Deval Patrick, as Charley also notes, has announced he will resign from the Board of ACC Capital Holdings, the parent company of Ameriquest, by 1 July. He said he was satisfied the company had put in place the changes he was brought in to help effect.
He addressed political criticisms of his role with the company as follows, “I understood from the outset that my work with Ameriquest would make some people uncomfortable. Progressives are sometimes uncomfortable in principle with people who work for companies. Political rivals try to make it an issue. But I still believe that lasting reform requires the effort of good people both outside and inside.”
This is a smart move by Patrick because it removes a potential conflict of interest and distances him from criticism of this specific company. I predict Reilly will get less traction on this issue now that Patrick is no longer on the Board. The issue of contributions by the Arnall family to various unpleasant groups, and Patrick’s endorsement of Mr. Arnall for an ambassadorship, while interesting, and an issue his campaign should clarify, is not as significant a subject as membership on the ACC Board. The issue of how much money Patrick was paid is significant if it was huge sum, and if the information somehow becomes public, but in all probability it will fade. “[T]he demands of the campaign have begun to make that [Board membership] impractical,” Patrick wrote. Just so.
Adam Reilly makes the point that Reilly’s persistence prove that Patrick’s relationship with Ameriquest is sketchy. But, there is more to simply resigning. Closure cannot happen unless Patrick admits how much money he made from Ameriquest.
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Remember , As the chief of the US Justice Department’s civil rights division in mid-1990’s, Patrick persuaded Ameriquest to enter into a $4 million settlement with the Justice Department after the company faced charges that it and its corporate affiliates engaged in discriminatory pricing practices. It denied the allegations.
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Hmmmm, a few years later Patrick takes a job as a highly paid director for Ameriquest. Don’t we have to also close that loop?
I don’t see how Reilly’s persistance shows anything other than the fact that lately he’s more interested in knocking his opponents than discussing how specifically he’ll do better.
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If I say you’re sketchy, and I persist in this statement, does that alone make it so? More to the point, if Reilly knows something about the Patrick/Ameriquest relationship that we don’t, why hasn’t he made clear what it is?
Because it’s not September yet?
The story wasn’t “Hey, Deval serves on the Ameriquest board”
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The story is:
1) Deval won’t say how much Ameriquest paid him
2) Deval was a part of Ameriquest’s unclearly shady goingson at Ameriquest
3) Deval supported Arnall’s Ambassadorship bid despite Arnall being a Bush stooge
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None of those three things have changed simply by Deval leaving the Board of Ameriquest.
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Further, it raises the question of Deval’s political posturing. He decides to leave the board a few days before the first big live debate, hoping to eliminate Ameriquest as an issue. Smacks of political posturing and evasiveness more than genuine sentiment.
hmmm… so are you posting that comment on every blog? Because nothing in that comment has changed since you posted it on my blog. It’s word for word the same.
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Copy and paste much?
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My reply to it is here, no need to answer it twice..
LOL That will teach me to wonder off and fold laundry in the middle of blogging.
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It’s interesting to me how some people spam blogs with the same comment over and over. At least it’s HIS comment though. I was posting at another blog recently and someone posted a response that they had cut and pasted from MY OWN BLOG! Crazy.
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Oh and Brighton – in addition to it being bad blogging form to spam other blogs with the same comment, it’s also bad form to lob accusations without some means to back it up – say in the form of links for instance.
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Deval Patrick could have the best reasons in the world for leaving Ameriquest and it wouldn’t matter a lick to some commentators on this blog. We just continue to go over the same stuff over and over… and I keep responding…
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1) Deval has said that he will provide information about this income per OCPF requirements. (he stated this at the first debate)
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2) I’d comment on this if I could make any sense out of that sentence fragment you posted.
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3) Deval is not the only Dem who supported Arnall. Bill Richardson supported Arnall. Ed Rendell supported Arnall. Villaragosa supported Arnall. Arnall is the Ambassador to the Netherlands, it’s not like they made him the Chair of the Fed. Sheesh.
Good points Susan. One does get sick of the broken-record attacks that Reilly’s supporters (and Reilly) have made… instead of talking about the issues. For once, I’d like a campaign to be decided on the issues. Just once! PLEASE GOD JUST ONCE!
