from Truthdig:
Runaway Wall StreetPosted on Feb 4, 2009
By Robert Scheer
It is instructional that only one of the three tax-challenged Obama appointees has survived public scorn to retain a high position in the new administration. Oddly enough, it is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the man who will collect our taxes, whose career has not been stunted by his failure to pay them.
What makes Geithner so special? The answer, provided by everyone from the president to the media pundits, is that his services are indispensable because he has the expertise in regulating markets needed to preside over the most massive government intervention in the economy. Are they kidding?
Both in his years in the Clinton treasury and as chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Geithner has been paving the way for a runaway Wall Street. Nor has he changed his ways, as was evidenced once again last week with his appointment of Mark Peterson, a Goldman Sachs vice president and lobbyist, to be his top aide. Peterson had lobbied strenuously for precisely the deregulation that the Obama administration now concedes needs reversing. It was confirmation that Goldman Sachs runs the Treasury Department—no matter which party is in power.
Last October the New York Times ran a devastating story entitled “The Guys from ‘Government Sachs,’” spotlighting the many Goldman Sachs alums operating under the firm’s former head, Henry Paulson, after he was named Treasury Secretary. The problem is that Geithner, whom Obama appointed as Paulson’s replacement, was totally enmeshed in Paulson’s handout to Wall Street while chair of the New York Fed. In that capacity, Geithner was intimately involved in the highly questionable negotiations to bail out AIG, in which Goldman had a $20 billion partnership at risk. .......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090204_runaway_wall_street/