Evidence of an American Plutocracy: The Larry Summers Story

[Octafish]

Now in its 32nd year...

"You can't help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice." -- President Reagan, 1/31/84, on Good Morning America, defending his administration against charges of callousness.



You want more Trickle-Down Voodoo Reaganomics?

Then Friend Larry Summers.

Evidence of an American Plutocracy: The Larry Summers Story

By Matthew Skomarovsky
LilSis.org
Jan 10, 2011 at 19:31 EST

EXCERPT...

Another new business model Rubin and Summers made possible was Enron. Rubin had known Enron well through Goldman Sachs’s financing of the company, and recused himself from matters relating to Enron in his first year on the Clinton team. He and Summers went on to craft policies at Treasury that were essential to Enron’s lucrative energy trading business, and they were in touch with Enron executives and lobbyists all the while. Enron meanwhile won $2.4 billion in foreign development deals from Clinton’s Export-Import Bank, then run by Kenneth Brody, a former protege of Rubin’s at Goldman Sachs.

Soon after Rubin joined Citigroup, its investment banking division picked up Enron as a client, and Citigroup went on to become Enron’s largest creditor, loaning almost $1 billion to the company. As revelations of massive accounting fraud and market manipulation emerged over the next years and threatened to bring down the energy company, Rubin and Summers intervened. While Enron’s rigged electricity prices in California were causing unprecedented blackouts, Summers urged Governor Gray Davis to avoid criticizing Enron and recommended further deregulatory measures. Rubin was an official advisor to Gov. Davis on energy market issues at the time, while Citigroup was heavily invested in Enron’s fraudulent California business, and he too likely put pressure on the Governor to lay off Enron. Rubin also pulled strings at Bush’s Treasury Department in late 2001, calling a former employee to see if Treasury could ask the major rating agencies not to downgrade Enron, and Rubin also lobbied the rating agencies directly. (In all likelihood he made similar attempts in behalf of Citigroup during the recent financial crisis.) Their efforts ultimately failed, Enron went bust, thousands of jobs and pensions were destroyed, and its top executives went to jail. It’s hard to believe, but there was some white-collar justice back then.

SNIP...

Summers also starting showing up around the Hamilton Project, which Rubin had just founded with hedge fund manager Roger Altman. Altman was another Clinton official who had come from Wall Street, following billionaire Peter Peterson from Lehman Brothers to Blackstone Group, and he left Washington to found a major hedge fund in 1996. The Hamilton Project is housed in the Brookings Institution, a prestigious corporate-funded policy discussion center that serves as a sort of staging ground for Democratic elites in transition between government, academic, and business positions. The Hamilton Project would go on to host, more specifically, past and future Democratic Party officials friendly to the financial industry, and to produce a stream of similarly minded policy papers. Then-Senator Obama was the featured political speaker at Hamilton’s inaugural event in April 2006.

Summers joined major banking and political elites on Hamilton’s Advisory Council and appeared at many Hamilton events. During a discussion of the financial crisis in 2008, Summers was asked about his role in repealing Glass-Stegall, the law that forbade commercial and investment banking mergers like Citigroup. “I think it was the right thing to do,” he responded, noting that the repeal of Glass-Stegall made possible a wave of similar mergers during the recent financial crisis, such as Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch. He was arguing, in effect, that financial deregulation did not cause the financial crisis, it actually solved it. “We need a regulatory system as modern as the markets,” said Summers — quoting Rubin, who was in the room. “We need a hen house as modern as the food chain,” said the fox.

CONTINUED...

http://blog.littlesis.org/2011/01/10/evidence-of-an-ame... /

These are the richest times in history, with seven-eighths of all wealth ever, per David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's own Budget Director. Until we see economic fairness restored through fiscal and other government policies, laws and regulations; the rich will keep getting richer, the middle class will continue dissolving into the new poor, and the poor will become the super-majority. Of course, as money pays for lobbyists who write the laws and speech and cash are the same thing when it comes to elections, the majority perspective on policy will be silent as the grave.

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Another amazingly informative post.

[Octafish]

4. Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism

The Dark Age of Money

by JAMES C. KENNEDY
CounterPunch Oct. 24, 2012

EXCERPT...

Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term ’Fascism’ was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as ‘Capitalism’ and ’Free Market’ economics.

SNIP...

The fundamental difference between Adam Smith’s free market capitalism and Friedman’s ‘free market capitalism’ is that Friedman’s is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.

