texas, the new election laws would be a problem. Employees would oppose the move and the company would have to make other plans. The claim does not seem credible on the surface of it.
So, who is this guy – and are his opinions credible and reflective of the general corporate leadership?
Altman was presented on MSNBC as a major business CEO – speaking for the greater business community. He was interviewed to give the perspective of major business leaders.
Altman IS a successful Wall Street businessman, who got his start as a prodigy at Lehman Brothers – becoming the firm’s youngest partner at age 28. He was co-founder and is current chairman of Evercore – a major Wall Street Player. His net worth is estimated to be at least $87 million dollars – not the highest card in the Wall Street wealth deck, but impressive.
What MSNBC failed to note is that Altman is also an outlier among business leaders. He is a stridently far left partisan Democrat. He has been an advisor to – and fundraiser for — virtually every major Democrat of the past fifty-five years – including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Barack Obama. His earliest foray into progressive politics was as an organizer in the 1968 presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy.
His work on behalf of top Democrats got Altman a lot of high-level appointments. He was in the Treasury Department under Carter and Clinton – but was forced to resign from the Clinton administration in the wake of the Whitewater scandal.
Altman’s connections not only gave him high appointed offices, but it also made him a very wealthy man. His role leading up to the General Motors bankruptcy netted his firm $47 million.
Altman tried to get an additional “success fee” of $17.9 million from the GM settlement. However, the bankruptcy trustee called the amount “staggering,” “inordinately large,” and beyond “the bounds of reasonableness” since Altman had not had any success in finding a buyer or funding for the GM debt.
As might be expected, MSNBC offered up an extremely biased progressive businessman/politician to represent the vast majority of CEO beliefs and thinking. Altman is donning dishonest garb to spread strategic political disinformation. In other words, the network took a partisan political hack – albeit a classy one — and packaged him as a representative of the general business community. That is why so much journalism is losing its standing as an objective and ethical profession – and why Altman needs to be called out for his participation in a political charade.
So, there ‘tis.
