Citi Offered Jack Lew A Big Bonus To Secure A 'High-Level' Government Position

[xchrom]

http://www.businessinsider.com/citis-government-job-bonus-for-jack-lew-2013-2

It's not uncommon for a U.S. Treasury Secretary to have served on Wall Street, but what's interesting about this next one is that his bank gave him a pretty significant financial incentive to do so.

The Senate Finance Committee will vote Tuesday on President Obama's nomination of White House Chief of Staff and former Citi executive Jack Lew for the top job at the U.S. Treasury.

Lew left Citi in 2009 to become the Deputy Secretary of State.

At Lew's recent confirmation hearing for Treasury Secretary, an interesting detail about his employment contract with Citi emerged: a bonus meant to keep him at Citi – meaning he wouldn't get it if he quit – would still be granted on the condition that he left the bank for a "high level" position in the federal government.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/citis-government-job-bonus-for-jack-lew-2013-2#ixzz2LvKLkFkb

[OKNancy]

1. Hey, liberals: Lay off Jack Lew! - salon

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/hey_liberals_lay_off_jack_lew/


---snip---

So just to restate the points, Jack Lew has spent essentially his entire career in public life — on the Hill, in the executive branch, and with universities — though he did spend about 18 months with Citigroup, which I suspect he’ll never live down. He has succeeded in every role he has taken on. He is not spectacular — from my fairly close observations, as they used to say in my high school, he brings his lunch and does an all-day job. He believes deeply in the value of the public sector, and as deeply in the importance of a high-quality public sector, in the importance of getting it right.

He hasn’t spent a lifetime in the financial private sector — I’m personally delighted President Obama did not go that way — but there is no one who knows and understands the complexities of our public finance better than Jack Lew. People always dismiss that as a green eye shade, low order kind of quality. Understanding budgets and public finance is for people who wear breast pocket pen protectors, not for the higher order idea men and women.

But this is a very good nomination, and the odds are high that Jack Lew will be a very good Treasury Secretary. Much more importantly, Jack Lew is the kind of person we all would like to see in public life.

[Fire Walk With Me]

4. The leaked 2006 Citigroup memo, "The Plutonomy Symposium: Rising Tides Lifting Yachts"

https://www.box.com/shared/9if6v2hr9h

Page 8 of the memo:
“Figure 1 shows...the top 1% of the population of income has grown substantially in countries such as the US, UK, and Canada. The countries, which apparently tolerate income inequality, are what we call Plutonomy countries: economies powered by a relatively small number of rich people.”


Some analysis:

http://occupyobservations.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-leaked-2006-citigroup-plutonomy-memo.html



Plutonomy's plan for America resembles Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal...
Goldman Sachs timeline, conquests:

2010:

Voila! Greek Gov't Appoints Ex-Goldman Exec As New Debt Chief

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/02/19/838682/-Voila-Greek-Gov-t-Appoints-Ex-Goldman-Exec-As-New-Debt-Chief#


2011:

Arrest the Criminals at Goldman Sachs and in the Greek Government (video: Greg Palast)

http://www.v2load.com/videos/aQp22WN0cpg/


Also Italy's Prime Minister; the former attorney general of Ireland during the bailout; the head of the European Central Bank; and more:

http://acampadabcninternacional.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/what-price-the-new-democracy-goldman-sachs-conquers-europe-acampadabcn-takethesquare-acampadasol-15m-occupy/

[Octafish]

2. Revolving Door for the Cronies...

...and the People serve as Revolving Doormats.

Neil Barofsky Gave Us The Best Explanation For Washington's Dysfunction We've Ever Heard

Linette Lopez
Business Insider, Aug. 1, 2012, 2:57 PM

Neil Barofsky was the Inspector General for TARP, and just wrote a book about his time in D.C. called Bailout: An Insider Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.

SNIP...

