RED
 

 
In American capitalism, money is more important than people.  Our mass media do
not say it as succinctly as that, but in their own sneaky way they do allow it
is true.
 
All that one must do to see this is shake off the lifetime of propaganda to
which we are exposed and open the eyes.  Robert Scheer reports this morning on
two New York newspapers contrasting what is happening in the economy, excerpted
following:
 
New York Times: "The American economy shed 467,000 jobs last month, and the
unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent from 9.4 percent [a 26 year high], the
Labor Department reported on Thursday."
 
Wall Street Journal: "Business is back on Wall Street. If the good times
continue to roll, lofty pay packages may be set for a comeback as well.  Based
on analysts’ earnings forecasts for 2009, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is on track
to pay out as much as $20 billion this year, or about $700,000 per employee.
That would be nearly double the firm’s $363,000 average last year, and
slightly higher than the $661,000 for the average Goldman employee in fiscal
2007, according to analyst estimates reviewed by The Wall Street Journal."
 
Note that, although unemployment is much greater this year than last year and
suffering is increasing, Wall Street sees this as a time to rejoice with "good
times rolling," because profits, the only thing they care about, are up owing
to government intervention at taxpayer expense on behalf of the wealthy
investors who finance our elections.
 



 
OUTRAGE IN ISRAEL
 

 
Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney is being held in a
detention center in Ramle, Israel, after venturing out to sea with about 20
other activists to provide aid to Gazans as part of the “Free Gaza
Movement.” The ship Spirit of Humanity was intercepted by the Israeli navy in
international waters before the group could reach its destination, and the
humanitarian activists were taken prisoner.
 
The US government is, of course, not objecting to Israel's clear act of piracy
any more than objecting to Israel's large illegal arsenal of nuclear weapons or
recent massive human rights violations documented by international human rights
groups.
 
While in detention McKinney has met women from many countries who entered Israel
via the United Nations, but who have been locked up because they have been told
"There is no U.N. in Israel."
 

McKinney was given the opportunity to leave imprisonment if she signed a
statement admitting guilt, but refused because the statement would require her
to lie that she had entered Israeli waters.
 




 
WASHINGTON POST SINKS TO NEW LOW
 

 
The Washington Post got caught by Politico, trying to sell to lobbyists for as
much as $250,000 a pop, access to its reporters, Members of Congress and Obama
officials.
 
Years ago, when a writer gave LUV News a report with an incorrect time of day,
we asked the writer for his source, and he told us it was the front page of the
Washington Post, which we checked and found, sure enough, the incorrect
time.  The time of day was essential to that story, about a visit by President
Bush to Iraq.  We advised the writer that we do not consider the Washington
Post or other corporate media up to our standards, and have not used the writer
since.
 




 
When Senator Barack Obama was running for president, we pointed out that he
received more in campaign financing from Wall Street than any other candidate in
history.  He then allowed for hundreds of billions of tax dollars to go to
Wall Street firms as one of his first acts as president.
 
But that's not the end of the story.  Wall Street firms now run the White
House, says Andrew Cockburn  --Jack
 
 

How Goldman Sachs and Citi Run the Show
The Wall Street White House
 

 
By ANDREW COCKBURN
Robert Hormats, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs, is to be installed as Under
Secretary of Economics, Business, and  Agricultural Affairs. This  comes as
one more, probably unnecessary reminder of the total control exercised by Wall
Street  over the Obama administration’s economic and financial policy. 
True, Hormats is “a talker rather than a decider” according to one former
White House official, but he will find plenty of old friends used to making
decisions, almost all of  them uniformly disastrous for the U.S. and global
economy.
Among the familiar Wall Street faces that Hormats will encounter in his new post
will that of Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew, lately Chief Financial Officer
of Citigroup Alternative Investments Group which lost $509 million in the first
quarter of 2008 alone.  On visits to the White House he is sure to bump into
Michael Froman, who also tore a swath through the Citi balance sheet at the
alternative investments shop (they specialized in “esoteric” investments
such as private highways) but is now Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser
for International Economic Affairs.  If Froman is otherwise engaged, Hormats
can interface with Froman’s deputy, David Lipton, who was until recently
running Citi’s global country risk management effort. 
Citigroup is also well represented at Treasury, in the form of Lewis Alexander,
formerly the bank’s chief economist and now Counselor to Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner.  Given the role played by all of the above in bankrupting us
all, Alexander’s 2007 verdict on the onset of the mortgage crash, “I think
that’s not going to spill more broadly into the economy and so I think we’re
going to have a normal kind of housing cycle though the middle of this year,”
can only have been a recommendation in the eyes of his current employer. 
Alexander’s function at Citi may have been merely to endorse the financial
depredations of colleagues with economic blather, rather than exercise
loss-making functions personally.  Not so Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin,
who has moved over to the number two job at the department from the Hartford
Insurance Company, where he served as president and chief operating officer of
the Property and Casualty Group.  Hartford was one of the insurance companies
that got suckered by the banks into backing their ruinous investments in real
estate and other esoterica, but Wolin’s Treasury has just handed Hartford $3.4
billion of our money in the form of TARP funds.
Hormats’ agricultural responsibilities will of necessity bring him into
frequent contact with the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,
Gary Gensler –  a former Goldman partner.   As Assistant Secretary of
Treasury in the Clinton Adminsitration Gensler played a key role in greasing the
skids for the notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act of  2000, which set
the stage for the great credit default swaps scam that underpinned the recent
bubble and subsequent collapse.  News of the appointment did generate threats
of obstruction in the Senate – any one of  the senators could have blocked
the appointment had they really wished to do so – but such threats proved
predictably hollow.  Had they been otherwise, Treasury Chief of Staff Mark
Patterson could of course have lent the expertise he gained as Goldman’s
lobbyist to overcome the obstacle.
For sheer gall it would be hard to equal the appointment of  Gensler, one of
the engineers of this catastrophe, but the administration has managed it with
the selection of Linda Robertson, formerly a key Enron lobbyist and intimately
involved in pushing through the commodity futures act as chief flack  for the
Federal Reserve.  Prior to joining the crooked energy-trading firm, Robertson
was an important figure in the Clinton Treasury Department, latterly serving her
friend Larry Summers and before him Robert Rubin during their terms as Treasury
Secretaries. 
Such connection to the key enablers of our bankrupt casino helps explain many of
the other hires listed above.  Michael Froman was Chief of Staff to Robert
Rubin at Treasury before following Rubin to his reward at Citigroup.  Most
significantly, it was Froman who first introduced Rubin to his Harvard classmate
Barack Obama.  David Lipton also served in the Rubin Treasury, as deputy under
secretary for international affairs.  Neal Wolin, on the other hand, appears to
have more an acolyte of Summers, who cherished him as Treasury General Counsel
from ’99 to ’01.  Summers and Robertson were similarly close, and certainly
he raised no objection to her fatal submissions on behalf of her paymasters at
Enron. 
Recent reports suggest that financial industry lobbying in Washington, at $104.7
million for the first three months of 2009, is 8% down on last year.  But that
is to be expected – why should Wall Street continue paying  top dollar for a
wholly owned subsidiary?
Andrew Cockburn writes about national security and related matters. His most
recent book is  Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy. He is the
co-producer of American Casino, the feature documentary on the ongoing financial
collapse. He can be reached at amcockburn@....
 





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