Rick Perry at a luncheon hosted by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity in NYC.
Rick Perry bashed Wall Street with the fury of a thousand Elizabeth Warren’s on Wednesday.
But sounding like The Street’s worst enemy likely won’t stop him from raising cash from the industry.
What will is the Perry campaign failing to build momentum in his 2016 Presidential race.
The bashing
Perry’s speech before 220 mostly wealthy, conservative voters at Manhattan’s Yale Club likely left Wall Street bankers smarting.
Many Americans think “the game is rigged,” he said.
Wall Street “corruption has turned capitalism into cronyism,” he added.
“To be quite frank, we got screwed… and we have every right to be angry about it.”
And the line that got the most applause: “Dodd-Frank took aim at Wall Street and the bullet went right through and hit Main Street.”
This is the tough-talking Texan Governor Rick Perry, a Republican running for President, not liberal Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fierce advocate for Wall Street regulation. That said, a bunch of her policy suggestions made it into his speech.
Splitting commercial lending and investment banking businesses at banks into two separate companies — i.e. reinstating Glass-Steagall.
Forcing banks to hold more cash for trading.
Breaking up banks into smaller companies to “unlock the value of their distinct parts.”
Stop big banks from being able to borrow at lower rates because they’re designated “systemically important financial insititutions.”
Improving the living will process for failing banks so there are no more bailouts.
Perry argued that banks had only gotten bigger since the financial crisis. That means a concentration of assets.
“If you think the last financial crisis was bad wait til the next crisis,” he said.
He mixed in his populist Warren policies with some general anti-big government conservative ones — like a dislike for the agency Warren founded, the Community Financial Protection Bureau. Perry’s tone was less acerbic than fellow Texan Ted Cruz’s tone before a group of uncomfortable Wall Streeters earlier this month, but the speech was brutal all the same.
That won’t necessarily stop Perry from raising money from the Wall Street money crowd though. Many people in the hedge fund and private equity community are angry about the housing bubble too. They blame bankers for it.
They also think the banks have turned into insanely massive, overly regulated, and less-profitable zombie firms.
That means Perry’s populist bent on Wall Street won’t necessarily put cash from the financial community out of reach. Hedge fund professionals have more money than bankers.
They’re the ones candidates really want to have in their camp.
As one hedge fund executive told Business Insider: “Hedge funds look down on bankers. Bankers are a few levels below funds on the Wall Street food chain.”
Perry’s real money problem
The real issue that will keep Wall Street money out of Perry’s hands isn’t banker bashing. It’s that his campaigns lack momentum. Party insiders say the money he has raised thus has come from a small group of loyal constituents and supporters who’ve followed his long career in office.
He’ll need to rise above all the noise in the Republican Party’s crowded field if he is to get big money from around the country.
“Rick Perry is doing the smartest thing for Rick Perry,” said Anthony Scaramucci, CEO of financial firm SkyBridge Capital and finance chair for another GOP candidate, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
“By hitting Donald [Trump] he is getting his name out there which may cause his poll numbers to rise. He is cheering on Carly [Fiorina] in hopes of getting the Republican women.
“However he will likely not be the nominee, there are just too many people coming out of the clown car ahead of him.”
The Perry campaign has yet to respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
That doesn’t mean Perry won’t have fun in the meantime, though. One reporter managed to ask him about comments fellow candidate Donald Trump had made questioning the Governors “toughness” and “brainpower.”
“Let’s get a pull-up bar out there and see who can do the most pull-ups,” Perry said.
Could Debris Washed Ashore on a Tiny Remote Island Be From MH370?3:30
Investigators are studying an airplane fragment discovered Wednesday on an island in the Indian Ocean, but they say it is too early to tell whether it might hold a clue to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 last year.
Boeing investigators have looked at photos of the fragment and say that they believe it is from a 777 aircraft, sources told NBC News Wednesday afternoon.
They believe it is a piece of a wing or flap from a Boeing triple 7 and there is only one 777 missing in the world right now — MH370.
