Desperado’s Outpost

March 2, 2010

Treasury Official Leaves to Begin Lobbying

Filed under: Obama, Politics, Wall Street, lobbyists, special interests — Craig @ 6:19 pm
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This is a recording. Some things never change:

“Barack Obama has made cracking down on K Street a signature cause of his presidency. But a year into his tenure, the executive branch’s revolving door has already started to turn with one senior official making the exodus from administration insider to hired gun.

Damon Munchus, the principal liaison between the Treasury Department and Congress regarding financial institutions and capital markets, signed on Monday as a managing director with financial services lobbying boutique the Cypress Group, whose clients include some of the nation’s biggest banks [Citigroup, Freddie Mac, and Bank of America to name three].

Munchus will be a test case for Obama’s tightened revolving-door policy, which prohibits former administration officials from lobbying the executive branch for the remainder of his administration.”

What happened to this:

“President Obama has consistently made clear that he will strive to lead the most open, transparent, and accountable government in history.  Whether it is reigning in the influence of lobbyists in Washington, bringing unprecedented accountability to federal spending, opening doors to engagement with the American public, or shutting down the “revolving door” that carries special interest influence in and out of the government, the highest standards will be sought in every thing the federal government does.”

And this portion of the “pledge” all incoming members of the administration, including Mr. Munchus, signed:

“5.Revolving Door Ban — Appointees Leaving Government to Lobby… I also agree, upon leaving Government service, not to lobby any covered executive branch official or non-career Senior Executive Service appointee for the remainder of the Administration.”

Did you catch the loophole? “I agree not to lobby any executive branch official.” No mention of lobbying Congress, which falls into Mr. Munchus’ area of expertise:

“Munchus worked in the Office of Legislative Affairs, which deals directly with the Hill. His position as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Banking and Finance gave him intimate knowledge not just of the process but of key lawmakers…That’s invaluable information to investors.”

But in the spirit of bi-partisanship:

“Munchus’ arrival at Cypress Group comes on the heels of another addition to the firm, Republican Jeb Mason. Mason, former deputy assistant secretary for business affairs under then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, was tasked with business outreach and coalition building in the Bush administration.”

In fact:

“With the acquisition of Munchus, Cypress can now boast to employ high-level officials from four straight Treasury Secretaries.”

And the band plays on….

February 9, 2010

The Rubin Influence Runs Deep in the Obama Administration

Filed under: Clinton, Financial Crisis, Obama, Politics, Wall Street, economy — Craig @ 8:11 am
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Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is one the lone voices in Washington D.C. calling for meaningful financial reform, and calling out the White House for its lack of leadership on that issue:

“To hear Sen. Maria Cantwell talk, another economic bubble is building as Wall Street banks — backed by taxpayer bailouts — continue to play the high-risk derivatives markets rather than extend credit to struggling businesses on Main Street.

Cantwell says that Congress and the Obama administration are just watching it happen. The Washington state Democrat is among the most outspoken members of the Senate when it comes to calling for tough new regulations to rein in Wall Street.”

Not just “watching it happen,” Sen. Cantwell. There are no innocent bystanders among the president and his team of economic advisers–enablers and co-conspirators are more accurate terms. More on that later. Back to Sen. Cantwell:

“She’s not looking to pick a fight with the White House, the Federal Reserve or powerful congressional committee chairmen. She was, however, one of 30 senators to vote against the confirmation of Ben Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman; she temporarily blocked the appointment of the White House nominee to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and she’s been highly critical of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, the top White House economic adviser.”

Geithner and Summers–see enablers and co-conspirators. But to see the whole picture in focus, it takes a few steps backwards get the proper perspective.

In 1985, following Ronald Reagan’s landslide defeat of Walter Mondale in ‘84, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)  was formed with the aim of moving the Democratic party away from its “liberal” leanings toward a more “centrist” (read corporate-friendly) position. Bill Clinton chaired the DLC from 1990-1991 before running for, and being elected, president in 1992 as a so-called “New Democrat.”

President Clinton’s director of the newly-created National Economic Council from 1993 to 1995, and his Treasury Secretary from 1995-1999, was Robert Rubin, who spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs prior to joining the Clinton administration.

Matt Taibbi in Obama’s Big Sellout:

“As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year’s financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.. and the deregulation of the derivatives market.”

