I met Wash. County Commissioner Candidate Crystal Lyte last week. Crystal is great! I donated to her campaign here:
electcrystallyte.com
Her opponent in the August primary is local banker Stephen Lange Ranzini. You should not vote for Stephen. #a2council (🧵)
Stephen donated to Donald Trump. He seems to think that's NBD because he also donated to Dems and it was after "Hillary lost."
Do you know any committed Dems who donated to Trump after Hillary lost?
No? I don't either.
Like many Trump donors, Stephen thinks that "business experience" is a qualification for holding public office, notwithstanding the fact that running a for-profit business isn't at all like running a government.
Does Stephen have a "good track record" running a small business?
The FDIC didn't seem to think so in 2009, when it issued an C&D order to Stephen's bank detailing "16 unsafe or unsound banking practices and violations of laws, rules or regulations."
mlive.com/business/ann-a…
Link to the full order: orders.fdic.gov/sfc/servlet.sh…
From 4/9/09 Am. Banker: "'This C&D is so sweeping; it hits them on one thing after another,'" said Rebel A. Cole, a finance and real estate professor at DePaul University in Chicago and a former Federal Reserve Board economist."
"He characterized the order as 'damning.'"
But that's not the only time the FDIC's taken issue with Stephen's management of his bank. In the last 10 years, the FDIC's commenced three more enforcement actions on or related to Uni. Bank. All three resulted in orders against the bank or, in 2014, Stephen himself.
Why did the FDIC, in 2014, ask Stephen to personally write them a six-figure check?
To address, among other things, his violation of various banking laws and "breach of [his] fiduciary duty as an executive officer and director of the Bank."
Q: Are we done?
A: No, we are not.
mlive.com/business/ann-a…
You might ask: How did this person come to own a small midwest community bank?
"Ranzini graduated from Yale College in 1986, earning a BA with a Double Major: East Asian Studies (Japanese) and (Economic) History."
Curious education for a banker.
university-bank.com/stephen-lange-…
"At the age of 23 . . . Ranzini convinced Bank One Corporation to lend $3.2 million to a newly formed corporation of which he was president & CEO the monies necessary to buy a bank in a leveraged buyout, assisted by his father."
hmmm
"Assisted by his father" apparently means "his dad bought it for him."
So: "Democrat" commissioner candidate Stephen Lange Ranzini might be a Republican or Republican adjacent, and might also be bad at running the bank that his dad bought for him.
I don't think he's qualified to help run the county. But if you need other reasons, read on.
He claims that he "experience[d] . . . being a minority growing up in the United States" while attending Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale as an "Italian-American" and "German-American."
Don't email him about this, or he might threaten to call the cops on you.
He claims to have discovered U2.
He plays moderator/cop on a local Facebook politics forum, self-seriously issuing silly "strikes" to people for serious-sounding but extremely silly reasons.
He did this thing:
Did you know he went to Yale?
He promoted Trump's claims on hydroxycloroquine.
He promotes damaging, baseless local political conspiracies that contribute to public cynicism and distrust in government.
He doesn't understand the First Amendment and supported abridging constitutionally protected speech at Ann Arbor public meetings.
Tl;dr: Don't vote for Stephen.
Vote for electcrystallyte.com
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