The BEA, the French counterpart to the National Transportation Safety Board, said it was also studying the fragment, which was found by a crew cleaning the coastline of rugged Reunion Island, a French territory east of Madagascar off the southern tip of Africa.
The French newspaper Le Figaro reported that the fragment was about 6 feet long and could be a piece of a wing. The fragment appeared to have been in the water "for a long period," the French Interior Ministry told NBC News.
NBC News
Sebastien Barthe, a spokesman for the BEA, said it was too soon to tell whether the fragment was part of Flight 370 or even part of that model of aircraft, the Boeing 777. He said French investigators are working with their counterparts in Malaysia and in Australia, which has led the ocean search.
The Malaysian jet, carrying 239 people, disappeared about an hour into its journey from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
Listen to Air Traffic Control Interaction With Flight MH3707:04
A joint investigation by Australia and Malaysia used satellite data to conclude that the plane probably changed course and headed south for hours before running out of fuel somewhere over the Indian Ocean.
Using boats, planes and sophisticated sonar equipment, crews from around the world have scoured tens of thousands of square miles of the open ocean, but no confirmed piece of the aircraft has been found.
Late Wednesday, the Australian government put out a statement on the new find, saying, "it would be consistent with other analysis and modelling that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern Indian Ocean."
Earlier, at the United Nations, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters that he has sent a team to verify the identity of the plane wreckage.
"Whatever wreckage found needs to be further verified before we can ever confirm that it is belonged to MH370," he said.
Prison seamstress Joyce Mitchell, who pleaded guilty Tuesday to helping two inmates escape, told investigators that she performed sexual acts on one of the men and sent X-rated selfies to the other and knew the duo planned to kill her husband, police documents show.
Mitchell, 51, told investigators that inmates Richard Matt and David Sweat nicknamed her husband, Lyle, "the glitch" and gave her small round pills to drug him with, according to statements obtained by NBC News that give dramatic new details of the breakout plot.
"I believe I helped Inmate Matt and Inmate Sweat escape because I was caught up in the fantasy," Mitchell said in one statement. "I enjoyed the attention, the feeling both of them gave me and the thought of a different life."
Mitchell, 51, has pleaded guilty to bringing contraband into the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, a felony, and to criminal facilitation, a misdemeanor, in a deal that spares her from more serious charges. She could get up to seven years when she is sentenced next month.
After three weeks on the run near the Canadian border, Matt was shot and killed by a tactical team of law enforcement officers in Malone on June 26, while Sweat was shot and captured in nearby Constable on June 28.
The three statements that Mitchell gave investigators while Matt and Sweat were still on the lam — obtained under a freedom of information request — describe how she fell under the sway of two convicted murderers serving life without parole.
They also provide a blow-by-blow of how the escape plan unfolded and how it went awry when Mitchell failed to show up for a midnight rendezvous with a sawed-off shotgun, a hatchet and a GPS for a seven-hour drive to a hideaway in the woods.
Mitchell said both men were "nice" and made her feel special. She began doing favors for Matt, starting with a call to his daughter, and he promised to paint a picture of her three kids so she could give it to her husband for their anniversary.
In April, she and Matt were alone in the tailor shop where she was an instructor when he grabbed her and her kissed her, she said.
"It startled me. He kissed me with an open mouth kiss. I didn't say anything because I was scared for my husband, who also works for the facility."
In May, she said, Matt asked her to perform oral sex and she did, out of fear, she said. On other occasions, Matt would come to her desk wearing a big coat in which he had cut a hole so that Mitchell could touch his genitals.
"This happened two or three times," she said. "The only other physical contact I had with Inmate Matt was when he kissed me at the bottom of the first set of stairs. He never touched any of my private areas."
In another statement, Mitchell said she passed notes to Matt, who was assigned to the tailor shop, to give to Sweat, who was re-assigned after a rumor that he was romantically involved with the seamstress.
