Well, one of several words and phrases of the day from Matt Taibbi, who explain how former Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs CEO) Henry Paulson joined with former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg, Phil Gramm and many others royally screwed over the country either directly or indirectly, by commission or omission.
Basically, the thrust of Taibbi’s story, in depth and snarky, is that Wall Street has become like former GM CEO Charlie Wilson, and essentially saying, “What’s good for Wall Street is good for the nation.” And, since these financial instruments are a bit more complex than a 1955 Bel-Air, Wall Street and its government enablers can flip the public the bird:
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.
And, speaking of those government enablers …
Forget TARP or TARP 2.0; direct Federal Reserve money-pushing has already shuffled off $3 trillion or so to these monoliths of megalomania, via loans, and perhaps as much as $6 trillion more through guarantees.
That’s nearly $10 trillion to the likes of AIG. And it’s current CEO, Edward Liddy, wonders why we’re so pissed off?
So, who puts the reins on the Fed? According to Taibbi, on page 7, The Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950 – relevant section, 31 USC 714(b) – says NOBODY. That’s right, Ben Bernanke can flip you and me off, too, allegedly.
And, of course, he has, with the full connivance of Geithner, who knows the Fed flip-off ropes from his former position running the NY Fed.
Meanwhile, while cronies of Paulson get the money with no questions asked, after five months of the TARP program, Joe Blow banks, in some cases, not only haven’t gotten any money, they haven’t even gotten a phone call.
Oh, don’t look for Team Obama to change this, either. It, too, gets a full blast of Taibbi’s scorched-earth writing:
The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.
But, Obama will never fire Geithner. Per the start of Taibbi’s report, Democrats have been in the tank for Wall Street for a decade, and, although Taibbi doesn’t come out and say it, Obama is Poster Child No. 1 for that, worse than the Slickster ever was.
Is that Rev. Jeremiah Wright I hear?
God DAMN Barack Obama; God DAMN Barack Obama …
Warm up the pipes, Rev.; you can substitute for the fat lady
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