If you say that this is nothing new, you miss the point. Friedman does not differentiate between some third world country and his own. The ultimate difference is that Friedman has created a model that sanctions and promotes the exploitation of his own country, in fact every country, for the benefit of the investor, money the uber-wealthy. He dressed up this noxious ideology as ‘free market capitalism’ and then convinced most of the world to embrace it as their economic salvation.

SNIP...

Monetary Fascism, as conceived by Friedman, uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself.

SNIP...

Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve money’s interests. Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations. Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulson’s $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress. The $700 billion was just the wedge. Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit. All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/24/the-dark-age-of-money/

Zanks, Jackpine! I'd like to see DU be something like what our nation's newspapers should be.



"Yak dung!... hope tastes good - like a cigarette should!" -- Dr. Yen-Lo, Manchurian Candidate

[WillyT]

2. HUGE K & R !!! - THANK YOU !!!

[Octafish]

5. Ending the Recession ... for Wall Street

Larry Summers and the Jobless Recovery

by ANTHONY DiMAGGIO
CounterPunch, DECEMBER 15, 2009

Arianna Huffington was right when she said that Larry Summers should be fired. As the top economic advisor to Barack Obama and the director of the National Economic Council, Summers is amassing an impressive record of serving corporate greed at the expense of the public good. Summers reveals himself as thoroughly disconnected from the suffering of main street America in light of his recent statements. On the December 13th edition of ABC’s This Week, Summers cheerfully explained to George Stephanopoulos that the U.S. has “walked back from the brink” following the 2008 economic collapse, and that “everyone agrees the recession is over and the question is what the pace of the [job and economic] expansion is going to be.”

Huffington, who was also a guest on This Week, reacted with scorn: “he’s the wrong man to be heading the President’s economic team. His response is so lackadaisical, no sense of urgency. This is meaningless; Larry Summers’ accelerating his forecast [on job creation] is so utterly meaningless. I don’t even know why we’re talking about it. All his [other] forecasts have been completely wrong.” Huffington’s tongue lashing was one of the few breaths of fresh air in a constant barrage of political and media propaganda that promises the end of the economic crisis is near.

Summers is technically accurate in claiming that the recession is over- if recession is defined as two consecutive quarters or more of negative growth. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis indicates that national changes in the value of National Gross Domestic Product for the last two quarters of 2008 were -2.7 and -5.4 percent respectively, while the figures for the first three quarters of 2009 were: -6.4, -.7, and 2.8 percent. Since the third quarter of 2009 saw limited economic growth, the U.S. economy cannot, by definition, be in a recession. What was most dishonest about Summers’ portrayal, however, is the implication that the U.S. is emerging from the economic crisis. This promise is highly suspect considering that many economists are predicting an increase in unemployment to 11 percent nationwide by next year.

Summers’ promise of economic redemption seems dubious in light of other current economic indicators, which suggest that the economy is in worse shape now than at any other point in recent decades. Unemployment still stood in November 2009 at 10 percent, a drop of a meager .2 percent from the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures indicate that the November unemployment rate is more than two percent higher than it was in February 2009. Unemployment is currently higher than at any other point in the last ten years, and remains more than twice as high as it was from March of 2007 to February 2008 (when unemployment ranged from 4.4 to 4.8 percent). When put into context, the .2 percent drop in unemployment last month hardly symbolizes an end to the economic crisis. Quite the contrary, the jobless recovery is continuing in light of the high unemployment rate, accompanied by the continued profits posted by major Wall Street banks and investment firms (such profits are largely the product of the economic bailout, rather than increased lending).

If one is still inclined to take Summers seriously, consider some other numbers:

SNIP...

- Summers was pressured to step down as President of Harvard after he made sexist claims that women were less well represented in the sciences and engineering because of their intellectual inferiority. Summers’ tenure at Harvard was also marked by controversy after he fired Harvard Endowment Manager Iris Mack for blowing the whistle on the university after it became involved in dangerous derivative investments – which were a major contributor to the 2008 economic collapse, and cost Harvard nearly $1 billion in lost investments.

- Summers also became a controversial figure when it was shown that he made over $5 million in profits for the year in hedge fund investments and another $2 million from troubled Wall Street investment firms (many of which received bailout money) for various speaking engagements. The millions made by Summers from his Wall Street connections have raised many eyebrows at a time when he’s supposed to be spearheading an effort by the White House to increase transparency in the national economy and hold Wall Street accountable for its many transgressions.

