Rahm Emanual: $18 mill in 3 yrs in Wall Street Leveraged Buy-Out Firm:

[amborin]

"Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, collected $18 million working less than three years at Wall Street outfit Wasserstein-Perella. I don’t think, after googling the firm, that anyone has adequately explained just what Wasserstein-Perella is. (I was writing about this stuff back in the late 1980s, so I know.) Bruce Wasserstein was one of the top leveraged buyout bandits of the 1980s, when America’s industrial companies were literally asset stripped and ripped apart. The amount of human misery Bruce Wasserstein caused with his "financial engineering" in former industrial towns from Akron to Zanesville is simply beyond imagination, but not exaggeration. After making a few billion ripping apart our country’s industrial base and looting pension funds, Wasserstein became head of Lazard Freres, the secretive but extremely powerful international private banking firm....."

snip

plus further evidence supporting Taibbi's claims:

<http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/11/813139/-Taibbi-details-Rubin-clones-around-Obama;-I-add-some-history->

[Bitwit1234]

1. And tht is what Obama is letting Emmanuel do to this country.

Sell it out to corporate raiders.

[cilla4progress]

2. Needed: complete turnover in economic advisers

Trade in Geithner for Elizabeth Warren; Emmanuel for Reich. Bring in Krugman, Steiglitz? Who else?

They all have credibility.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

17. Rahm isn't an economic advisor. n/t

[movonne]

20. rahm fought Dean all the way ... putting in progressives...rahm put

in the blue dogs...and if it wasn't for Dean we would have many more...

[BeFree]

3. Well

That explains a lot about how Obama has been coerced into looking the other way.

So what are the chances Rahm gets his just due and looks for another job?

[Kansas Wyatt]

4. So Rahm Emanual's HERO is Gordon Gekko.

So, did Obama choose him or was Obama told to choose him?

[AllentownJake]

7. Rahm was sought by the President Elect

Rahm's goal in life was to be the first Jewish-American Speaker of the House. The President interrupted that goal.

[Kansas Wyatt]

10. But was Obama told to choose him?

I'm curious, because Obama says he is working for and fighting for the average American, but the people he surrounds himself with, are the ones out to destroy average Americans with their ideals.

[AllentownJake]

11. I think if someone was trying to hide their poker hand

They could have picked someone more innocuous than Rahm Emmanuel.

He's a controversial figure. Rahm is a pit bull, so is Axelrod and Ploufe. It is consistent with previous strategies and I don't doubt in anyway that Rahm does not work for the President not the other way around.

[Individualist]

14. The buck stops where?

[mitchum]

18. In Rahm's bank account?

Where it has plenty of company.

[snagglepuss]

5. K&R Thanks for posting. nt

[rudy23]

6. Obama's number one draft pick.

The day after the elections, when I was on top of the world, my heart sunk knowing what was about to happen to our party and our country. Sick.

[Lorien]

21. That's exactly how I felt. On top of the world one day, sick at heart

the next. Rahm was Obama's message to Wall st. and Corporate crooks; "We've got your back".

[midnight armadillo]

8. One wonders...

Exactly what Rahm learned all those years in government as a White House staffer under Clinton that made him so valuable to such a firm. Perhaps there's an overlooked career track for investment success.

[Fumesucker]

9. Is it any wonder that the elite neither know nor care of the challenges that ordinary people face?

Seriously, how can someone who made six million dollars a year have any idea what it's like to live on twenty thousand a year?

[rollingrock]

12. Rahm was on the board of directors at Freddie Mac

and probably one of the architects of the current US mortgage/banking crisis.

Emanuel was named to the Board of Directors for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation ("Freddie Mac") by then President Bill Clinton in 2000. His position earned him at least $320,000, including later stock sales.<31><32> He was not assigned to any of the board's working committees, and the Board met no more than six times per year.<32>

During his time on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.<32><33> The Obama Administration rejected a request under the Freedom of Information Act to review Freddie Mac board minutes and correspondence during Emanuel's time as a director.<32>

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) later accused the board of having "failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention." Emanuel resigned from the board in 2001 when he ran for Congress.<34>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahm_Emanuel

so much for transparency!

[amborin]

13. thanks for that info!

[Trekologer]

15. I don't think that there was much involvement

The boards of directors of companies generally have little to do with the average day-to-day operations; they are mostly involved in high-level stuff. Also, the source indicates that Rham Emanual wasn't on any of the board's committees (aka he didn't do much). I would suspect based on this that Emanual's position on the board was more to give the company the prestige of having a high-level White House staffer involved and/or a post-administration job.

[rollingrock]

16. >$320k is a whole lot of money for doing nothing

so why did the Obama WH reject the FOIA request to reviews Rahm's time on the board? what are they trying to hide??

[Trekologer]

19. As is the case with boards of directors

I don't disagree that members of boards of directors get paid a lot of money to do very little. Mostly they are being paid to have their name attached to the company.

As far as the FOIA request, Freddie Mac is a private company. Even though it was placed under conservatorship, its still private. I believe that it would be improper to fulfill the request. Now, if the company was nationalized, that would be another story.

[Hannah Bell]

22. Freddie Mac was put under a conservatorship of the U.S. Federal government 9/08

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), known as Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE), is a government sponsored enterprise (GSE) of the United States federal government. Freddie Mac has its headquarters in the Tyson's Corner CDP in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia.<1><2>

The FHLMC was created in 1970 to expand the secondary market for mortgages in the US.

In 1968, Fannie Mae split into a private corporation and a publicly financed institution. The private corporation was still called Fannie Mae, and its charter continued to support the purchase of mortgages from savings and loan associations and other depository institutions, but without an explicit insurance policy that guaranteed the value of the mortgages. The publicly financed institution was named the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) and it explicitly guaranteed the repayments of securities backed by mortgages made to government employees or veterans (the mortgages themselves were also guaranteed by other government organizations).

To provide competition for the newly private Fannie Mae and to further increase the availability of funds to finance mortgages and home ownership, Congress then established the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) as a private corporation through the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1970. The charter of Freddie Mac was essentially the same as Fannie Mae's newly private charter: to expand the secondary market for mortgages and mortgage backed securities by buying mortgages made by savings and loan associations and other depository institutions.

The Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act ("FIRREA") of 1991 revised and standardized the regulation of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Prior to this act, Freddie Mac was owned by the Federal Home Loan Bank System and governed by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which was reorganized into the Office of Thrift Supervision by the Act. The Act severed Freddie Mac's ties to the Federal Home Loan Bank System, created an 18-member board of directors, and subjected it to HUD oversight.

On September 7, 2008, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director James B. Lockhart III announced he had put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the conservatorship of the FHFA (see Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The action has been described as "one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets in decades".<3><4><5>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Mac