Lobbyists and Other Players from Wall Street's Corrupt Financial Institutions Filling Obama Administration Positions
| The chickens have certainly come home to roost and the foxes are guarding the hen house. Am I piling on homespun sayings? I don't think so. Here's what I wrote at the end of January: "Three Democratic senators, Byrd, Feingold and Harkin, and one independent, Sanders were correct in voting against the ultimately confirmed Treasury secretary nominee, Timothy Geithner. "Byrd, Feingold, Harkin and Sanders can say 'We told you so' because they're right. "Immediately out of the starting gate, Geithner's judgment and fitness for this office, which was questionable before, should be questioned again." Included in that posting was this: "The following staggers the imagination and questions the Obama administration and the new Treasury Secretary's judgment. A few days ago, David Corn and Jonathan Stein wrote this at Mother Jones: "..[President Obama] he slammed Wall Street's culture of 'excess greed, excess compensation, excess risk taking." To demonstrate that he's committed to battling such greed, the president cited his work in the Senate to rein in executive compensation. Noting that he and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) had each introduced legislation on this front in 2007, Obama declared that 'there were some people who attacked us, saying government has no business doing that.' "One of Obama's activist opponents at that time was Mark Patterson, a lobbyist then for Goldman Sachs, the investment banking firm, which opposed the Frank-Obama initiative. Yet Patterson is now chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the embattled point man in the Obama administration's endeavor to undo the notorious AIG bonuses. That is, a Washington influence-peddler who worked against Obama's effort to limit excessive corporate pay is now a key member of the Obama administration team that is supposed to contain excessive compensation in the AIG case and in general. "In 2007, Frank, the chairman of the House financial services committee, introduced H.R. 1257, the Shareholder Vote on Executive Compensation Act... "As vice president for government relations at Goldman Sachs, Patterson, who had previously been policy director for Sen. Tom Daschle, handled a wide assortment of financial, banking, patent, energy, and insurance issues. He worked on tribal gaming matters. And he was registered to lobby on credit default swaps and carbon trading. Because of his lobbying activities, Patterson did not meet the tight ethics rules Obama adopted to slow down Washington's ever-spinning revolving door. His appointment—which was not subject to Senate confirmation—was questioned by White House reporters and criticized by government reform outfits. But the Obama administration granted Patterson a waiver, and the ex-Goldman Sachs lobbyist was able to join Treasury. (Goldman Sachs has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the federal rescue of AIG; the fallen insurance firm, which has received $170 billion in funds from the Federal Reserve, has used that money to pay Goldman Sachs $6.8 billion.)" "As Robert Kuttner recently wrote about Geithner's Treasury Dept: "Even the players are the same Goldman-Citigroup crowd. The well named Neel Kashkari, the Citigroup executive brought in by Paulson to run the TARP program, is still in place. Geithner's top assistant, Mark Patterson, is from Goldman. And most of the concepts are coming from the same Wall Street crew." If Patterson's appointment isn't enough to make you shake your head in disbelief, another Citigroup player is at bat, Lewis Alexander, soon to be a counselor to Geithner. All this plus Obama's nomination of Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), formerly of Goldman-Sachs, a derivatives cheerleader who worked with the infamous Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan to exempt credit default swaps from regulation that helped cause the AIG debacle and this economic catastrophe. This is continuing, jaw-dropping insanity from the Obama administration. |
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