The Portman Pattern: Looking Out for the Rich and Powerful
By Ohio Democratic Party Communications Department
Why would anyone sign up to represent a brutal dictator known for killing and torturing his own people?
That question — and the answer — is central to the case against Senator Rob Portman of Ohio. He’s part of the Washington-insider club whose members will do anything to enrich and advance themselves and the wealthy special interests they serve, even when they’re wildly out of step with middle-class families and communities.
Portman has come up with all sorts of excuses. Ten years after he registered as a foreign agent to represent Haiti while it was controlled by the brutal despot Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Portman and his firm claimed he didn’t do any work on the client’s behalf. Now he says that registering for clients — even if they’re morally reprehensible — is just the way Washington works.
But the fact remains, Rob Portman made a decision. He decided to sign up as a foreign agent for Duvalier’s Haiti. That much is not under dispute. Under Duvalier, thousands of Haitians were killed and tortured, and Duvalier himself was notorious for selling body parts of dead Haitians, utilizing brutal torture techniques, and for being heavily involved in the drug trade.
This is the way Rob Portman’s Washington works, but it’s also exactly what Ohioans and hard-working people across our country can’t stand about the broken, self-serving politics of Washington.
Worse yet, this represents a pattern for Portman.
Away from his time in public office — as a congressman, as President George W. Bush’s trade czar and budget director, and as a U.S. senator — Rob Portman has built a lobbying and legal career working for a series of nefarious clients. At the same D.C. lobbying firm where Portman registered as a foreign agent on behalf of Duvalier’s Haiti, Portman also registered and did work as a foreign agent for a Chinese-based company with a web of offshore affiliations in countries often used as tax havens. Then, after leaving his posts as trade czar and budget director under President Bush, Portman joined a lobbying firm where his personal financial disclosures reveal he worked on behalf of a Wall Street bank whose practices contributed to the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the global recession. The bank, JPMorgan, was then forced to pay a $13 billion settlement with the government for misrepresenting the risk of its subprime mortgages to investors, and it paid $50 million to settle charges that it improperly “robo-signed” mortgage documents.
It’s not just the private sector where Portman’s priorities are out of step with Ohio — his association with these groups is consistent with his priorities and work in Congress. For example, his advocacy for the Chinese company is in line with his decades-long record of supporting unfair trade policies — like Permanent Most Favored Nation trading status for China — that have cost Ohio over 300,000 jobs. And his work for the Wall Street bank came after he denied the extent of the subprime mortgage crisis when he was President Bush’s budget director. In fact, he claimed that the housing crisis would have no “real world” impact on the economy and even said he “really [didn’t] see” any future potential issues with the housing market, saying it “does appear to have bottomed out now.” The rest, as folks in Ohio know all too well, is history: the housing market collapsed, and Rob Portman was left to ride off to a $800,000-a-year job, where he represented the Wall Street bank whose practices contributed to the collapse… thanks in part to Rob Portman himself.
It’s the circle of life for Rob Portman’s Washington insider club, where wealth, power and privilege come at the expense of working families.
This November, let’s break up the club.
