Thread: Tyson's Immigrants

From 2002.

Providence Journal

Editorial
January 18, 2002

Tyson's Immigrants


Tyson Foods Inc., America's largest meat producer, has a weakness for sharp practices.

When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, where Tyson is based, there were allegations of influence-peddling in the state government, aggravated by the fact that the governor's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, also served as a lawyer for Tyson. When Bill Clinton was president, a Tyson executive was convicted and sent to prison for trying to bribe Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy. (The executive was later pardoned by President Clinton.)

Now comes news that Tyson faces a 36-count federal indictment for reducing costs in its poultry factories by smuggling illegal aliens into the country from Mexico and providing them with fraudulent work papers. The government asserts that Tyson arranged for illegal aliens to be delivered to 15 plants in nine states, and obtained phony documents for the aliens so that they would be legally employable in the counties and states where the Tyson plants were situated.

A Tyson spokesman denies that there was any companywide "conspiracy" to deliberately augment its workforce with illegal aliens, blaming the charges on a few rogue managers at certain plants. But the sheer volume of the charges, and that the rogue managers operated at so many plants in so many states, suggest that Tyson may be more involved than its public-relations department claims.

To be sure, Tyson remains innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But this extraordinary case illuminates not just Tyson Foods Inc., but the larger problem of illegal aliens in the U.S. economy.

The immigration laws are unambiguous, and ought to be enforced: Illegal aliens have no more inherent right to employment than they have to taxpayer-funded social services. And companies that knowingly import illegal aliens to cut costs are undermining not just their competitors, but the rule of law -- and the wages of citizens.

If it is evident that the size and increasing strength of the U.S. economy require more workers than we can generate here at home, then it might be time to revisit the immigration laws and encourage the importation of greater numbers of potential employees for jobs Americans don't want or cannot fill. There is, however, no excuse for knowingly violating the law now.

Return to Laborers.org

http://www.laborers.org/projo_TysonChicken_1-10-02.htm

See:
http://www.alipac.us/f19/clinton-chronicles-full-movie-299918/


Hillary Clinton Futures Trades Detailed

By Charles R. Babcock
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 27, 1994; Page A01

Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.

The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In about 10 months of trading, she made nearly $100,000, relying heavily on advice from her friend James B. Blair, an experienced futures trader.

The new records also raise the possibility that some of her profits -- as much as $40,000 – came from larger trades ordered by someone else and then shifted to her account, Leo Melamed, a former chairman of the Merc who reviewed the records for the White House, said in an interview. He said the discrepancies in Clinton's records also could have been caused by human error.

Even allocated trades would not necessarily have benefited Clinton, Melamed added. "I have no reason to change my original assessment. Mrs. Clinton violated no rules in the course of her transactions," he said.

Lisa Caputo, Clinton's spokeswoman, said the documents were released yesterday "to give as complete a picture as possible" of her trades. She said Clinton had never before seen them.

Blair, who urged Clinton to enter the high-risk futures market and ordered most of her trades, said in a recent interview that he "talked her into" her first futures trade in October 1978 before paperwork on her account was completed. It was liquidated quickly, he recalled, because "it was bigger than she wanted and required more money."

A close examination of her individual trades underscores Blair's pivotal role. It also shows that Robert L. "Red" Bone, who ran the Springdale, Ark., office of Ray E. Friedman and Co. (Refco), allowed Clinton to initiate and maintain many trading positions – besides the first – when she did not have enough money in her account to cover them.

Why would Bone do so? Bone could not be reached for comment, but Blair said he thought he knew why. "I was a very good customer," he said, noting he paid Bone $800,000 in commissions over the years. "They weren't going to hassle me. If I brought them somebody, they weren't going to hassle them."

Besides, he added, Bone would not worry if he agreed with his clients' bet on which way the price of a given contract would go.

Blair, who at the time was outside counsel to Tyson Foods Inc., Arkansas' largest employer, says he was advising Clinton out of friendship, not to seek political gain for his state-regulated client. At the time of many of the trades, Bill Clinton was governor.

