NOTABLE DEATHS ELSEWHERE Carl Levin, 87
Carl Levin, a liberal Michigan Democrat who served 36 years in the Senate and scared the wits out of America’s biggest CEOs by demanding explanations for shadowy schemes that hid billions in profits overseas and avoided vast corporate taxes at home, died Thursday in Detroit. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by the Levin Center at Wayne State University. Levin had disclosed in March that he had lung cancer, Jim Townsend, a spokesperson for the family, said.
The longest-serving senator in Michigan history — from 1979 to 2015 — Levin was regarded by Senate colleagues and Washington observers as a paragon of probity as chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He wielded subpoena power, huge briefing books, a big gavel and an unquenchable zeal for grilling high-profile witnesses at public hearings.
With his longish silver hair, affable smile and glasses perched low on the nose, he looked more like a kindly Old World shoemaker than the terror of the Senate. But he confronted the titans of JPMorgan Chase, Apple, American Express and other corporate giants like a barbarian at the gates, and extracted admissions about overseas banking havens and mind-boggling tax-avoidance maneuvers that rendered profits invisible and made tax burdens vanish into thin air.
“Levin has shown how profits can be shipped tax-free to the Cayman Islands and, amazingly, how Apple figured out that profits booked in Ireland could be hidden from tax authorities of both Ireland and the United States in a cloak of invisibility,” David Cay Johnston wrote in a 2014 essay, “The Legacy of Carl Levin,” in The American Prospect, a liberal quarterly.
Johnston said Levin showed how Apple escaped $10 billion in taxes every year from 2009 to 2012; how Microsoft siphoned $8 billion to Singapore and Irish subsidiaries and lowered its effective tax rate on the money to 3%; and how Goldman Sachs sold clients securities that it later bet would fail, “eliciting eye-opening testimony from its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, who saw nothing wrong with this.”
Levin documented conflicts of interest and other wrongdoing that led to the 2008 financial crisis, which threatened global markets and produced the worst recession since the Great Depression. In 2013, a 300-page report by Levin’s panel detailed JPMorgan Chase’s $6.2 billion loss fiasco by rogue traders.
Levin, who was also known for opposing the Iraq War and for advocating tighter controls over handguns and nuclear weapons, was one of his state’s most popular politicians — narrowly elected to the Senate on his first try, but reelected five times by widening margins. He was the Senate’s fourth-longest serving incumbent when he retired at age 80.
Carl Levin joined a class of 20 freshman senators in 1979 that included Democrats Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts, and the Republicans Alan Simpson of Wyoming and William Cohen of Maine.
Many hit the ground running. Levin became floor manager of legislation to implement recently ratified Panama Canal treaties, and won a tough fight for more funds for child care.
In 1981, Americans for Democratic Action, a national liberal organization, issued its ratings of senators’ voting records for the previous year. It gave its highest rating, 94%, to Levin, and its lowest, 0, to Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz.
Levin’s votes in the Senate over the decades were consistent with that early assessment, except on home-state issues like fuel economy for cars, which he opposed, and bailouts and other measures to aid Detroit’s automotive industries, which he backed enthusiastically.
He supported funds for education, measures for environmental protections and trade regulations that, advocates said, improved public health and created jobs. He sponsored a ban on assault weapons, was rated “F” by the National Rifle Association and voted to ratify treaties to control nuclear weapons and ban intercontinental ballistic missiles.
While he had no military experience, Levin served for 10 years — from 2001 to 2003 and from 2007 to 2015 — as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a platform from which he exerted a major influence on military appropriations and defense policies.