Fire Tim Geithner

If President Obama really gives a damn about the middle class, as he and his campaign now relentlessly tell us, why keep the man who has done more than anyone in his administration to make sure that financial elites rule while main street gets screwed?

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is once again entangled by scandal -- this time a rate-rigging conspiracy -- that replays an old story with him: Protection schemes for big banks that line pockets on Wall Street, leaving middle class Americans with table scraps.

In this interview Neil Barofsky, a former inspector general at Treasury, takes on Geithner as he does in his richly detailed book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.

It's shocking to see how a handful of powerful banks really do control our economy. So, a Tim Geithner and the other officials I was dealing with down there, they would view these incidents through Wall Street colored glasses... If you find out something in April of 2008 and more than four years later nothing has happened about it -- I mean, that tells you everything you need to know about what's wrong with Washington.

-- Neil Barofsky

Craig blogs daily at craigcrawford.com