Hillary Clinton has said she made all the trading decisions herself and has tried to play down Blair's role. But she acknowledged in April, three weeks after her trades were first disclosed, that Blair actually placed most of the trades.

Blair advised Clinton again on July 17, 1979. He recalled that she started that trading day by losing $26,460 on 10 cattle contracts she had held for more than a month, by far her worst loss as a futures player. On his recommendation, he said, she immediately went back into the market. She acquired 50 new cattle contracts – worth $1.4 million -- and when the price moved in her favor, unloaded them around noon for a quick gain of $10,550. This recouped part of her loss.

Blair said Clinton and other friends he suggested trades for had lost money that spring on feeder cattle. Those trades "caused everyone some grief," he said. "I'm sure I was pressing to get everyone back above water" in recommending the quick and bold day trade.

The White House defense of Hillary Clinton's preferential treatment was that other customers in the same office also were allowed to trade without having enough cash in their accounts.

While Clinton's account was wildly successful to an outsider, it was small compared to what others were making in the cattle futures market in the 1978-79 period. An investigation of the cattle futures market at that time by Rep. Neal Smith (D-Iowa) found that in one 16-month period 32 traders made more than $110 million in profits from large trades -- those of 50 contracts or more. Clinton traded positions of 50 or more contracts only three times.

The records the White House released yesterday were part of an investigative file from 1979, when the exchange charged Bone and Refco with violations of its record keeping and margin requirement rules. Bone was suspended for three years; Refco paid a $250,000 fine, then the largest in the exchange's history. Internal memos from that investigation cover transactions from the same period in June in which Clinton was trading, but not the same trades. In one instance, the Merc found Bone and a fellow broker were ordering 1,000 cattle contracts at a time – far over the limit allowed at the time – and then allocating them to other customers.

One internal Merc memo said "there is reason to believe" that a majority of Bone's accounts were traded without the clients' permission. Blair said that Bone at times traded his personal account without permission.
Blair said he doubted Bone traded Clinton's account without her permission.

Melamed said it was "impossible" to determine the exact cause for the discrepancies between the Merc computer record of Clinton's trades and the trading records she received from Refco, which the White House released earlier.

She said that for six trades, her initial trading position in the Refco records were not reflected in the Merc documents. On one other trade neither her purchase nor sale was included. On that trade she netted $12,150 on 15 cattle contracts she held for four days.

Clinton reported a loss of $2,480 on one of the trades in question, Melamed noted.

One was a "day trade" on hog contracts that netted $2,553. Melamed said "day trades" are the only way to assure profit even if favorable trading positions are allocated to a customer's account. Any position held overnight would be subject to the rise and fall in prices in the volatile futures market, he added.

Staff researcher Barbara J. Saffir contributed to this report.

In commodities futures trading, an account that falls below the "maintenance margin" typically triggers a "margin call," where the trader must put up sufficient cash to cover the contracts. Although Hillary Rodham Clinton's account was under-margined for nearly all of July 1979, no margin calls were made, no additional cash was put up, and she eventually reaped a $60,000 profit.

June 29 ......... $56,466 (Margin: Value account should have had to continue trading.)
July 12 ........ -$24,243
July 17 ......... $22,537 (Account value: Total cash on hand plus (or minus) paper value of contracts.)
July 20 ......... $61,537
July 23, 1979: She withdrew $60,000 and never traded again, closing the account in October.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...wwtr940527.htm

Arkansas Roots

In 1978, Bill Clinton, then attorney general, was engaged in his first gubernatorial election. By year's end, he and his wife, Hillary, would become the youngest First Couple in the history of Arkansas. They were rising stars in Little Rock, but their salaries were relatively modest: Bill made just $35,000 and Hillary just $25,000 as a young associate at the influential Rose Law Firm.


Weeks before election day, Mrs. Clinton invested about $1,000 in the commodities market. In the next 10 months, she would clear $100,000, an unheard-of return. James Blair, the chief outside counsel for powerful Tyson Foods, oversaw the trades for her.
The Clintons soon made another investment. With developer Jim McDougal and his wife Susan, both longtime friends, they formed the Whitewater Development Corporation to build on lots near the town of Flippin. Questions would later be raised as to how much risk the Clintons really bore in the deal.