"Some of those notes were of a sexual nature but I never had any sexual contact with Inmate Sweat, only Inmate Matt. I did take some naked photos of my breasts and vagina and gave them to Inmate Matt to give to Inmate Sweat. I do not know what they did with the photos."
Mitchell described how Matt had her bring certain items to him: padded gloves, glasses with lights on them, a screwdriver-type bit and, in early May, hacksaw blades.
Matt eventually confided that he and Sweat were cutting holes in their cells and going behind the walls, she said. He said they had found a box of power tools they were using to slice into the underground pipe system.
"Matt told me they were getting out and we were all going to be together," Mitchell said.
The plan, she said, was that on the day of the escape, she would give her husband two pills that Matt had somehow gotten his hands on.
"These two pills were intended to knock Lyle out so I could leave the house," she said. "After Lyle was asleep, I was supposed to drive to Dannemora and meet them by the powerhouse.
"The agreed upon meeting time was midnight. I was to drive my Jeep and bring my cellphone, gps, clothes, a gun, tents, sleeping bags, hatchet, fishing poles and money from a package I never picked up," she added.
"After I picked them up, the plan was to drive to my home and Inmate Matt was going to kill 'the glitch.' Inmate Matt referred to Lyle as 'the glitch.'"
But Mitchell never showed up to the rendezvous.
"I know I had agreed to help them escape and run away with them, but I panicked and couldn't follow through with the rest of the plan," she explained. "I really do love my husband and he's the reason."
Drug use should be treated as an illness and not a crime
Clarence Page’s Sunday column, “Let’s kick the ‘new Jim Crow’ out the door,” only addresses part of the problem. Putting people in prison for drug offenses is a senseless means of controlling the consumption of drugs. Nothing that we have done has affected the increasing use of drugs. It is time to try a new strategy.
Legalize the drugs and treat them the way we treat cigarettes and alcohol. Prohibition did not work, and we are still suffering from the aftermath of that experiment. It was the foundation of ongoing organized crime.
Legalizing the drugs and selling them the way we sell cigarettes and/or alcohol would discourage people from becoming drug dealers. People would no longer find attracting people to become addicts a profitable business.
Drugs like cocaine and heroin are produced in foreign countries and yield high income to the distributors. This industry is a major source of revenue for many of the terrorist groups. Legalizing the drugs would reduce the income provided to the terrorist groups. This would reduce some of the ongoing mayhem in the world.
We spend a phenomenal amount of money interdicting the flow of drugs to this country and imprisoning drug dealers and drug users, but we have not been successful. If we made the use of narcotics and similar drugs legal and spent this money on marketing to the public that drugs are harmful, I think you would see a much lower rate of consumption and a lower rate of incarceration.
It seems to be working for cigarettes.
Drug use should be treated as an illness and not a crime.
Three people are dead, including the gunman, in a shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana Thursday night, police said.
There were also seven people injured at the Grand 16 Theater on Johnston Street.
Conditions of those injured range from non-life-threatening to critical, Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft said at a news conference.
Paul Kieu/The Daily Advertiser/Associated Press
PHOTO: A Lafayette Police Department vehicle blocks an entrance at the Grand Theatre in Lafayette, La., following a shooting, Thursday, July 23, 2015.
The shooting broke out around 7:30 p.m. in one of the movie theater's auditoriums, Lafayette PD told ABC News. According to the Associated Press, the movie "Trainwreck" was playing at the time.
"We heard a loud pop we thought was a firecracker," witness Katie Domingue told the Daily Advertiser, according to the AP. She said a man shot down into the theater. "He wasn't saying anything. I didn't hear anybody screaming either," Domingue said, according to the AP.
Craft said the shooting was contained to one theater.
The identity of the shooter is known but is not being released, Craft said. The shooter was described as a man in his 50s, Craft said.
Treylan Arceneaux via AP
PHOTO: Police tape surrounds the scene following a shooting at a movie theater Thursday, July 23, 2015, in Lafayette, La.
