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In the ongoing discussion of John McCain, Vicki Iseman, and the lobbying firm of Alcalde & Fay, my eye has been particularly caught by the close connections of that firm to the cruise ship industry. In researching Jack Abramoff and his bizarre purchase of SunCruz in 2000, I've run into a lot of material on the "cruises to nowhere" racket -- which involves floating casinos that dock in US ports but conduct their business outside the territorial limit, thus avoiding most forms of oversight and regulation -- and I wondered if that was an issue here, too. The first thing I found was that Alcalde & Fay is essentially joined at the hip with the International Council of Cruise Lines. http://books.google.com/books?id=S5QlSKl3oFEC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=%22cruise+industry+charitable+foundation%22+alcalde&source=web&ots=aqT3_PiCyg&sig=nKFV0B3xP7qsDoRb7CWfY7zukK0
ICCL does its own lobbying and also employs the firm Alcalde and Fay. The two have an odd relationship in that the president of ICCL is a partner in Alcalde and Ray. The previous president, Cynthia Colenda, is Hector Alcalde's daughter and now serves as executive director of the Cruise Industry Charitable Foundation. The two organizations, ICCL and Alcalde and Fay, are inextricably linked. Curiously, the amount Alcalde claims as lobbying income from ICCL is greater than the amount ICCL says it spent on lobbying activities in recent years.
http://www.alcalde-fay.com/meet_the_firm/BiosDetail.cfm?id=35
Cynthia A. Colenda, Consultant, is an experienced government and legislative affairs specialist who joined Alcalde & Fay in 1983 and later served as president of the International Council of Cruise Lines (ICCL). In that position, she directed the association's international and domestic regulatory programs, and public affairs initiatives. During her five-year tenure, she spearheaded the development of an Associate Membership Program that forged relationships between domestic and international businesses. She also established the Cruise Industry Charitable Foundation and continues to serve as executive director. The Cruise Industry Charitable Foundation also appears to operate the American Freedom PAC, whose sole donors are the top executives of Carnival Corporation (Micky Arison and others), Royal Caribbean Cruises, and Alcalde & Fay. ( http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/committees/american-freedom-political-action-committee.asp?cycle=08,) Looking a little further, it wasn't hard to tie that cluster of groups in with the cruises-to-nowhere business: http://www.livableoldtown.com/deep_blue_greed.htm
The Deep Blue Greed
The Arison clan built Carnival into a money machine by cleverly avoiding tax laws
In September 1992 Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat, stepped out of his congressional office. He was on his way to the Capitol to vote for a bill that would restrict so-called cruises to nowhere (gambling trips outside the three-mile limit of American territorial waters) to U.S.-flagged ships. Taylor had sponsored and stewarded the measure through the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. Owners of the foreign-flagged ships, who dominated the cruise business, wanted the bill stopped.
Before Taylor could cross Independence Avenue, Hector Alcalde, a lobbyist whose clients included the International Council of Cruise Lines (ICCL), approached. "He did the typical flattery stuff -- 'You knocked 'em dead in committee, we want to get to know you, we don't feel you understand our industry,'" Taylor recalls. "And then came the punch line: 'We want to give you and your family a free cruise so you can get to know us better.'
"I tell you, I was appalled at the blatancy of what I felt was an attempt to bribe me to back off," Taylor says. "And this just happened to be the day I was walking across the street to pass the bill.... I was furious. I said, 'Listen, buddy, I'm going across that street, I'm going to cut out your freaking loopholes, and I'm going to enjoy every moment of it." Taylor also remembers telling Alcalde to do something with the complimentary cruise. . . .
