Posted on 06/28/2006 12:00:55 PM PDT by Trupolitik
As the Senate Finance Committee considers President Bush’s nomination of Henry Paulson to be the next secretary of the Treasury, the question is not whether he will be confirmed. That seems assured, as senators in both parties behave like star-struck groupies in the presence of a Wall Street “master of the universe,” whose net worth, from his time as a senior executive of Goldman Sachs, is estimated to be on the order of $600 million.
Rather, the question is: Will any of his Senate interlocutors even bother to explore the nominee’s troubling fifteen-year ties to Communist China and the potential for serious conflicts of interest they pose, with national security as well as economic implications for our country?
It is hard to overstate the enormity of this problem. For calibration purposes, consider an historical parallel.
In the last century, the Soviet Union enlisted a relative handful of prominent Western capitalists to serve as financial advisers, engines of economic assistance, and agents of influence in Washington and other foreign capitals. Typically, these businessmen were rewarded with access to lucrative Soviet energy and other natural resources and exclusive arrangements for marketing their products inside the USSR.
Arguably, the most prominent of these Soviet fellow-travelers and enablers was Armand Hammer, who created a vast personal fortune and an oil and gas conglomerate in no small measure thanks to sweetheart deals he secured from the Kremlin. For decades, he found it to be good for business to use his wealth and favored standing in Moscow to promote the USSR’s interests among his peers in the capitalist world and politicians in their thrall.
Henry Paulson has been Communist China’s Armand Hammer. In fact, he has been vastly more effective than Hammer ever was in promoting his clients’ interests and enabling their access to Western economic assistance and high technology.
Under Mr. Paulson’s leadership at Goldman Sachs, the company has been instrumental to the growth of Chinese economic power and particularly to its penetration of Western capital and other markets.
In 2005, Goldman Sachs not only advised the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) in its attempted takeover of Unocal.
one of Goldman Sachs’s few setbacks in its efforts on Beijing’s behalf was its planned launch of an initial public offering for another Chinese state-owned company, the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC). This IPO was expected to garner $10 billion, which would at the time have been the largest such transaction in the history of the New York Stock Exchange.
There was only one problem: CNPC owned a 40 percent stake in the national oil consortium of Sudan, the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company. (By contrast, the Sudanese government had only a 5 percent share.) Millions of Americans were outraged that Khartoum’s genocidal, slave-trading and WMD-proliferating government was using murderous “ethnic cleansing” techniques to clear Christians and animists from oil-rich areas in the southern part of the country and that anger was came to be focused on the CNPC IPO...
Goldman also advised Hutchison in its attempted buyout of the one-time telecommunications giant, Global Crossing, a bid that was withdrawn only after coming under heavy criticism. The Pentagon opposed the sale as it was deemed a “threat to national security because it would put Global Crossing's fiber-optic network, which is used by the U.S. government, under foreign control.”
It is unimaginable that during the Cold War any president would appoint — let alone that a majority of senators would vote to confirm — a man like Armand Hammer as secretary of the Treasury. Now President Bush has nominated his Chinese counterpart and, all other things being equal, Henry Paulson will have the votes to be confirmed.
I voted for President Bush twice, and actively campaigned for him. However, I am convinced he is looking out for Global Corporate interests over National Security interests. Open borders, the SPP, the Dubai Ports deal, Support of an Islamist Constitution in Afghanistan... now this.
Be Sure to Read all of the Article.
The Dubai Ports deal was the right thing to do.
And if you're such a Dubya fan, how come I don't recall ever seeing you around here?
Why is this in the breaking news section?
Yep you convinced us (extreme sarcasm). Go back to Dummy Land
Sounds like Bush's next move will be to just invite all the commies up to the WH then leave the building until they have gotten an adequate amount of information to completely overthrow the government...
"I voted for President Bush twice, and actively campaigned for him. However, I am convinced he is looking out for Global Corporate interests over National Security interests. Open borders, the SPP, the Dubai Ports deal, Support of an Islamist Constitution in Afghanistan... now this."
Bingo
Another serious negative in Bush's ledger. Based on Mr. Gaffney's article, Paulson is a very poor choice despite his probable high competence. Bush has been weak on China, weak on North Korea, weak on Iran, and arguably weak on Iraq, and that's not to mention immigration, racial preferences, Harriet Miers, and some other things. It is a shame that the first Republican president since the Depression to have a Republican Congress has proven to be such a weak leader. We may not get this opportunity again, ever. I think this explains much of the disappointment and anger toward Bush on FReep. It certainly explains much of mine.
Correction: Ike had a just-barely Republican Congress in '53-'54. But he was lame, too -- and he needed the leadership of Robert Taft, who died in mid-'53.
"The Dubai Ports deal was the right thing to do."
Only true if you believe that to freedom loving people -
people who love and respect their human rights, democratic values and truly FREE market principals -
that there is no moral distinction between the "capital" of a public-traded or 100% private-citizen owned American corporation
and the "capital" of a fuedal-shiekdom to whom its "company" (Dubai World Ports) and its "country" (UAE/Dubai) and that country's OWNER (the ruling royal family) is no more than a distinction as thin as the paper it is written on, much like the distinction between the biggest "companies" in China and its dictatorship.
Advancing the "capital" interests of the state interests of China and of outfits like the gang that owns Dubai has only one element of success; it helps their government-business models succeed.
And why, pray tell, should freedom loving people want to do that, unless they don't give a damn about advancing their own model of freedom?
"the politicians simply do as they are told."
Only by immoral acquiesence.
You act like he's a dictator...or even a certain President circa 1982. Bush does what he is told, and somebody told him to put Paulson in, or else.
Evidence is overwhelming that there are certain issues on which Bush isn't even close to being his own man - fiscal and trade policy is one of them.
Rewarding a key ally in the war on terror, in a deal that has been thoroughly vetted by the CFIUS, does far more to advance freedom that some bickering nabobs on the Internet.
His daugher works for the Christian Science Monitor as a bureau chief.
His circle of friends are not good.
Who's daughter? Paulson?
And that "cooperation" amounts to what,
in comparison with the financial support they continue to give to groups like Hamas, and the Wahabi schools of hate-the-west that they continue to fund along with the Saudi's - continuing to create the future foot soldiers of violent extremists -
and who is to say that their double dealing with us and the Taliban and the Pakistani corrupt intelligence service during the 1990s is not still in operation - keeping tabs on us through all that "assistance" they let us have at their ports, and through the info our "partnership" supplies them with.
The UAE, Qatar and the Saudis are 100% duplicitious, in to no deal that is not 100% about their own self-interest and self-advancement and their "friendship" with the west is as shallow as a dry creek bed; no matter how broad it seems at any point in time.
I would not trust any of them as far as I can spit.
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