- Summers enjoys other controversial ties with Wall Street firms. He was strongly criticized after it was revealed that he accepted benefits from Citigroup (one of the major banks responsible for the sub-prime/derivatives economic crisis), including free jet rides. Summers also called prominent members of Congress, requesting that they remove limits on executive pay at companies that received TARP bailout money (Citigroup was one of the companies that would benefit from the removal of the cap).

- Finally, Summers supported the 1999 bi-partisan repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. The Congressional repeal tore down the legal separation between traditional commercial banks and riskier investment banks. This repeal was significant because it ushered in the deregulation of U.S. banks. Deregulation is cited by critics as having played a major role in fostering the current economic collapse and crisis, especially in light of Congress’s deregulation of financial derivatives with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/12/15/larry-summers-and-the-jobless-recovery/

PS: You are most welcome, WillyT!

[leftstreet]

3. Why do so many of our Overlords have big jowls?

DURec
Great links

[Octafish]

7. Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception

First, in answer to your excellent question, let's turn to science...

"Jowls are a technical term describing fullness along the jawline," Dr. Anil Shah, M.D. reports. "This is typically a collection of fat, descended soft tissue, skin, and muscle which has descended with age."

http://www.shahfacialplastics.com/jowls.html

Now, let us turn to political economics:

Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception

Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.

By Jim Lobe
May 18, 2003 | Alternet.org

What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?

A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.

The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.

Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.

Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.

Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/leo_strauss'_philosophy_of_deception

Thank you for the kind reminder on the relationship between jowls and the signs of a life spent living high off the hog, leftstreet. While funny on its face (biting my knuckle as I type), the subject goes to the meat of the situation.

[MisterP]

6. link broken (will edit once updated...)

http://blog.littlesis.org/2011/01/10/evidence-of-an-american-plutocracy-the-larry-summers-story/

[Octafish]

9. Rubin and Summers gifted us ENRON

From LilSis:

EXCERPT...

“A relatively senior figure on Wall Street said to me years ago that many of the most important business relationships he had were with the people he met through his other activities. He had found that his business and non-business lives fed each other to the benefit of both.”
—Robert Rubin, Harvard Business School Commencement, 2000

Summers’ arrogant personal style is known to be politically toxic, so he’s been fortunate to have Robert Rubin as a guardian angel easing his way to political stardom. Rubin is what you might call a Wall Street godfather. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1966 and rose to co-CEO and then co-chairman before joining the Clinton administration in 1993 as the first ever director of the National Economic Council, the same position Summers is leaving from now. Summers, a lower level Treasury official at the time, had already endeared himself to Rubin in the 80s, consulting to Goldman Sachs and then working with Rubin on the Dukakis campaign. When Rubin rose to Secretary of the Treasury in 1995, Summers became his deputy.

While running Treasury over the next six years, the two, along with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, were chiefly responsible for the neoliberal economic reforms that allowed banks to market and trade derivatives without oversight or transparency, combine in dangerous ways, take excessive risks, and recover losses when big loans to companies and foreign governments went sour. During the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998, Time Magazine famously labeled the three “The Committee To Save he World”, which is now a running joke because financial deregulation allowed big banks to almost destroy the world ten years later.

When Rubin left Treasury in 1999 to become Chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup, he persuaded President Clinton to name Summers as his replacement. Citigroup was a new banking conglomerate made possible by laws Rubin and Summers supported and implemented at Treasury, and it paid Rubin over $100 million in the next ten years.

Another new business model Rubin and Summers made possible was Enron. Rubin had known Enron well through Goldman Sachs’s financing of the company, and recused himself from matters relating to Enron in his first year on the Clinton team. He and Summers went on to craft policies at Treasury that were essential to Enron’s lucrative energy trading business, and they were in touch with Enron executives and lobbyists all the while. Enron meanwhile won $2.4 billion in foreign development deals from Clinton’s Export-Import Bank, then run by Kenneth Brody, a former protege of Rubin’s at Goldman Sachs.

Soon after Rubin joined Citigroup, its investment banking division picked up Enron as a client, and Citigroup went on to become Enron’s largest creditor, loaning almost $1 billion to the company. As revelations of massive accounting fraud and market manipulation emerged over the next years and threatened to bring down the energy company, Rubin and Summers intervened. While Enron’s rigged electricity prices in California were causing unprecedented blackouts, Summers urged Governor Gray Davis to avoid criticizing Enron and recommended further deregulatory measures. Rubin was an official advisor to Gov. Davis on energy market issues at the time, while Citigroup was heavily invested in Enron’s fraudulent California business, and he too likely put pressure on the Governor to lay off Enron. Rubin also pulled strings at Bush’s Treasury Department in late 2001, calling a former employee to see if Treasury could ask the major rating agencies not to downgrade Enron, and Rubin also lobbied the rating agencies directly. (In all likelihood he made similar attempts in behalf of Citigroup during the recent financial crisis.) Their efforts ultimately failed, Enron went bust, thousands of jobs and pensions were destroyed, and its top executives went to jail. It’s hard to believe, but there was some white-collar justice back then.