Fast forward to April 2006 and the founding of a DLC offshoot, The Alexander Hamilton Project, whose first director was….Robert Rubin. Back to Taibbi:

“There are four main ways to be connected to Bob Rubin: through Goldman Sachs, the Clinton administration, Citigroup and, finally, the Hamilton Project, a think tank Rubin spearheaded under the auspices of the Brookings Institute to promote his philosophy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation.”

At the founding meeting of the Hamilton Project, one of the featured speakers, and the only United States senator in attendance, was the junior senator from the state of Illinois, Barack Obama.”

Now take a look at President Obama’s economic team:

“At Treasury, there is Geithner, who worked under Rubin in the Clinton years. Serving as Geithner’s “counselor” — a made-up post not subject to Senate confirmation — is Lewis Alexander, the former chief economist of Citigroup, who advised Citi back in 2007 that the upcoming housing crash was nothing to worry about. Two other top Geithner “counselors” — Gene Sperling and Lael Brainard — worked under Rubin at the National Economic Council, the key group that coordinates all economic policymaking for the White House.

As director of the NEC, meanwhile, Obama installed economic czar Larry Summers, who had served as Rubin’s protégé at Treasury. Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin’s Hamilton Project.

…to serve alongside Furman at the NEC [Obama hired] management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, Farrell was the author of an infamous paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be “as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so.”

…Over at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to regulate derivatives trading, Obama appointed Gary Gensler, a former Goldman banker who worked under Rubin in the Clinton White House. Gensler had been instrumental in helping to pass the infamous Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which prevented regulation of derivative instruments like CDOs and credit-default swaps that played such a big role in cratering the economy last year.

And as head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Obama named Peter Orszag, who served as the first director of Rubin’s Hamilton Project.”

Now, considering that tangled web, do you think we’re going to get lip service or meaningful, substantive reform of Wall Street? My money says lots of talk, very little, if any, action.

February 1, 2010

Continuing the Bush / Cheney "War on Terror" Policies

Filed under: Justice Department, Obama, terrorism, torture, war on terror — Craig @ 2:56 pm
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As someone who voted for Barack Obama in 2008,  I’ve been disappointed in many of the actions of the Obama administration. None more so than their continuation of the Bush/Cheney policies of dealing with those accused of terrorist activities. I expected much better from a president who professed to be something of a Constitutional scholar, and the administration bowing to pressure over the weekend from those who are against trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 4 others in New York City has only renewed that disappointment.

It also didn’t help that, in a Newsweek article on Friday, the Obama Justice Department has, what Newsweek called “downgraded” but a better term would be “whitewashed,” a Bush DOJ recommendation that Jay Bybee and John Yoo should be investigated for committing ethical violations in connection with authoring the 2002 torture memos. The Obama DOJ now calls their actions simply “poor judgment.”

In light of that, Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece in Salon which is a must-read for anyone who shares my concerns, and which compares the Bush/Cheney policies with those of the current administration. The sad fact being that there isn’t much difference. Greenwald writes:

“From indefinite detention and renditions to denial of habeas rights, from military commissions and secrecy obsessions to state secrets abuses, many of the defining Bush/Cheney policies continue unabated under its successor administration.

…there is clearly a bipartisan and institutional craving for a revival (more accurately:  ongoing preservation)  of the core premise of Bush/Cheney radicalism:  that because we’re “at war” with Terrorists, our standard precepts of justice and due process do not apply and, indeed, must be violated.

...it’s now crystal clear that the country, especially its ruling elite, is either too petrified of Terrorism and/or too enamored of the powers which that fear enables to accept any real changes from the policies that were supposedly such a profound violation “of our values.”  One can only marvel at the consensus outrage generated by the mere notion that we charge people with crimes and give them trials if we want to lock them in a cage for life. Indeed, what was once the most basic and defining American principle — the State must charge someone with a crime and give them a fair trial in order to imprison them — has been magically transformed into Leftist extremism.”

That “Leftist extremism” would by today’s standards include that noted leftist, Ronald Reagan, whose policy on dealing with terrorists, as stated by L. Paul Bremer, the top Reagan State Department official in charge of  Terrorism policies, was this:

“Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.”

