James Fallows oughtn't to have been surprised by the networking that goes
on in the oligarchy. It happens everywhere at all levels. All of us
preferentially retain the network of friends that we made in our highly
formative adolescent and early adult years (when our frontal lobes were
growing and developing enormously as we began to choose the p;articular
culture and roles that we wanted in adult life). It's part of our immensely
long genetic history in small groups.
America is supposed to be more democratic than most advanced countries. But
it's rapidly becoming the highly stratified country that older cultures
have long since been. In England, for example, the upper middle class, who
get their children into the best schools and universities (particularly
Oxford and Cambridge), have an almost total lock on the best jobs in the
country -- in finance, business, politics, media, academe. And, as James
Fallows remarks, many of these people glide in and out of several different
networks in which they have pals made in earlier years at university
etc.. There are exceptionally gifted individuals who break into these
inner circles from below, as it were, but they're relatively scarce in
comparison with the "old boy network". This is a tired old phrase, as is
"It's not what you know, but who you know, that's important", but true
nevertheless.
Keith
At 15:50 17/12/2010 -0800, Mike wrote:
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
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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