CONTINUED...

http://blog.littlesis.org/2011/01/10/evidence-of-an-american-plutocracy-the-larry-summers-story/

Of course, the nice man at ENRON Kenny Boy Lay managed to keep his ill-gotten gains by conveniently dying before sentencing and the vice-chairman guy, Cliff Baxter, who could tell us things from a more ethical perspective suddenly up and suicided after telling everyone he feared for his life.

[Fire Walk With Me]

8. Sick and scary...and I have additional information:

On the Wall Street Blackstone group:

It’s Not a Housing Boom. It’s a Land Grab
http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/05/the_dangerous_new_housing_boom.html

Many in the political and financial class are holding up this relatively positive new housing data as proof that the country has reached an economic oasis. And at first blush, the situation can be construed to be positive. The value of the U.S. housing market has climbed back to $16 trillion, exactly where it was before the economic crisis. Home prices and permits for new construction are up by double digits nationwide.

But rather than an oasis, these new gains might be an economic mirage. The reality of the current real estate renaissance is that the rich and those on Wall Street are raking in the cash while large segments of the population—especially historically marginalized communities—remain stuck in a downward, alternate housing reality.

Generally, housing recoveries are fueled by millions of Americans with new jobs, higher wages, available credit from banks and overall confidence that things will get better. But the real economy that most people live in day-to-day is too weak for all of that. Jobs are in short supply, wages are at historic lows and credit for middle and working class Americans is tight. With their economic ladder into homeownership taken away, many Americans can no longer participate in the housing market.

snip

Just in the last 12 months, Wall Street’s Blackstone Group has raised $8 billlion to buy up homes on Main Street. Following suit, according to The New Republic, JP Morgan Chase—the nation’s largest bank—has organized a fund to purchase 5,000 single-family homes in states with some of the most depressed real estate prices. As I wrote last year, a former Morgan Stanley housing strategist left that bank, organized a billion dollars, and is purchasing up to 10,000 homes with these new resources.

(More at the link. Via Occupy Fights Foreclosures.)

One of the three leaked Citigroup Plutonomy memos, "The Plutonomy Symposium: Rising Tides Lifting Yachts", stated that the main asset of the bottom 80% of income earners in America is their home. Note Summers and others' involvement in Citigroup...

Read the three leaked Citigroup Plutonomy memos, “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances”, “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer”, and "The Plutonomy Symposium: Rising Tides Lifting Yachts" :
http://our99angrypercent.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/download-citigroup-plutonomy-memos/


Reagan of course significantly contributed to the number of helpless homeless people living on the streets, unable to care for themselves, through eliminating mental health budgets, which forced institution directors to expel those for whom the money had vanished, and this included those with no family and too low-functioning to care for themselves. Some personnel got together and used the last money for bus tickets for some of those to Santa Monica California, Reagan's home town, apparently, where they would at minimum not freeze to death on the first frost.

A side note on that horror...Project 50 in Los Angeles proved that you can take the most hardcore homeless, even those still in addiction, and place them in housing with extremely positive results, including financial savings for the city (medical care, etc.) and that the vast majority stayed in such provided housing and got clean and sober. Financial interests would rather rent such rooms for far more money to hipsters so the Project never went forward.

[Egalitarian Thug]

13. The entire "recovery" is what 41 once famously called "voodoo economics".

From real estate to jobs to the markets, it's all a massive illusion funded by the working class without their approval or knowledge.

[Octafish]

24. The plutocrats already had a party. Now they bought another. They took two. They were small.

And we are the smaller for it. Thanks for the heads-up on the Blackstone operators. Like back in the Great Depression, the bastards swoop in to buy farms, homes, businesses for pennies on the dollar.

$16 Trillion is the nation's housing stock? Interesting. That's also the number of dollars the Fed pumped into the banks and business, both foreign and domestic, in the great Bankster Bailout.

Apart from you, Fire Walk With Me, and a few other great DUers, no one has asked where did all that money that needed replacing go?

Even if every mortgage in the country were to default, there'd still be trillions that didn't need replacing. The property itself would be worth more.

