Obama's Top Economic Adviser Is Greedy and Highly Compromised - Matt Tabibi
Among the payoffs Larry Summers received: $45K from Merrill Lynch days before he joined Obama's team. And it gets worse.
I remember watching Obama the presidential candidate give a speech in Mason City, Iowa, in 2007. Obama had made a big show of not having registered lobbyists working for his campaign, and he promised that lobbyists "won't work in my White House." The line was a hit and became part of Obama's stump speech. I must have heard it two dozen times.
A little over a year later, he put a registered lobbyist of a bailed-out investment bank into a job whose primary responsibility is administering bailout money.
It gets worse. According to a Glenn Greenwald piece I just read, even Gary Gensler is a former Goldman employee. That absolutely blows my mind. Genlser is Obama's choice to head the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose purview is the derivatives market. The CFTC was the battleground where ages ago Rubin, Summers, and then-Rubin aide Gensler teamed up to whack CFTC chief Brooksley Born, who had serious concerns about the burgeoning derivatives market, in particular the credit-default swap market. Rubin overturned Born's recommendations, and derivatives were freed from most regulation. That economic Alamo led almost directly to the AIG disaster.
In the midst of all of this, something amazing happens. Goldman Sachs, along with Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and a host of other "troubled" banks, reports a profit for its first quarter in 2009! How and why that happened is another fascinating story, for another time. For now, the only thing to remember is that all the ones who got us into this mess — Rubin, Summers, Goldman in general — are now being put in charge of the cleanup by a president who spent most of 18 months on the campaign trail pledging to end the influence of money in politics.
I remember watching Obama the presidential candidate give a speech in Mason City, Iowa, in 2007. Obama had made a big show of not having registered lobbyists working for his campaign, and he promised that lobbyists "won't work in my White House." The line was a hit and became part of Obama's stump speech. I must have heard it two dozen times.
A little over a year later, he put a registered lobbyist of a bailed-out investment bank into a job whose primary responsibility is administering bailout money.
It gets worse. According to a Glenn Greenwald piece I just read, even Gary Gensler is a former Goldman employee. That absolutely blows my mind. Genlser is Obama's choice to head the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose purview is the derivatives market. The CFTC was the battleground where ages ago Rubin, Summers, and then-Rubin aide Gensler teamed up to whack CFTC chief Brooksley Born, who had serious concerns about the burgeoning derivatives market, in particular the credit-default swap market. Rubin overturned Born's recommendations, and derivatives were freed from most regulation. That economic Alamo led almost directly to the AIG disaster.
In the midst of all of this, something amazing happens. Goldman Sachs, along with Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and a host of other "troubled" banks, reports a profit for its first quarter in 2009! How and why that happened is another fascinating story, for another time. For now, the only thing to remember is that all the ones who got us into this mess — Rubin, Summers, Goldman in general — are now being put in charge of the cleanup by a president who spent most of 18 months on the campaign trail pledging to end the influence of money in politics.
posted by temporal at 4/11/2009
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