Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides, none of whom faced Senate confirmation, earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other Wall Street firms, according to financial disclosure forms.
Get that - they don't face Senate confirmation. Geithner's 'kitchen cabinet' comes right from the financial oligarchy:
Tyler Cowen writes an general op-ed on how Poliics now runs the financial sector in Where Politics Don’t Belong:
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the birth of a military-industrial complex. Today we have a financial-regulatory complex, and it has meant a consolidation of power and privilege. We’ve created a class of politically protected “too big to fail” institutions, and the current proposals for regulatory reform further cement this notion. Even more worrying, with so many explicit and implicit financial guarantees, we are courting a bigger financial crisis the next time something major goes wrong.
I call this the financial oligarchy or multinational corporations took over Washington D.C.
Cowen also notes the lastest deals with big business have turned off many who are in favor of health care reform.
There is a quote that is so appropriate for what the Obama Administration particularly via the Treasury Department are doing:
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
--Albert Einstein
Check out the Obama Administration's last appointment to the Treasury Department. He's name is Jeffrey Goldstein. Mr. Goldstein has a HUGE potential conflict of interest:
The worst actors of the financial crisis, those who should have gone down in the flames they set themselves, who were rescued by our government, are now beyond belief mega financial oligarchs, limiting consumer choice and making a mockery of the phrase moral hazard:
Matt Taibbi has been wading through the objections to his Rolling Stone article a few weeks ago detailing how Goldman Sachs has profited obscenely by using its political influence to help create, then prick, a series of financial bubbles over the past century. Taibbi's reply is very much worth reading, to see the depths to which defenders of the financial status quo will stoop, such as hurling the "anti-semitic" charge. But, here is the conclusion, which I consider the best part:
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