When Bill Clinton lost his first bid for re-election in 1980, Jim McDougal lost his job. The developer, who had been Clinton's economic aide for two years, tried a new profession: banking.


McDougal bought a small bank in Kingston and renamed it the Madison Bank and Trust Company. Three years later, he and Susan McDougal bought a savings and loan and renamed it Madison Guaranty. By the end of 1983, McDougal's bank was involved in ambitious real estate projects from Arkansas to the coast of Maine.


Already, red flags were appearing. That same year, the S&L started to run into trouble with federal regulators for making too many loans outside its service area. And in 1984, the McDougals borrowed $100,000 from Madison Guaranty to pay down the original Whitewater mortgage.


The Clintons and Jim and Susan McDougal were members of what was known as "the Arkansas political family," but neither couple had much money. In 1980, they hatched a moneymaking idea to develop forested lots along the White River in Arkansas. Their pitch: "One weekend here and you'll never want to live anywhere else."


The Clintons and McDougals borrowed about $200,000 from Citizens' Bank to buy Whitewater and without telling Citizens' they borrowed $10,000 from another bank to make the down payment. The Clintons got a half share, although they invested much less.


From there, the loans began to spiral as Whitewater faltered. Just after Clinton lost the governorship in 1980, Hillary Clinton called McDougal asking for money. He believed that Whitewater needed a model home to attract buyers, and he loaned her $30,000 from his small bank to build, own and ultimately sell a three-bedroom, ranch-style unit.


By 1982, the lots still weren't selling, and the two couples had to borrow another $20,000 just to pay interest on their original loan. McDougal began an effort to unload the properties and at one point, he in effect sold the remaining 20 lots to his real estate agent, Chris Wade, for a Piper Seminole airplane. The deal later cost taxpayers $13,000.


At the same time, the McDougals were loaning themselves thousands of dollars from Madison to cover the mortgage. They say they tried to persuade the Clintons to abandon the investment. Hillary Clinton angrily refused. Then, and for several years after, the Clintons were taking tax deductions for interest payments on Whitewater. The deductions were later challenged because the interest payments came from the Whitewater Corporation itself.
In 1988, Mrs. Clinton wrote McDougal, who was having a mental breakdown brought on by the probing into his Madison activities, to ask for power of attorney to sell off the remaining Whitewater lots herself.


By the mid-1980s, Jim McDougal was rapidly expanding the reach of Madison Guaranty. He did it by making imprudent loans with such frequency that the Arkansas banking commissioner warned the Clintons of shoddy practices.
Madison's losses were piling up, but the books never showed it. David Hale, an Arkansas judge appointed by Bill Clinton, alleges that the governor and McDougal pressured him to arrange a $300,000 loan to help cover up the problems. Hale did approve a loan of that amount to Susan McDougal, and $110,000 went to Whitewater. Clinton says he was unaware of this.


About the same time, Hillary Clinton, acting as a lawyer for Madison, won state approval of an unusual stock offering to help keep the thrift afloat (the plans were scuttled). By mid-1986, federal regulators removed McDougal as Madison Guaranty's president. By 1989, they closed the failed S&L at a cost to taxpayers of more than $60 million.


Hillary Clinton has denied doing any substantial work for the failed Madison Guaranty, as well as charges that any such work was a conflict of interest because her husband was governor. In 1985 and 1986, Mrs. Clinton represented Madison before state regulators appointed by Bill Clinton. One of them, Beverly Bassett Schaffer, approved her unusual stock sale to shore up the troubled S&L.


Exactly what else Mrs. Clinton did for Madison is in dispute. Rose lawyers also became involved in a 1,050-acre land development called Castle Grande. McDougal and Seth Ward, father-in-law of Rose partner Webb Hubbell, were principals in the deal. Federal regulators would call it a "sham transaction" that cost the public $4 million. Hillary Clinton has claimed that a young associate, Rick Massey, effectively handled the case, although records discovered later indicate that she personally billed Madison for 60 hours of work.


