Today, Ms. [E. Lee] Hennessee finds herself in the middle of a battle over the apparent collapse of Mr. [Samuel] Israel's hedge-fund firm, Bayou Management LLC, and the possible disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars. She and her husband, Charles Gradante, run Hennessee Group, which vets hedge funds for wealthy investors, and are two of the booming industry's biggest promoters. On their advice, Hennessee clients say they had invested tens of millions of dollars in Bayou.
[...]
Ms. Hennessee, a North Carolina native, said she has never encountered a fraud since founding her company in 1987 as a division of E.F. Hutton. In 1997, Hennessee struck out on its own. She and her husband are routinely quoted in media stories about hedge funds. Ms. Hennessee was also a vocal supporter of President Bush. "Help!," she wrote in an email she sent to fund managers during the previous presidential campaign, "the current administration is favorable to the hedge-fund industry and we need to do all we can to keep them in office."
During the debate over an SEC rule requiring registration by hedge funds, Mr. Gradante argued in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee that the SEC should avoid being too heavy-handed in regulating the funds because most frauds "could have been curtailed by the gatekeepers of the industry."
Could have been, but weren't. Self-regulation among pirates is doomed to fail, isn't it? Argh!
Naturally, these Republican fraudmeisters would be opposed to regulating hedge funds, because it becomes that more difficult for them to defraud their investors. (Although pesky regulations never got in the way of Bush mega-contributors like Enron's Ken Lay from siphoning tens of millions in Enron stock and converting it into self-titled real estate and annuities, over four years before he would come to trial.)
Why do I write about this? To help establish the pattern. Bush Republicans are the purest form of parasite — they will steal from the poor (New Orleans, Medicare, tax policy), the rest of the world (Iraq, Blair's UK), the middle class (Enron, gas prices), and even their true base: the richest of the rich.
