Who's really rolling who?
Robert Hormats, Vice Chair of Goldman Sachs, is to be installed as Under Secretary of Economics, Business, and Agricultural Affairs. One more unnecessary reminder of the total control exercised by Wall Street over Obama's economic and financial policies.
Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew, lately Chief Financial Officer of Citigroup Alternative Investments Group which lost $509 million in the first quarter of 2008 alone. He is sure to bump into Michael Froman, who tore a swath through the Citi balance sheet at the alternative investments, specializing in "esoteric" investments like private highways, but now Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economic Affairs. David Lipton, who was until recently running Citi's global country risk management effort is also onboard.
Citigroup former chief economist Lewis Alexander is now Counselor to Timothy Geithner. All the above have been bankrupting us all. Alexander's 2007 opinion at the onset of the mortgage crash, "I think that's not going to spill more broadly into the economy and so I think we're going to have a normal kind of housing cycle though the middle of this year," can only reflect the best interests of his current employer.
Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, who has moved over to the number two job at the department from the Hartford Insurance Company, where he served as president and chief operating officer of the Property and Casualty Group. Hartford was one of the insurance companies that got suckered by the banks into backing their ruinous investments in real estate and other shit. Wolin's Treasury has just handed Hartford $3.4 billion of our money in the form of TARP funds.
Hormats' agricultural responsibilities will of necessity bring him into frequent contact with the Chairman of the CFTC, Gary Gensler, another former Goldman partner. As Ass-Sec-Treasury for Clinton Gensler played a key role in greasing the skids for the notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which set the stage for the great credit default swaps scam that underpinned the recent bubble and subsequent collapse. News of the appointment did generate hollow threats in the Senate. Had they been otherwise, Treasury Chief of Staff Mark Patterson could lend the expertise he gained as Goldman's lobbyist to overcome the obstacle.
The appointment of Gensler, one of the engineers of this catastrophe, takes gall, but the administration has outdone that by choosing Linda Robertson, formerly a key Enron lobbyist and chief flack for the Federal Reserve. Prior to joining the crooked energy-trading firm, Robertson was an important figure in the Clinton Treasury, serving her friends Larry Summers and Robert Rubin during their terms.
Such connection to the key enablers of our bankrupt casino explains many of the hires listed above. Michael Froman was Chief of Staff to Robert Rubin at Treasury before following Rubin to his reward at Citigroup. Most significantly, it was Froman who first introduced Rubin to his Harvard classmate Barack Obama. David Lipton also served in the Rubin Treasury, as deputy under secretary for international affairs. Neal Wolin, is a Summers protoge, who cherished him as Treasury General Counsel from '99 to '01. Summers and Robertson are close, and certainly they raised no objections of her service to paymasters at Enron.
Excerpted from Andrew Cockburn @ Counterpunch