Since the early 1970s, when he refused money from big business in a failed run for Congress, Bill Clinton had matured into a master political fund-raiser. Throughout the 1980s, the governor had done what many politicians do: take personal loans, use them for campaigning and then raise money to repay the loans later. Clinton raised several hundred thousand dollars this way from influential supporters like Don Tyson, the head of Arkansas's powerful Tyson foods.


But in 1985, the governor's biggest campaign contributor was himself, with help from Jim McDougal of Madison Guaranty. In 1985, Clinton asked McDougal to host a fund-raiser to pay off $50,000 that he had lent his own campaign the year before, as some politicians do. The event raised $35,000. Federal investigators are still looking into charges that much of it came from Madison, in the names of depositors, without their knowledge.


Clinton's eventual successor as governor, Jim Guy Tucker, also received large loans from Madison, and would later go on trial with the McDougals for bank fraud. All three were convicted.
By November 1992, the Clintons were in a position to reward Arkansas friends who had helped them gain the White House and safeguard them from questions about Whitewater along the way. Webb Hubbell, Mrs. Clinton's partner at the Rose Law Firm, was installed as Number Three at the Justice Department, where he would play a role in federal investigations related to Whitewater. Vincent Foster, her other close Rose associate, handled documents related to Madison as deputy White House counsel.


The Clintons also rewarded Harry and Linda Bloodworth Thomason, Arkansas friends who had become successful TV producers, when they hired Thomason acquaintances to run the White House Travel Office.


In March 1992, just as Bill Clinton was making a political comeback in his campaign for president, the news media began to zero in on the Whitewater investment. It began with a New York Times story that suggested the McDougals heavily subsidized the Clintons in the Whitewater investment, and that the Clintons took improper tax deductions from it. The Clinton campaign fired back with a report showing that the couple had made substantial investments in Whitewater and lost about $68,000. This amount would later fall as new documents emerged. But the story stuck, and Whitewater was dead as a campaign issue.


Even so, attorney David Kendall and other close aides to the Clintons begin pulling together records of the Clintons' involvement with McDougal, Whitewater and Madison Guaranty.


Vincent Foster, the closest partner to Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm, had handled paperwork for the Clintons' most intimate finances. When they sold their Whitewater stake back to Jim McDougal in 1992, Foster represented them.
In 1993, the Clinton Administration's growing troubles weighed heavily on Foster. As deputy White House counsel, he filed three years of tax returns for the Whitewater investment on their behalf. At the same time, he was apparently distraught over the White House Travel Office scandal, in which Mrs. Clinton stood accused of cronyism.


On July 20, Foster was found shot to death in a suburban Washington, D.C., park. His death has been ruled a suicide by three investigations, including, reportedly, the ongoing probe led by Kenneth Starr. Federal and Senate investigators question whether records pertaining to Whitewater, including those detailing Hillary Clinton's controversial legal work, were removed from Foster's office by Clinton aides that night.


Under increasing pressure from the media on Whitewater, Hillary Clinton called a dramatic press conference in the East Wing of the White House in April 1994. She answered the questions with calm authority, momentarily silencing her critics.
She sought to put two nagging issues to rest:


First, reporters had discovered that Mrs. Clinton had realized a $100,000 return on a $1,000 investment in commodities futures back in 1979. Jim Blair, a friend and chief attorney for Arkansas food giant Tyson, had advised her. Now, the first lady said she had made the trades by herself. Later, she would admit that Blair and others had taken the lead.


Mrs. Clinton also denied having worked on a Madison-related project called Castle Grande, a fraudulent deal that cost the public $4 million. She repeated her written statement to regulators that a young Rose associate, Rick Massey, did most of the work. That assertion was called into question when her billing records were found in early 1996.

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/.../ak.roots.html

Now comes news that Tyson faces a 36-count federal indictment for reducing costs in its poultry factories by smuggling illegal aliens into the country from Mexico and providing them with fraudulent work papers.

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This is NOT news. Tyson has been doing this for AT LEAST two decades. As little as ten years ago, Tyson posted large billboards in Mexican border towns advertising employment with them. All the Mexicans had to do was get there ..