Bottom line: Barofsky said the incentive structure in our nation's capitol is all wrong. There's a revolving door between bureaucrats in Washington and Wall Street banks, and politicians just want to keep their jobs.

For regulators it's something like this:

"You can play ball and good things can happen to you get a big pot of gold at the end of the Wall Street rainbow or you can do your job be aggressive and face personal ruin...We really need to rethink how we govern and how regulate," Barofsky said.

CONTINUED... http://www.businessinsider.com/neil-barofsky-2012-8

This is the kind of story that should be everywhere in a democracy.

Ex-TARP overseer denounces US government cover-up of Wall Street crimes

Andre Damon and Barry Grey
wsws.org 31 July 2012

In interviews prompted by the publication of his new book (Bailout) on the $700 billion US bank bailout scheme—the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the former special inspector general for the program, Neil Barofsky, has denounced bank regulators and top officials in the Bush and Obama administrations for covering up Wall Street criminality both before and after the financial crash of September 2008.

In an interview last Thursday with the Daily Ticker blog, Barofsky accused Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner of facilitating the banks’ manipulation of Libor, the global benchmark interest rate, when he was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2007-2008, prior to his joining the Obama administration. Recently published documents show that as early as 2007, Geithner knew that London-based Barclays Bank was submitting false information to the Libor board to conceal its financial weakness.

SNIP...

Deprived of any enforcement powers under the TARP law drafted by Wall Street lawyers and ratified by Congress, Barofsky was simply ignored by Geithner and the Obama administration and his reports were largely buried by the media.

Barofsky’s book has received a similar response from the media, as did reports issued last year by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations documenting in detail fraudulent and illegal activities by the banks in the lead-up to the financial crash of 2008.

Four years after the crisis precipitated by the banks, not a single top banker has been prosecuted, let alone convicted. Meanwhile, the same bankers, and the government officials who shielded them and ensured that they grew even richer, are demanding that American workers accept the “new normal” of wages at $13 or less, along with the destruction of pensions, health care and working conditions.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jul2012/pers-j31.shtml

But, for some reason or another, it's not.

[OKNancy]

3. New Republic

In fact, Lew has a well-deserved reputation for homing in on the values that lurk behind the numbers. Progressives in and out of government in the late 1990s recall him as one of the key defenders of Medicare and Medicaid from the designs of axe-wielding Republicans. “There was no bigger supporter,” one liberal policy maven told me. “He saved Medicaid.” More recently, as a top Obama emissary to the deficit negotiations of the last few years, he’s been dogged in his insistence that Democrats won’t entertain the tiniest pinprick to these programs unless Republicans put revenue on the table.

That, I’d guess, is half the reason Republicans have reservations about him (at least to the extent their reservations are sincere rather than a crass play for leverage). The other half is that Lew is just plain effective. During Obama’s first confrontation with the House GOP in early 2011, John Boehner’s troops were bent on lopping $100 billion off Obama’s budget request for that year, an eye-popping sum to squeeze out of a weak economy. Obama, with Lew as his chief negotiator, eventually compromised at $78 billion, which looked at first like a massive concession, but was a pretty favorable outcome once you read the fine print. As it happened, Lew was able to produce a “headline” number that was large and pleasing to the GOP but ultimately rather meaningless: He’d conjured up cuts to piles of money that weren’t going to be spent anyway, and handed them over to Republicans wrapped in pretty little bows. “Boehner and his guys got snookered by [Obama congressional affairs liaison] Rob Nabors and Jack Lew,” a senior White House official told me while I was writing a book on the subject. “We protected what we wanted to protect.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, GOP leaders have repeatedly petitioned the White House to send someone other than Lew to join them at the bargaining table. Which points to at least one reason to love his nomination: It’s an instance of Obama emphatically not allowing Republicans to choose their negotiating partner, a rule he hasn’t always observed.

http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/111780/when-it-comes-worldview-jack-lew-obama-in-coke-bottle-glasses