TARP Bailout Fraud: Where Did the Money Go?

Designed to Fail

By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, September 21, 2012

EXCERPT...

Geithner bears full responsibility. Understating problems, he admitted solutions “won’t come close” to expectations. He refused to address glaring shortfalls. He abandoned Main Street for Wall Street. He’s complicit in grand theft. He and banker cronies belong in prison.

Banks know they can steal with impunity. They’re larger and more powerful now than when crisis conditions erupted. They can speculate recklessly. They’ll be bailed whenever they get in trouble.

Treasury “ignore(d) rather than support(ed) real” reforms. Its “broken promises” turned TARP and other programs into a giant Wall Street “giveaway.”

Its “mismanagement” and criminal complicity “damaged the credibility of the government….” Conditions are so out of control that future policy makers may be unable “to save the system the next time a crisis arises.”

Perhaps that’s TARP’s “most lasting, and unfortunate, legacy.”

Barofsky’s new book “Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street” explains.

Writer/Roosevelt Institute fellow Matthew Stoller calls it “a very important” account of the financial crisis aftermath. In April 2010, Barofsky met a key adversary.

Herbert Allison formerly headed Merrill Lynch, TIAA-CREF and Fannie Mae. He came out of retirement to oversee TARP. He became Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Stability.

“Have you thought at all about what you’ll be doing next,” he asked. “Out there in the market, there are consequences for some of the things you’re saying and the way you’re saying them.”

Barofsky knew he was being threatened “with lifelong unemployment.” Going along instead of bucking the system assures revolving door plum positions. “It was gold or the lead,” he explained.

Cooperate and get rich. Don’t and lose out. At first, he “had no idea that the US government had been captured by” bankers. He was “shocked (at) how much control” they have over policy on their own terms. Treasury goes along deferentially. Republicans or Democrats agree on core issues.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/tarp-bailout-fraud-where-did-the-money-go/5305528

So. What happened to all that money? And, why isn't anyone talking about it?

[Fire Walk With Me]

25. Quite! And why put Summers, a bail-out expert in the Fed seat? MOAR BAILOUTS.

And the bailout money is a war chest for them to overturn the middle class. I've been screaming here for years that "they" want to live like kings and queens with the rest of us serfs. With the increasing income inequality gap and the (since Reagan, including Reagan) attacks upon the middle class, it is working. Using our own money.

And:

Why doesn't anyone ask Rumsfeld where the 2.3 TRILLION went?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/02/1175717/-Why-doesn-t-anyone-ask-Rumsfeld-where-the-2-3-TRILLION-went

It was forgotten in the wake of 9-11, but on 9-10 the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said:

On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech at the Pentagon where he stated:

“According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 Trillion dollars in transactions.”

“The adversary is closer to home, it’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.”

“In fact, it could be said that it’s a matter of life and death.”

[johnnyreb]

10. Enron: the closer you look, the more you see.

And now, a quick jingle from our malefactor: Enron_Air.mp3

[Octafish]

14. LFOLOLOLOL! ''ENRON Air - We've got friends in high places!''

That is my new phone ringing thing. Corporate McPravda dropped the ENRON Buy-Partisan Corruption story so fast, it made Rupert Murdoch's head spin.

Of course, Joe Lieberman, Official Senatorial Mentor to the President, was up to his eyeballs in the thing.

Lieberman in Enronland

It has come to this: The investigation of Enron as a political scandal appears for now to depend on Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Enron Democrat who bagged Enron campaign contributions and who worked hard to block accounting reforms. Lieberman's committee agreed to issue subpoenas seeking information that could shed light on Enron contacts with the White House, but the question is, How hard is he willing to push?

For months the White House and the Republicans have put out the message that Enron is nothing but a business scandal, a strategy that seems to have paid off, judging by the dwindling media coverage. But the lack of coverage doesn't mean that the political aspects of Enron have been thoroughly probed. Far from it.

In a letter to Dan Burton, the Republican chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, Henry Waxman, the senior Democrat on the panel, noted many episodes that warrant scrutiny. Among them: Enron-friendly appointments to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; Vice President Cheney's timely condemning of electricity price caps during the California energy crisis (see John Nichols on page 14); meetings between Enron execs and Clinton officials; and Congressional passage in 2000 of legislation exempting energy derivative contracts from federal oversight. Army Secretary Thomas White, who previously headed an Enron venture that engaged in fraudulent accounting practices, failed to disclose all his financial ties to the company. And just-released documents from the Energy Department, forced out by public-interest-group lawsuits, show that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met with dozens of business representatives and Bush contributors--and no consumer or conservation groups--while he was developing the Bush energy plan. But Burton, to no one's surprise, turned down Waxman's proposed investigation, and other House Republicans, again no surprise, have been more eager to jump on Enron's and Arthur Andersen's funny numbers than on those firms' political connections.

