We've already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far: "Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff."
When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile -- but the smile didn't last long. There's simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.
The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama's new chief of staff -- arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn't shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank's global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House. Daley replaced Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported eighteen and a half million dollars.
The new guy, Jack Lew -- said by those who know to be a skilled and principled public servant -- ran hedge funds and private equity at Citigroup, which means he's a member of the Wall Street gang, too. His last job was as head of President Obama's Office of Management and Budget, where he replaced Peter Orzag, who now works as vice chairman for global banking at -- hold on to your deposit slip -- Citigroup.
Still with us? It's startling the number of high-ranking Obama officials who have spun through the revolving door between the White House and the sacred halls of investment banking. Sure, you can argue that it makes sense that the chief executive of the nation would look to other executives for the expertise you need to build back from the disastrous collapse of the banks in the final year of the Bush Administration. Remember -- it was Bush and Cheney with their cronies in big business who helped walk us right into the blast furnace of financial meltdown, then rushed to save the banks with taxpayer money. That little fact seems to have been overlooked in the current primaries.
All this brings back memories of Hank Paulson, doesn't it? Hank Paulson, the $700 million man who became secretary of the treasury for President Bush. Paulson had been head of Goldman Sachs, the rich investment bank. As his successor at Goldman Sachs, Paulson chose Lloyd Blankfein. Several times, according to Bloomberg News, Rolling Stone, and Paulson's own memoir, the treasury secretary made sure Blankfein and Goldman got privileged inside information.
But Bush and Cheney aren't the only ones to have a soft spot for financiers. President Obama may call bankers "fat cats" and stir the rabble against them with populist rhetoric when it serves his interest, but after the fiscal fiasco, he allowed the culprits to escape virtually scot-free. When he's in New York he dines with them frequently and eagerly accepts their big contributions. Like his predecessors, his administration also has provided them with billions of taxpayer dollars -- low-cost money that they used for high-yielding investments to make big profits. The largest banks are bigger than they were when he took office and earned more in the first two-and-a-half years of his term than they did during the entire eight years of the Bush administration. That's confirmed by industry data.
And get this. It turns out, according to The New York Times, that as President Obama's inner circle has been shrinking, his "rare new best friend" is Robert Wolf. They play basketball, golf, and talk economics when Wolf is not raising money for the president's campaign.
Robert Wolf runs the U.S. branch of the giant Swiss bank UBS, which participated in schemes to help rich Americans evade their taxes. During hearings in 2009, Michigan's Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, described some of the tricks used by UBS: "Swiss bankers aided and abetted violations of U.S. tax law by traveling to this country with client code names, encrypted computers, counter-surveillance training, and all the rest of it, to enable U.S. residents to hide assets and money in Swiss accounts.
"The bankers then returned to Switzerland and treated their conduct as blameless since Swiss law says tax evasion is no crime. The Swiss bank before us deliberately entered United States, actively sought U.S. clients and secretly helped those U.S. clients defraud the United States of America."
And so it goes, the revolving door between government service and big money in the private sector spinning so fast it becomes an irresistible force hurling politics and high finance together so completely it's impossible to tell one from the other.
Read more "ON DEMOCRACY" essays at the all-new BillMoyers.com
Related:
Bill Moyers with David Stockman on Crony Capitalism
Bill Moyers with Gretchen Morgenson on Fannie Mae's Web of Influence
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Is it any wonder that many Americans have lost faith in the credibility and good intentions of politicians and policy-makers of both political parties?
To shake it to its core, power must be removed from the equation. That is done by the minimalization of the power of government to become corrupted. The larger government becomes, the more impact they have, and the more the general populace is affected by it.
By minimizing government to its Constitutional limits, you reduce their relevance. By reducing their power, you reduce the power of outside influences.
You can never beat the collusion between big government and big finance. You can only divorce them from each other.
No matter how much money one has, you cannot buy that which is not for sale. And you cannot sell anything which you do not own.
But I'd say big government is simply the legalistic front for big business. (That's not what it's supposed to be, I'm just saying that's what it has become.)
Every US dollar is literally a Federal Reserve note loaned to the Department of the Treasury. Thus, all the government's (and American society's, and the world's reserve currency) money comes from the Federal Reserve, which is a group of twelve united private banks who have a "special" relationship with the US government.
Now consider this: What can a government do without money? Regimes, dynasties, entire nations rise and fall because of money.
The problem with government, in my opinion, is not -- strictly speaking -- quantitative (how big or small it is) but qualitative (does it ably do what it's supposed to do?). And what it's supposed to do is laid out in the Preamble to the Constitution, namely, "promote the general Welfare," among other things.
he woulda turned into the Disappointment-in-Chief.
(sigh)
Study: The Press and the Pipeline,. 1/26/12
The Press in this country is the biggest obstacle to good government. This is evident by the coverage we see every day on all things we care about. What can we do about this?
Any suggestions?