Posted on 04/21/2010 6:42:45 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
While President Obama assails the culture of greed and recklessness practiced by the men of Goldman Sachs, his administration is infested with them. The White House can no more disown Government Sachs than Da Boss–in–chief can disown Chicago politics.
Obama is headed to Wall Street on Thursday to demand “financial regulatory reform” — just as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has filed civil suit against Goldman Sachs for mortgage-related fraud. Question the timing? Darn tootin’. There are no coincidences in the perpetually orchestrated Age of O. Everyone from disgraced former New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer to analysts at the Brookings Institution and Barclays Capital to the GOP leadership and Rush Limbaugh has noted the reeking political opportunism in the air.
As the New York Post reported Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee immediately bought ads on Google that direct web surfers who type in “Goldman Sachs SEC” to Obama’s fundraising site. “It’s time to hold the big banks accountable,” the money-grubbing DNC message bellows. But just like his crony-capitalist predecessor, George W. Bush, Obama has relied on Goldman Sachs and Wall Street power brokers to engineer massive government interventions to “rescue” failing businesses with the tax dollars of ordinary Americans.
While irony-challenged Democratic candidates such as mob-linked banker Alexi Giannoulias in Illinois (who hopes to fill Obama’s old Senate seat) call on Republicans to return their fat-cat Goldman Sachs donations, the Democrats are silent on the $994,795 in Goldman Sachs campaign cash that Obama bagged. The class-warfare Dems are also mum on all the president’s Goldman Sachs men sitting in the catbird seat:
Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission head. He was confirmed despite heated congressional grilling over his role, as Reuters described it, “as a high-level Treasury official in a 2000 law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight. The financial instruments have been blamed for amplifying global financial turmoil.” Gensler said he was sorry — hey, it worked for tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner — and was quickly installed to guard the henhouse.
Goldman Sachs kept White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on a $3,000 monthly retainer while he worked as Clinton’s chief fundraiser, as first reported by Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney. The financial titans threw in another $50,000 to become the Clinton primary campaign’s top funder. Emanuel received nearly $80,000 in cash from Goldman Sachs during his four terms in Congress — investments that have reaped untold rewards, as Emanuel assumed a leading role championing the trillion-dollar TARP banking-bailout law.
Former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson serves under Geithner as his top deputy and overseer of TARP bailout — $10 billion of which went to Goldman Sachs. Left-leaning government watchdog Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington responded: “It makes it appear that they are saying one thing and doing another.” Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation noted that, while at Goldman Sachs, Patterson lobbied against the executive-pay limits that Obama had crusaded for as senator (this was, of course, before his administration carved out exemptions for AIG). While Patterson agreed to recuse himself on any Goldman Sachs–related issues or policy concerns, Blumenthal wrote, it “still creates a serious conflict for Geithner, as Treasury is being partly managed by a former Goldman lobbyist. Geithner is also placed in a tough position considering that his chief of staff is limited in the areas in which he can work (supposedly).”
Obama’s close hometown crony, campaign-finance chief and senior adviser Penny Pritzker, was head of Superior Bank of Chicago, a subprime specialist that went bust in 2001, leaving more than 1,400 people stripped of their savings after bank officials falsified profit reports. Pritzker’s lawyer at O’Melveny and Myers, Tom Donilon, is now Obama’s deputy national-security adviser. He earned just shy of $4 million representing her and other high-profile meltdown clients including Goldman Sachs.
White House National Economic Council head Larry Summers reaped nearly $2.8 million in speaking fees from many of the major financial institutions and government-bailout recipients he now polices, including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs. A single speech to Goldman Sachs in April 2008 brought in $135,000. Summers had prior experience negotiating government-sponsored bailouts that benefit private concerns. In 1995, he spearheaded a $40 billion bailout of the Mexican peso that bypassed Congress. Summers personally leaned on the International Monetary Fund to provide nearly $18 billion for the package. Summers’s boss, then–secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, was former co-chairman of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs — the Mexican government’s investment banking firm of choice.
Rubin continues to mentor another former employee of his with regular visits and chats — Treasury Secretary Geithner, who as head of the New York Federal Reserve pushed bailed-out insurance conglomerate AIG to cover up sweetheart deals for investment banks that benefited, you guessed it, Goldman Sachs.
As Obama harangues Wall Street to clean up its house, all the president’s Goldman Sachs men have their feet on the coffee table at his.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2010).
Everbody in D.C. is bought and paid for. Which means we can’t take down their guys without taking down ours, so things never change. It’s a tidy system.
I am looking forward to a new Congress and impeachment of this thug followed by a trial for treason against America.
There can’t POSSIBLY be enough room left under the bus for Goldman-Sachs to fit, can there?
That must be one BIIIIIIIGGGGGG bius!
These people have NO shame. Nothing is too low for them. Are days like this approaching?
Violence has already been instigated by the left. We need to keep our cool and throw them out in November, then move to impeachment and a trial for treason for Obama.
Yes he can. He can, he is doing it and with the help of the MSM propganda machine he will succeed in convincing 50% or more of the people of this country that it was the Republicans who did this.
The left OWNS the media and can easily convince the masses of pretty much anything they want. Come on, the Healthcare bill is a complete disaster and yet, only 55% of the people want it repealed! 55%! That's just little over half the people who are against one of the biggest debt creating fiasco ever passed!
Eat dinner earlier. You're dreams won't be so crazy!
impeachment and a trial for treason for Obama
Eat dinner earlier. You’re dreams won’t be so crazy!
Well put.
I read somewhere that the demographic of the Democrat party is the poor and the rich. This business about the financial reform seems to fit that model. It’s a bit like a movie where the cop on the take shows up in the raid with the rest of the task force and has to play along arresting the bad guys. The dirty cop does his best to minimize any real damage to the crime boss’ operation, though. Republicans have one leg in this bed too, but at least there is some element of the party that recognizes that corrupt markets are not a good thing.
*Demand* “financial regulatory reform” = government take over it’s all about power and control before the elections.
Google Goldman Sachs Sec and you will reach http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=goldma+sachs+sec&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Sponsored Search for Goldman Sachs
paid for bt Barackobama.com
they pay for your hits
any ideas?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.