In the Senate, the Democrats have not shown much taste for this kind of probe either, at least until recently. On March 21 Lieberman announced that the Governmental Affairs Committee, which he chairs, is issuing twenty-nine subpoenas seeking information on contacts between the companies and the federal government. The subpoenas--addressed to Enron, Arthur Andersen and twenty-seven past and present members of Enron's board--request materials regarding Enron's communications with the White House and eight federal agencies, starting in January 1992. Lieberman also said his committee will send letters (not subpoenas) to the White House and the US Archivist asking for similar information. Those subpoenaed have until April 12 to respond. Lieberman's staff is quick to note that his investigation targets Enron, not the White House. And the subpoenas and letters are limited in their scope: They do not ask for Enron files on its efforts to develop political muscle. But the subpoenas and letters could produce information on how the Bush and Clinton administrations responded to Enron's attempts to gain political influence.

The Enron mess offers a view into a world where policy is increasingly shaped by money. Few members of Congress, of either party, want to run down that rabbit hole. But Enron is a political scandal, and those who want it investigated should press Lieberman to chase this bunny as far as it goes.

-- The Nation

SOURCE: http://www.thenation.com/article/lieberman-enronland#

And yet, the editors of The Nation STFU and just got along. As even the real, true, I was there liberals, like Joe Lieberman, must, IOT get along.

[hootinholler]

11. Kick for after work n/t

[Octafish]

15. Six of Janet Yellen or Half-Dozen of Larry Summers?

By Ezra Klein
Bloomberg, Aug 1, 2013 9:37 AM ET

The strangest part of the increasingly bitter shadow campaign for chairman of the Federal Reserve is that the contest is not really about monetary policy. It’s about financial regulation.

The two leading candidates for the job are Janet Yellen, the current vice chairman of the Fed, and Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and an economics adviser to President Barack Obama. When it comes to monetary policy, they don’t differ drastically. Both support the Fed policy to maintain low interest rates and continue asset purchases -- no premature “tapering” -- until unemployment falls significantly.

SNIP...

Yellen, meanwhile, has little record on these issues. Her supporters seem to prefer her mostly because she’s not Summers. “The question is whether you are prepared to beat up on the banks, yes or no,” said Dean Baker, president of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. “If no, then everything else doesn’t matter. With Summers you’re picking someone you know is not. I don’t know that Yellen is prepared to, either. But there’s reason for hope that Yellen would be stronger on regulating finance.”

The criticism of Yellen is that -- like Bernanke and Alan Greenspan before her -- regulating banks simply isn’t something she’s terribly interested in. She’s at the Federal Reserve because she’s an excellent monetary economist. There’s little evidence she wants to spend her time watching over hedge funds. Her heart may be in the right place; her priorities might not be.

CONTINUED MISERY...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-01/six-of-janet-yellen-or-half-dozen-of-larry-summers-.html

...misery for the 99-percent, that is.

[liberal_at_heart]

12. K&R

[Octafish]

16. 6 More Reasons Larry Summers Should Not Be Fed Chair

There are a number of reasons the former director of Obama's National Economic Council shouldn't be nominated to head the Federal Reserve. But he would be particularly bad on financial reform.

—By Erika Eichelberger
MotherJones | Tue Jul. 30, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

There is a broad consensus among liberal economists that President Barack Obama should most definitely not nominate Larry Summers as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and the former director of Obama's National Economic Council, lacks the central banking experience that the other top contender for the position boasts: Janet Yellen, the Fed's current vice chair, has worked at the Fed for nearly 20 years. The little Summers has said about monetary policy suggests that he may cut back on the stimulus measures that the Fed has deployed since the financial crisis, even though the economy is still struggling. (Oh yeah, and he has implied that women may be "innate[ly]" intellectually inferior.)

But Summers has other troubling attributes. In addition to setting monetary policy, the Fed has important duties as a financial industry watchdog, and financial reform advocates say that Summers' blatantly pro-Wall Street record would doom current efforts by regulators and Congress to reign in the industry.

