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.
Ping...........
bump
Goldman Sachs = Corzine
China = Toricelli
ping
Why no mention of Robert Rubin in the article? He is the one who got the whole thing rolling in the first place.
I would be interested in hearing details. thnx.
ping
Duh. Take the New Age "cheaper is better at any price" stuff to the bankers friends, apparently the other folks on this thread.
I do not consider China a true "market" economy.
It is best described as state-capitalism, which in the 1930s we called fascism. If you wanted a classical economic definition of the political-fuedalistic politics of the sheikdoms and their "state" control and decisions about their capital, you would come close to the mercantilism that Adam Smith was so opposed to.
Yet, here in the west, we have been led by our own greedy mercantilists to believe that capital is capital, no matter its political connections or the political intent of those connections, or how adverse to our essential freedoms will be the success of those intentions. The fiction earns someone profits and it profits greatly those who seek to promote their economic model (state-capitalism, mercantilism) over ours.
It is this same fiction and the greedy promoters of it that is now allowing weak democracies to be bought off so easily , in their foreign policies towards us, by the influence of "capital" from China and the Sheikdoms. And, oh, by the way, where are China and the sheikdoms accumulating that capital? From us idiots.
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