Wednesday, December 28, 2011

REAL Buying Power: The Whole Executive Branch!!

Kevin Williamson flat-out NUKES Obozo's Gummint.

...For a few measly millions, Wall Street not only bought itself a president, but got the start-up firm of B. H. Obama & Co. LLC to throw a cabinet into the deal, too — on remarkably generous terms. President Obama, for a guy prone to delivering prim and smug little homilies denouncing greed, greed, greed — the only of the seven deadly sins that truly offends Democrats (though Mrs. Obama has done some desultory work on gluttony) — is strangely comfortable among the Gordon Gekkos of this world. Shall we have a partial roll call?...

You'll get three or four without any trouble.  But Williams names a lot more, in all sorts of interesting positions.

Then he gets to TurboTaxTimmy!

...the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.

He's right.  I don't get it, either.  So yeah, I don't have an Ivy League MBA.

Then the bad news:

...When President Obama opined during his 2011 State of the Union speech that a corporate tax-rate cut might be just the thing for America after a year of record corporate profits, his left-wing base was shocked and dismayed. Heck, some conservatives were caught offguard, too. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed who was running the Obama administration: In large part, the same guys who plan to be running the next Republican administration.

Not-very-thinly-veiled slap at Romney, the Utterly Electable Squish. 

For that matter, he's not very nice to the "conservative/Free-markets" radiomouth-gang, which obediently reads press releases:

...Congress has effectively exempted itself from insider-trading rules, not that the SEC would have the guts to go after a Senator Schumer or a Speaker Pelosi for these exploits. And that — not campaign contributions, not lobbying — is the really stinky petri dish of festering corruption at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street. You want a case for limited government? That’s it. And Wall Street is on the wrong side of the argument, which is one reason free-market conservatives should not romanticize the lords of finance.

...Wall Street can do math, and the math looks like this: Wall Street + Washington = Wild Profitability. Free enterprise? Entrepreneurship? Starting a business making and selling stuff behind some grimy little storefront? You’d have to be a fool. Better to invest in political favors.

All that from just one reading of Prof. Schweizer's "Throw Them ALL Out..."

(One ponders the possibility that merely 'throwing them out' is far, far, far too kind...)

Back to Romney, the Utterly Electable:

Romney’s ten biggest donor blocs include Goldman Sachs (his biggest — No. 1, as always), Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase.

Wonder why?

You'll have to read PP 5 and 6 of the essay.  Then you'll do a forehead-slap:  of COURSE that's why!!

HT:  AOSHQ

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Dad, Have you seen this one?

You Won't Believe How Corrupt, Lazy And Stinking Rich Our Congress Critters Have Become

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/you-wont-believe-these-statistics-which-show-how-corrupt-lazy-and-stinking-rich-our-congress-critters-have-become