Commentary By Ron Beasley
If you been hanging out at Hoggers at all you may have noticed were not very happy with the Obama administration. Steve covered the AF/PAK Instahoglets below but there is a lot of material on the economy today as well. It looks like the Obama economic brain trust is largely made up of some of the same people who caused our current economic woes or did nothing to stop them.
First up we have Glenn Greenwald,
Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's ownership of government
Last night, former Reagan-era S&L regulator and current University of Missouri Professor Bill Black was on Bill Moyers' Journal and detailed the magnitude of what he called the on-going massive fraud, the role Tim Geithner played in it before being promoted to Treasury Secretary (where he continues to abet it), and -- most amazingly of all -- the crusade led by Alan Greenspan, former Goldman CEO Robert Rubin (Geithner's mentor) and Larry Summers in the late 1990s to block the efforts of top regulators (especially Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission) to regulate the exact financial derivatives market that became the principal cause of the global financial crisis. To get a sense for how deep and massive is the on-going fraud and the key role played in it by key Obama officials, I highly recommend watching that Black interview (it can be seen here and the transcript is here).
Of course it's not just Geithner. We covered Summers' history here. Greenwald continues
Rubin, Summers and Greenspan succeeded in inducing Congress -- funded, of course, by these same financial firms -- to enact legislation blocking the CFTC from regulating these derivative markets. More amazingly still, the CFTC, headed back then by Born, is now headed by Obama appointee Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive (naturally) who was as instrumental as anyone in blocking any regulations of those derivative markets (and then enriched himself by feeding on those unregulated markets).
Just think about how this works. People like Rubin, Summers and Gensler shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting. When in government, they ensure that the laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall St. firms, literally abolishing all safeguards and allowing them to pillage and steal. Then, when out of government, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented when in government. Then, when their party returns to power, they return back to government, where they continue to use their influence to ensure that the oligarchical circle that rewards them so massively is protected and advanced.
Over at The Left Coaster paradox chimes in:
As far as I can tell—‘n what Galbraith wrote in the Washington Monthly—is that Geithner and Summers are currently implementing the looting of the Treasury so we can get back to normal, meaning privately owned banking and finance that enabled gross inequity and got us into this mess.
Remember, as Josh Marshall so astutely pointed out, so far there has been nary a peep on plans to break up these too-big-to-fail extortionists. Why on earth we would be so foolish as to allow the precise same environment to exist after trillions of dollars of looting defies any notion of common sense, but this is where we are.
I’m sickly furious with this exasperating mess that only gets worse by the week, it’s grinding our people down and blowing up political capital all over the place. The hedge fund manager income tax exemption story is just waiting to erupt all over again, and I get the distinct impression Geithner, Summers, Axelrod and Bernanke are totally clueless on the red-hot volatility of this issue, extremely powerful political forces could careen out of control under their hands at any minute.
That's right - we voted for Obama to stop the looting of the American taxpayer by the wealthy oligarchs and it continues as if there had been no election at all and the Bush/Cheney pirates were still in charge.
There is one ray of hope, Elizabeth Warren:
Elizabeth Warren, chief watchdog of America's $700bn (£472bn) bank bailout plan, will this week call for the removal of top executives from Citigroup, AIG and other institutions that have received government funds in a damning report that will question the administration's approach to saving the financial system from collapse.
Warren, a Harvard law professor and chair of the congressional oversight committee monitoring the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp), is also set to call for shareholders in those institutions to be "wiped out". "It is crucial for these things to happen," she said. "Japan tried to avoid them and just offered subsidy with little or no consequences for management or equity investors, and this is why Japan suffered a lost decade." She declined to give more detail but confirmed that she would refer to insurance group AIG, which has received $173bn in bailout money, and banking giant Citigroup, which has had $45bn in funds and more than $316bn of loan guarantees.
Warren also believes there are "dangers inherent" in the approach taken by treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who she says has offered "open-ended subsidies" to some of the world's biggest financial institutions without adequately weighing potential pitfalls. "We want to ensure that the treasury gives the public an alternative approach," she said, adding that she was worried that banks would not recover while they were being fed subsidies. "When are they going to say, enough?" she said.
But will anyone be listening? Ian Welsh doubts it:
I don't have much hope any of this will occur. Warren's not part of the boys club of Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and Obama who's making the decisions. But one can hope...
The change that Obama promised has turned out to be anything but change.
