The Geithner mystery solved

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com Monday, Sep 19, 2011 06:20 ET

Reviewing "Confidence Men" -- Ron Suskind's new book critically examining President Obama's management of the financial crisis -- The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani ponders this mystery raised by Suskind:

Mr. Suskind suggests that the administration's problems in dealing with the fiscal crisis began with the president's choice of his economic team. He wonders why Mr. Obama turned away from the advisers who had seen him through the campaign (including more progressive thinkers like Mr. Stiglitz, Robert Reich and Austan Goolsbee), and relied instead on two men associated with the deregulatory policies of the past, Mr. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Mr. Summers, the chief economic adviser. Both men had served in the Clinton administration (with Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who would later join Citigroup as a senior adviser and board member); their actions, Mr. Suskind contends, "had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve."

Of course, one might ask the same of Obama's penchant for filling the most important positions in his administration -- including his Vice President, Secretary of State, and Defense Secretary -- with supporters of the Iraq War. But about Geithner, Suskind unwittingly solved the mystery he raised: Kakutani notes that "one top banker quoted in these pages refers to as 'our man in Washington' for helping avert more systemic changes affecting Wall Street."

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http://www.salon.com/news/timothy_geithner/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2011/09/19/geithner

The Real McCloy

THE CHAIRMAN: JOHN J. McCLOY; The Making of the American Establishment, By Kai Bird (Simon & Schuster: $30; 800 pp.)

April 19, 1992|Robert Sherrill | Sherrill is corporations correspondent for The Nation magazine

EXCERPT...

First let's trace his muddy footprints through the business world. McCloy was a key member of various Wall Street firms dedicated to greed; for a while he was chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and also for a while boss of the Ford Foundation. In those roles he assisted railroad management in swindling thousands of small shareholders, helped Chase achieve a merger that launched a flood of other mergers and damaged many smaller banks and made the nation's wealthiest foundation virtually a piggy bank for the CIA.

SNIP...

McCloy became, Bird says, "the country's first national-security manager," someone who believed that when the choice was between national security and constitutional civil liberties, "why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me." Those are McCloy's words. No wonder Interior Secretary Harold Ickes wrote in his diary: "I have been told that he is more or less inclined to be a Fascist."

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He commuted two-thirds of the death sentences of mass murderers (such as the SS officer who personally executed 1,500 Jews) and radically reduced the prison sentences of doctors who had conducted experiments on death-camp inmates, of high-ranking Nazi Judges who had administered Gestapo justice, and of industrialists who had built the Nazi war machine.

McCloy freed some immediately, including Alfred Krupp, whose munitions factories had worked thousands of slave laborers to death. Krupp's original sentence had included loss of all property; McCloy canceled that punishment and within a few years Krupp was again one of the richest industrialists in the world. Obviously McCloy's obsequiousness toward money and power made him the wrong man to reform Nazi Germany. "Though he could understand the special culpability of the 'big Nazis,' " Bird writes, "when it came to a wealthy and politically well-connected man like Krupp, he suspended his good judgment."

As high commissioner, McCloy dabbled disastrously in the intelligence business, setting up a network of agents in Germany that included the likes of Klaus Barbie, who had shipped 78,000 French Jews to the gas chambers, and Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who had been responsible for some of the "grisliest mass killings on the Eastern Front." Not surprisingly, many of the intelligence operations carried out under McCloy were, says Bird, "fiascos."

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http://articles.latimes.com/1992-04-19/books/bk-588_1_kai-bird

A Free Pass for Financial Predators

Coup of the Elites

by ROBERT HUNZIKER
CounterPunch
June 26, 2012

The American plutocratic revolution is now complete. The proof is: There are no criminal charges for the housing bust and financial meltdown of 2008. Starting with Reagan in the 1980s, as of today the Right has won their decades-long overthrow for complete control of America. An elite corps of wealthy now runs the country. Their bloodless rebellion, a coup d’etat whereby the Left was nullified by a tripartite (bankers, academia, and politicians) cabal’s tour de force, is a sharp contrast to the old-fashioned traditional bloody coup d’etats were accustomed to in South America, e.g., the Chilean September 1973 military coup against President Allende conducted by ultra right wing General Pinochet, who, after bombing the presidential palace, massacred the Left (See: the film Missing, by Costa-Gavras, Universal Pictures, 1982.). Of course, Pinochet’s old-fashioned coup had the advantage of speed and efficiency, completed within hours, whereas America’s bloodless coup took decades to accomplish, but on the other hand, America has not yet condoned military occupation on domestic soil.

SNIP...

As Charles H. Ferguson, winner of the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Inside Job, says, “There is overwhelming evidence of massive criminal behavior” in the 2007-08 real estate bust and financial meltdown, but nobody has been charged with a crime. This, in part, is why he recently published Predator Nation, Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America, Random House, 2012, which book footnotes/documents the virulent combination of unchecked greed and criminal behavior behind the financial collapse of 2008. Ferguson identifies leading bankers, academics, and politicians who collaborated to pillage the American public. The book has been called a “roadmap for prosecution,” naming the culpable, stating the crimes, referencing laws that were broken.

SNIP...

The real mystery is how and why they get away with it when their crimes and/or despicable ethical behavior prove so hideous… and so obvious, and thus, many astute progressive mouths dropped wide open with dismay when President Obama insanely appointed Summers as the Director of the National Economic Council, which only goes to prove what a tight clique exist amongst academia, politicians, and Wall Street whereby bad judgment and/or unethical practices are overlooked in favor of companionship-to-profits.

Nobody has gone to jail and as Ferguson explained in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, “There is overwhelming evidence of massive criminal behavior.” Ferguson says: “the American people need to take their country back.” He suggests some kind of nationwide movement but without stating specifics. Indeed, the stench of the entire cabal, including academia, politicians, Wall Street, and rating agencies is so loathsomely squalid, and rotten to the core, it would not surprise if perpetrators are dragged into the streets in the middle of the night, stripped naked, tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail, assuming some daring citizens become so fed up with the ‘system’ they take matters into their own hands.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/26/coup-of-the-elites/