Jacob Lew: Another Brick in the Wall Street on the Potomac (William K. Black)

[Octafish]

16. The Inconvenient Truth About Jack Lew

What Robert Scheer wrote:

The Inconvenient Truth About Jack Lew

By Robert Scheer
TruthDig.org, Jan 11, 2013

I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary. Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who unfettered Wall Street greed and then took his own considerable cut of the action.

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Really? That is a statement of such deliberate ignorance that one must marvel at Lew’s audacity in uttering it. He was one of the top economic officials in the Clinton administration when the president signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into law that declared all of those “derivative products” exempt from the reach of any existing government regulation or regulatory agency. It was aimed at silencing the warning of Brooksley Born, who, as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, attempted to control the burgeoning market in the toxic assets that have carried such a huge human price in foreclosed homes and lost jobs.

Not only did Lew go along with the Clinton administration’s policy, he continued to endorse a radical deregulatory approach to financial markets as a board member of the Hamilton Project, funded by Rubin at the Brookings Institution. Lew’s myopic view of the origins of the economic meltdown, at odds even with Greenspan’s own admission of culpability, hardly qualifies him for the top economic position in the Obama administration. As Sanders told the Post this week, “In my view, we need a Treasury secretary who is prepared to stand up to corporate America and their powerful lobbyists and fight for policies that protect the working families in our country. I do not believe Mr. Lew is that person.”

But if we need that quality in a Treasury secretary, we certainly need it even more in the president, and given Obama’s appointments—from Lawrence Summers through Geithner and now Lew—it is clear that he is not that person. In announcing Lew’s nomination, the president only once referenced his chief of staff’s Wall Street experience, noting, “He helped oversee ... one of our largest investment banks.” That he also helped destroy it was buried as an inconvenient truth.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_inconvenient_truth_about_jack_lew_20130111/

Thanks, WillyT!