Gov. Bobby Jindal, who arrived in Lafayette tonight, called the shooting a seemingly random act of violence at a news conference.
Jindal said via Twitter:
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy also tweeted, expressing his condolences for those shot:
The FBI said in a statement: "The FBI New Orleans Division is aware of a shooting incident that occurred at a Lafayette area movie theater in which FBI Agents, along with state and local law enforcement have responded. Presently a joint law enforcement coordination is under way and further details will be shared once the information becomes available."
The theater and its parent company, the Southern Theaters, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CRANFORD, NJ - Heroin overdose deaths in the United States have quadrupled since 2002. If that weren’t alarming enough, New Jersey’s rate of heroin overdose deaths is more than three times the national average and drug overdose is now the leading cause of accidental death in New Jersey. If it were not already clear, this recent surge in heroin deaths show that America’s drug laws are in need of drastic reform. We need to stop treating substance abuse as a criminal act and start treating it as a medical issue. We should end the War on Drugs and instead legalize and regulate the sale and use of narcotics.
I’m proud to say I have already been part of the fight to change New Jersey’s drug laws. In 2013 I testified to the legislature in favor of what is now the New Jersey Drug Overdose Prevention Act, which authorized paramedics and police officers to carry and administer the overdose prevention drug naloxone. I’m pleased that overdose deaths have declined since the law went into effect. Lives are being saved because our leaders realized that our drug laws were foolishly hurting vulnerable people instead of seeking to help those in need.
But there is still much work to be done. An obvious first step would be the legalization of marijuana. The success of legalization in Colorado and Washington should serve as a model to the rest of the country. Legalization will save millions of dollars in police and court costs, keep thousands of people out of jail and prison, and bring millions of dollars in new tax revenue into our state’s coffers. Simple possession of small amounts of more dangerous drugs by adults should be decriminalized immediately. Prohibition has only empowered drug dealers and organized crime.
Our drug laws should focus on treatment instead of punishment. We need to expand drug courts and alternative sentencing programs so that people whose crimes were a result of their substance abuse problems are not sent to prison to become career criminals. But we also need to get tougher on doctors who abuse their prescription writing power by overwriting scripts for pain relievers without seeing the patients in any meaningful way and then simply cutting the patients off without treatment or a plan to wean them off of the pain medication. Such doctors create the addiction without liability or consequences to themselves. That is where the focus of the authorities should be, rather than on the people suffering from addiction.
The recent prison escape of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman demonstrates the futility of an enforcement-only approach. This is the second time he has been able to escape from prison. How can you build a prison that will hold someone who has limitless resources? To me, it makes much more sense to cut off his source of wealth by legalizing and regulating narcotics. Prohibition has only empowered criminals like Guzman. We have tried every enforcement mechanism possible, and none of them have succeeded.
We will look back on the War on Drugs as one of the great follies in American history, alongside the prohibition of alcohol. The trajectory and failure of the two policies is strikingly similar. The prohibition of alcohol empowered bootleggers and the mafia much the same way the War on Drugs has empowered drug cartels. After 13 years of Prohibition, America came to its senses and legalized and regulated alcohol. It’s now time we do the same with drugs.
There is increasing bipartisan consensus for reform of our broken drug laws. While I have disagreed with Governor Christie on many issues, I was proud to work with him on the Overdose Prevention Act and have been heartened by his comments on drug policy reform. As a member of the New Jersey Assembly I will make reform of our state’s drug laws a top priority. I stand ready to work with members of both parties to help bring common sense and compassion to this issue. The War on Drugs has failed. It is time to bring it to an end.
-Jill LaZare is a candidate for New Jersey Assembly District 21
The opinions expressed herein are the writer's alone, and do not reflect the opinions of TAPinto.net or anyone who works for TAPinto.net. TAPinto.net is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by the writer.
Rick Perry at a luncheon hosted by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity in NYC.