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Nope. I’m sure we’ll get some witty copy-and-paste response talking about the same talking points that they keep dragging out. But Arnall! But Ameriquest! Blah, blah, blah.
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In any event, when it comes to copy and pasting, I don’t mind people doing it a little bit… but that just really annoyed me because I read the same comment three times! More importantly, it wasn’t some long comment. If it were a long comment, then fine: a lot of work went into it, may as well make that work a bit more efficient. However, it was two or three good sentences worth of effort to repeat those ideas… and instead we got a copy and paste from the blog just before this one on BMG.
Good points Susan. One does get sick of the broken-record attacks that Reilly’s supporters (and Reilly) have made… instead of talking about the issues. For once, I’d like a campaign to be decided on the issues. Just once! PLEASE GOD JUST ONCE!
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Nope. I’m sure we’ll get some witty copy-and-paste response talking about the same talking points that they keep dragging out. But Arnall! But Ameriquest! Blah, blah, blah.
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In any event, when it comes to copy and pasting, I don’t mind people doing it a little bit… but that just really annoyed me because I read the same comment three times! More importantly, it wasn’t some long comment. If it were a long comment, then fine: a lot of work went into it, may as well make that work a bit more efficient. However, it was two or three good sentences worth of effort to repeat those ideas… and instead we got a copy and paste from the blog just before this one on BMG.
then I’m gonna repeat the same response.
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If you all want to parrot each other, I’m gonna debunk it with the same points.
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Keep on astroturfing.
How old are you?
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Keep on astroturfing.
Deval has said the Ameriquest is a bad company. He went there to make it better. He’s now leaving because he feels they are on a good path. He surely knows they aren’t a fixed company, but he feels he has done work that has benifited homeowners in Massachusetts, and most remarkably he has taken 90 laid-off workers and found them new jobs. He has nothing to be ashamed of about the work that he’s done at that company. If anything, his work at Ameriquest is proof that if good people go to work at bad companies, they can do good. While if only bad people go to work there, what do you think results?
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Clearly Ameriquest has been a distraction for him and his campaign. He probably wouldn’t do it again if he could do it over, if only for the difficulty it caused his campaign. He surely doesn’t need the money: the man donates nearly $300K per year in charity. The accusation above that he is going to “launder” the money is just pure nastiness with nothing behind it but vitriol. But of course that is the next line of attack, the next time he puts his own money into the race.
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What’s most amusing, though, is even as Deval has stated that all sources and sums of income will be released at the end of this month, the Reilly folks are out there demanding that he release that information. Of course come May 31 when Deval releases the information, as he’s said he’d do all along, all the Reilly folks will declare victory because they’ll claim they forced Deval to disclose his sources of income. Pure genius.
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I’m sure once this dies down, we’ll probably go back a few months to ‘how can a black man own such a big house?’.
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(Yes I’m a Deval Patrick supporter and volunteer.)
While I’m sure Deval can sleep at night and probably really believes that he made a difference at Ameriquest, there are hundreds and potentially thousands of Massachusetts residents who are in jeopardy of losing their homes due to the predatory practices of this company. As someone who has been involved in housing issues for a number of years, there is no doubt in my mind that the entire business strategy of companies like Ameriquest and other predatory lenders revolve around putting people in loans that they cannot afford. In fact, many of the people with an Ameriquest mortgage fall behind within 12-18 months of receiving the loan. Then Ameriquest tacks on additional fees, etc to put them further under water.
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As I’m sure everyone has seen recently, there has been a rise in foreclosures throughout the state. Ameriquest is the #1 lender in the City of Boston in terms of foreclosures. I don’t have the statistics for any other cities, but I did take a snapshot look at about a week’s worth of filings and found that ACC Holdings (Ameriquest’s parent compay) and it’s subsidiaries accounted for more than 15 percent of foreclosures in the entire state for just a one-week period.
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I’m glad Deval was able (according to him) secure jobs for the 90 employees in Massachusetts who were laid off. I just wonder what he will do for the many more homeowners who could be out in the streets because of the actions of this company.