Truthout: BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES Does Pennsylvania Avenue eventually become Wall Street, or does it just seem that way?
Obama's former budget director, Peter Orszag, is becoming Citigroup's vice chairman of global banking, at a salary speculated to be well in excess of one million dollars a year - and that doesn't include the "bonuses." Orszag is just one in a long line of top-level Democratic and Republican economic advisers in D.C. who make seamless rides back and forth from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill. As a Reuters article notes: He [Orszag] follows in the footsteps of another prominent Democratic government official - former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who became a senior counselor to Citigroup and helped shape the bank's strategy during the years leading up to the financial crisis. Rubin resigned under a cloud of criticism in early 2009, after the struggling bank accepted $45 billion in U.S. government bailout funds. Rubin has come to symbolize the continuous "neoliberal" school of finance that has been the course of both parties for the last few decades - and many Rubin fellow travelers - such as Geithner and Summers - have been key to the pro-Wall-Street tilt of the current White House. James Fallows of the Atlantic writes that Orszag's jump to Citigroup "should be shocking." But he laments that very few media outlets, political figures or even progressive notables were outraged by another major example of the oligarchy at work. Indeed, Goldman Sachs (which Bush Treasury Secretary Paulson headed at one time) just hired Theo Lubke, the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank's efforts to regulate the derivatives market. Lubke - you know what's coming - will become Goldman Sach's "chief regulatory reform officer in the securities division to help navigate the impending overhaul of financial regulations in the derivatives market." The relationship of government financial advisers and regulators and "banks too big to fail" is as toxic as methane gas in a coal mine. As a result, like the miners who aren't forewarned of the risks of a possible explosion due to the lax regulation of wealthy mine owners, we don't get a warning of financial collapse until it's too late. Mark Karlin Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