Here are six reasons why a Larry Summers Fed chair would be dangerous for financial reform:

1. Summers blocked pre-crash regulation of Wall Street: In the 1990s, Brooksley Born, the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under Clinton, noticed that the complex, opaque, and as-yet unregulated derivatives market was rapidly expanding, so she proposed bringing the multi-trillion dollar market under CFTC rules. (Derivatives are financial products whose value is derived from underlying numbers like interest rates or fuel prices.) Summers, who was then Deputy Treasury Secretary, didn't like that idea. He testified during a 1998 Senate hearing that derivatives regulation wasn't necessary because Wall Street could be trusted to police itself. His fierce resistance, along with that of then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, foiled Born's plans. As New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien said at the time, "They...shut her up and shut her down." Partly because of this lack of derivatives oversight, few people saw the 2007 derivatives market meltdown coming.

2. He pushed to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act: In 1999, Summers also played an important role in convincing Congress to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had for decades forced banks to keep their commercial and investment activities separate. The idea behind Glass-Steagall was that banks that hold customer deposits should not be making wild bets with that money. Repeal of the law allowed commercial banks to get into the mortgage-backed securities market that came crashing down during the financial crisis. "Larry Summers helped give us the last crash," says Bart Naylor, a financial policy advocate at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "He must not be allowed to operate the heavy equipment of the Fed."

CONTINUED with FOUR MORE GOOD REASONS...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/lawrence-summers-federal-reserve-chair-financial-regulation

I'm so old, I remember a time when the Democrats actually stood up for Main Street instead of Wall Street -- a fossil. The Buy-Partisan corruption has resulted in trillions of missing dollars, again, and the rapidly disappearing middle class taxpayer left to pay their tab.

[deutsey]

17. When I heard Summers was in Obama's inner circle back in '08

(along with Geithner), it really cooled my enthusiasm for Obama.

I still voted for him, but with these guys on board, any hope I had for a bold and progressive presidency rapidly vanished.

[Octafish]

19. Great rhetoric, though. 99-percent believable.

D, did you hear about the nice thing the homeowners did for the banks? It was like a scene out of "Die Hard 2."

&t=0

Geithner sacrificed homeowners to “foam the runway” for the banks

Is great phrase:

Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, has published a new book, “Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.” It presents a damning indictment of the Obama administration’s execution of the TARP program generally, and of HAMP in particular.
…
By delaying millions of foreclosures, HAMP gave bailed-out banks more time to absorb housing-related losses while other parts of Obama’s bailout plan repaired holes in the banks’ balance sheets. According to Barofsky, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner even had a term for it. HAMP borrowers would “foam the runway” for the distressed banks looking for a safe landing. It is nice to know what Geithner really thinks of those Americans who were busy losing their homes in hard times.

CONTINUED w VIDEO and links and more letters...

http://washingtonexaminer.com/video-geithner-sacrificed-homeowners-to-foam-the-runway-for-the-banks/article/2502982

Our beloved Democratic Party has come to resemble everything that I once hated the Republicans for -- suck ups to the rich and powerful in the hopes of one day becoming a toady.

[Enthusiast]

18. Kicked and Recommended! nt

[Octafish]

20. Say 'No' to Larry Summers. As World Bank President, he would pollute the poor...

A flashback, er, I mean, "flushback":

The (Larry) Summers of Our Discontent

Why the world should keep destructive men out of the World Bank

by Robert Weissman
Published on Wednesday, March 21, 2012 by Common Dreams

"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?"

Do those sound like the words of a man who should be running the world's leading economic development institution?

They don't, but the man who put his name on the memo in which those words appeared -- Lawrence Summers -- does in fact appear to be the Obama administration's leading candidate to head the World Bank.

SNIP...

What's the matter with Larry?

Consider his public service career.

As chief economist at the World Bank, Summers authored (or at least put his name on) a 1991 internal memorandum that argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" wrote Summers. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic, or a thought experiment.

CONTINUED...

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/21

That was at World Bank. Imagine all he could for, um, I mean, "to" the Untermenschen from the Fed?

[bobthedrummer]

21. That reminds me, Sir, of the current stage of Paul Wolfowitz - former DoD and World Bankster-k&r

Paul Wolfowitz Today

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Paul_Wolfowitz

[Octafish]

22. Greetings, kind Sir! Was wondering the other day whatever happened to the Comblicker...

Lotta money to be made from war.

The Carlyle Group

Crony Capitalism Goes Global

By Tim Shorrock The Nation.com
3-26-2

By hiring enough former officials to fill a permanent shadow cabinet, Carlyle has brought political influence to a new level and created a twenty-first-century version of capitalism that blurs any line between politics and business.