On September 22 the House passed the bill. But the Senate later gutted it. "Nothing happened on the cruise-to-nowhere side. Finally it dawned on me: I wonder if I'm the only guy he's offered a free cruise to." Taylor eventually uncovered a list of fifteen legislators who had taken "fact-finding" cruises. Although Taylor now acknowledges that these little jaunts were not technically violations of ethics rules, he made a point of entering the names into the public record at a committee meeting. This episode, and the cruise industry's subsequent success on Capitol Hill, leads the congressman to declare that "what's best for them is worst for American taxpayers."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE6DD173DF93AA25751C0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
February 19, 1999
The world's largest cruise company, the Carnival Corporation, earned $2 billion in profits over the last three years. But the company, with headquarters here in two multistory buildings on Carnival Place, paid less than 1 percent in income taxes even though its earnings exceeded those of many Fortune 500 companies. Royal Caribbean Cruises, the second-largest cruise company, whose headquarters overlook the Port of Miami, reported profits of $657 million over the same time. Its financial statements do not even include a line for income taxes.
Doing business under a decades-old loophole in the Federal tax code, and protected by an increasingly powerful lobbying force, the 17 major cruise lines pay practically no income tax even though they are based in this country and 90 percent of their passengers are Americans. The cruise lines, all of them registered in foreign countries, do not observe the nation's labor laws, minimum wage law and many environmental and safety regulations. . . .
While all the members of the International Council of Cruise Lines are foreign businesses, the campaign finance law allows the organization to have a political action committee and raise donations for it from the cruise line employees who are American citizens. In the 1997-98 campaign, the group donated $166,146 to House and Senate candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization.
The council spent more on lobbying. In its latest full-year report filed with the Senate, it said it spent $557,023 on lobbying in 1997. Most of the money, $380,000, went to the firm Alcalde & Fay for work on tax and immigration issues. The firm, run by Hector Alcalde, a former Congressional staff member, received an additional $200,000 in the first half of 1998. Mr. Alcalde is the father of Cynthia Colenda, who worked at his firm before taking over as president of the International Council of Cruise Lines. And John McCain also fits neatly into this pattern: http://www.buyingofthepresident.org/index.php/stories/from_the_archives/
McCain has collected more than $100,000 in contributions from gambling interests since 1993, and he’s returned the financial favors in ways big and small. In June 1998, McCain voted for legislation to overhaul the Internal Revenue Service that included a tax exemption for the casino industry for free meals it gives to workers. The exemption is projected to cost the U.S. Treasury $316 million from 1998 to 2007. In 1995, McCain supported legislation that paved the way for gambling “cruises to nowhere.” Even during his battle to pass tobacco legislation, McCain found a way to help the gambling industry: At the urging of the American Gaming Association, he agreed to exempt gambling establishments from his bill’s ban on indoor smoking.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=522
As the Center for Public Integrity reported in its recently released book The Buying of the President 2000 (Avon), McCain has done several favors for the gaming industry over his career. The industry has contributed over $100,000 to the senator since 1993.
IN JUNE 1998, MCCAIN VOTED for legislation to overhaul the Internal Revenue Service that included a tax exemption for the casino industry for free meals given to employees. Earlier, in 1995, McCain supported legislation that paved the way for gambling "cruises to nowhere," the same year he sponsored legislation that would have limited states' abilities to regulate Indian gambling. More recently, McCain seems to have hit the jackpot with Native American gambling interests by opposing legislation that would have halted the expansion of gambling onto Indian reservations. As the legislation was debated in Congress throughout the summer and fall of 1999, the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Nation, which operates the world's largest casino, gave McCain more than $25,000, more than half coming from a fund-raiser the Indian nation hosted for him on June 30, 1999. Some of the material I've run into on SunCruz -- for example, what Daniel Hopsicker writes at Mad Cow Morning News -- emphasizes mob connections, money-laundering, and so forth. I don't see any immediate signs of that here. But any time you get billions of dollars being earned in an industry with minimal accountability, which depends on the US Congress to keep things that way, you have the potential for deep corruption. And the fact that McCain was so close to Alcalde & Fay during precisely the 1999-2000 period when the cruises-to-nowhere business was at issue suggests that further investigation is warranted. |
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