With all the economic chaos being hyped by the media and Obama lackeys, it’s hard to see the trees through the forest.. It seems every time an administration needs an economic advisory position filled, it turns to Wall Street executives who have run their corporate ships into the shoals of economic ruin. For example, through the last 20 years there have been an inordinate number of ex-Goldman Sachs CEOs and Board members to which the political establishment has turned for economic “leadership”. So much so, the firm has been dubbed “Government Sachs”.. While this presents an obvious conflict of interest, since these appointed officials will be the ones overseeing and implementing the rules under which firms like Goldman Sachs operate, it also seems to not have worked well for the country economically.. Apparently, Obama will continue with this disingenuous tradition.
Henry Paulson, the current bumbling Secretary of the Treasury, was a board member of Goldman Sachs. At that same time, Jon Corzine was also on the Goldman Sachs board, where he amassed his estimated $320 million dollar fortune when the company IPO was floated. The same fortune he used, some say, to buy his way into the US Senate to the tune of $60 million. Corzine has since been elected Governor of New Jersey (a particularly odious thought, as I live in New Jersey), and was reportedly on Obama’s short list for Secretary of the Treasury before he picked Timothy Geithner, the current New York Federal Reserve head.
For all of Obama’s rhetoric regarding corporate CEO salaries, bonuses, and private jets, he has chosen to look the other way when floating people such as Gov. Corzine for the post. People like these are fine as long as they are wealthy Democrats and influential liberal contributors.
In fact, according to OpenSecrets.org, 7 of the top 20 political donors are brokerage firms. Out of those 7, 6 have contributed a substantially higher percentage to Democrats than Republicans.
Goldman Sachs is #2 on the list of 100 contributing entities, spending an estimated $4,960,609 in political contributions, with a whopping 73% going to Democratic candidates.
Decimated and weakened, Goldman Sachs is a shell of itself.. It’s stock price, which, at the beginning of 2008, was $234 per share, has dropped as low as $47 this year alone. One of the biggest pushers of AIG, it allegedly tried to prime the stock price of the now impotent insurance giant, at one point pumping up the stock to $90 per share right up to the time AIG crashed and burned. This, along with the Democratic mishandling of mortgage slush fund giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, was the impetus for all the economic troubles we now face.
And to be barely outdone in the political contribution department, CitiGroup is #3 on the list, with donations of $4,191,630, 64% of which was contributed to Democratic candidates.
Aside from Obama picking other Clinton scraps for his cabinet, Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, and an economic adviser to Obama, worked at Goldman Sachs for 26 years before taking his cabinet post. He, until August 2007, was Chairman of CitiGroup until he resigned, but not before lining his pockets with an estimated $117 million dollars since 1999. This is the same CitiGroup that has just been handed a $306 billion bailout from the government, due to gross mismanagement and risky real estate lending practices.
Not surprisingly, Larry Summers, a protege of Robert Rubin and his Goldman Sachs pedigree, is also now on Obama’s economic advisory team..
For all the railings about salaries, bonuses, and corporate jets, Obama has an easy time of ignoring the fortunes of those around which he chooses to collabarate. It seems, however, that this type of action has proved to be a detriment to the economic health of the country, and we could do without this misguided experience for a while.
Wouldn’t that be change we can believe in?
By Shawn Mallow