William Conway, managing director and co-founder of the Carlyle Group, was talking recently about the media coverage of his bank and the cast of ex-Presidents and former officials, including George H.W. Bush, James Baker III and Frank Carlucci, on its payroll. "One of the words that has recently cropped up as an adjective around us--and I love this adjective--is the 'secretive' Carlyle Group," he said in an interview in his offices overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington. "What's the secret? I don't think we have many secrets. The reality is, we're a group of businessmen who have made an enormous amount of money for our investors by making good investments over the past fifteen years."

To give Conway his due, Carlyle has done exceedingly well for the 435 pension funds, banks and investment funds--40 percent from overseas--that have entrusted their money to one of the world's largest private equity funds. Under the leadership of Carlucci, a former CIA deputy director who was Defense Secretary in the Reagan Administration, Carlyle has become the nation's eleventh-largest defense contractor, a major arms exporter to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, one of the biggest foreign investors in South Korea and Taiwan, and a key player in global telecommunications, wireless, real estate and healthcare markets. Since 1987 it has invested $6.4 billion in 233 transactions, with a rate of return of 36 percent on its completed investments. Carlyle currently has $12.5 billion invested.

"Their basic nature is not to be a long-term investor but buy low and sell high," said Philip Finnegan, an analyst with the Teal Group, a Beltway company that tracks the aerospace industry. "They always look for an exit strategy in whatever they buy. They have a sense of the stability of the business because of the accumulated expertise they have."

That's where Carlyle's global network of statesmen and former officials comes in. Bush is Carlyle's senior adviser on Asia and makes his money by giving speeches at Carlyle's investment conferences. Baker, who was Bush's Secretary of State, is Carlyle's senior counselor and a member of the firm's Asia, Europe and Japan advisory boards. John Major, the former British prime minister, was named chairman of Carlyle Europe last year. Carlyle's advisory boards are peppered with corporate executives from Boeing, BMW, Toshiba and other big multinationals, and men of influence like former Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl, former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun and former US ambassador to Japan (and former Speaker of the House) Thomas Foley. Carlyle's new asset management group is run by Afsaneh Beschloss, the former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank.

By hiring enough former officials to fill a permanent shadow cabinet, Carlyle has brought political influence to a new level and created a twenty-first-century version of capitalism that blurs any line between politics and business. In a sense, Carlyle may be the ultimate in privatization: the use of a private company to nurture public policy--and then reap its benefits in the form of profit. Although the fund claims to operate like any other investment bank, it's undeniable that its stable of statesmen-entrepreneurs have the ability to tap into networks in government and commerce, both at home and abroad, for advance intelligence about companies about to be sold and spun off, or government budgets and policies about to be implemented, and then transform that knowledge into investment strategies that dovetail nicely with US military foreign and domestic policy.

How the Carlyle System Works

A good analogy to the Carlyle system is a Japanese tradition known as amakudari (literally, "descent from heaven&quot . Under this system, senior officials from Japanese ministries retire, only to be instantly hired as senior advisers by the companies and industry groups they were paid to regulate. "What we're really talking about is a systematic merging of the private and public sectors to the point where the distinctions get lost," said Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and author of two acclaimed books on the Japanese system of governance. "The Carlyle Group is a perfect example. It's the use of former government officials for their access to government bureaucracies to determine contractual relations. It's inside knowledge--knowing where the government is going to spend money and then investing in it."

In turn, Carlyle executives influence policy--sometimes profoundly. On March 12 Carlucci, who is chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council, a coalition of US multinationals doing business in Taiwan, invited Tang Yao-Ming, Taiwan's Defense Minister, to attend a closed-door summit of US and Taiwanese defense officials sponsored by the council and key US military contractors, including Carlyle's United Defense Industries. Tang's visit, which was capped by a meeting with US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, marked the highest-level defense contacts between Taipei and Washington since diplomatic relations were severed in 1979--and paralleled President Bush's push to expand arms sales to Taiwan, where Carlyle has significant investments. Carlyle people also testify frequently before government panels: senior adviser Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been ubiquitous before Congressional hearings on Enron.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/article/crony-capitalism-goes-global#axzz2bTW0lCkg

A wonderful specimen, full of love for humanitee lada doo da dee ba dee ba dah ding dong.

Oh. I know you know, bobthedrummer, but for those who think reading is too hard: Carlyle owns Booze Allen Hamilton who has an NSA contract on everybody and their business.

[Enthusiast]

23. He can keep his thought experiments.

What a horrible person. What a great FED chief he would make. NOT!