Greenwald also has the just-released policy of another country in dealing with al-Qaeda, along with some quotes from that country’s leader. See who this sounds like:

“_____ will hold up to 300 al Qaeda members in jail indefinitely after they have completed their prison terms to stop them staging fresh attacks.

“These people are heretics. They are followers of (Osama) Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. They killed a number of civilians and police…It is a necessity to keep them in prison. They are very dangerous as they are ready to resume killing people in our streets here or travel…elsewhere to stage attacks…These people constitute a danger even when the court had pronounced its verdict. Security authorities are the ones who are responsible for this matter to say whether they are dangerous or not. The court verdict is void of reason in such cases.”

The country is Libya. The speaker is Muammar Gaddafi.

June 27, 2009

Limbaugh: “Obama is More African Than He is American”

Filed under: Obama, Politics, Uncategorized — Craig @ 9:28 pm
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The hatred and racism from the far-right continues bubbling over the top. Listen to the leader of the Grand Old Bigots, Rush Limbaugh, from his June 26 program. “Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African colonial” who “wants to turn this into a third world country,” spews Limbaugh. He is “more African in his roots than he is American” and is “behaving like an African colonial despot.” Pathetic, but predictable. Thanks to Media Matters.

November 14, 2008

How Will President Obama Govern?

Filed under: Election 2008, McCain, Obama, Politics, Uncategorized — Craig @ 7:25 pm
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There was much written and said during the recent presidential campaign about the supposed “mystery” surrounding now President-elect Barack Obama. Senator McCain and Governor Palin, along with the Republican Party spokespersons and their allies on talk-radio, often raised the question, “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

Their contention was that his thin record as a United States Senator gave us no clue as to what kind of president he might be or how he might govern if elected. The right threw around buzz words like “the most liberal member of the Senate” and pointed to Obama’s “radical associations” in an attempt to portray him as a far-left ideologue who would carry that ideology into the Oval Office.

As is brought out in a post on today’s Moderate Voice, there is a much better guidepost to how President-elect Obama will govern than his time in the Senate, and that is his tenure as president/editor of the Harvard Law Review.

According to the post:
“The environment at Harvard during Obama’s matriculation was rife of protests and peaceful sit-ins of the Dean’s Office and other faculty. Divergent activist groups of blacks, Hispanics and others demanded more diversity among the composition of law professors.

In this divisive setting, Obama was selected to join The Harvard Review, the most prestigious publication of any law school in America. His peers elected him president/editor of the group his third and final year at Harvard.

Juan Zuniga (a law student one year behind Obama) said Obama’s emergence in the selection process was “a neutral, middle-ground, non-threatening, non-ideological candidate.”

His (Zuniga’s) impressions of Obama from friends on the Harvard Law Review and faculty were “that he was not perceived as an ideologue by those who knew him. Rather, he has an incredible facility to listen to other people, consider their positions, respect their positions when making a decision and then use his own intellect to reach his own conclusion. He draws talented and respectful people to himself. He makes responsible decisions based on merit and not ideological principles. It is very much worth noting that in many ways he keeps himself above the fray.

“While a bunch of us were out there trying to take over the Dean’s office, Barack was never a meaningful presence at any rallies. I have no doubt he believed we needed a more diverse faculty, but he also knew that the role he had as Editor in Chief of the Law Review meant he could accomplish so much by approaching his task with professionalism without raising an ideological torch and being a rabble rouser.”

I had my own skepticism about then Senator Obama at first. That was due mostly to listening to the characterizations of him in some of the media. But as I listened to him, I didn’t hear a strident, far-left ideologue, I saw what his fellow students at Harvard saw, a pragmatist, with reasonable solutions to the problems facing our country. And that is how I expect President Obama to govern beginning on January 20, 2009.

October 28, 2008

Barack Obama: Right Man, Right Place, Right Time

Filed under: Election 2008, Obama, Politics, Uncategorized — Craig @ 8:27 am
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As this long and grueling presidential campaign nears it’s final week, it is time to reflect back on where we have come, what we have seen happen, and why. How did Barack Obama, a first term Senator from Illinois, a virtual unknown when this process began nearly 2 years ago, manage to defeat the powerful Clinton machine and now stand on the brink of being elected President of the United States.

To put it in a few words, he is the right man, with the right message, in the right place, at the right time in our country’s history.

While I agree with Obama’s economic policy of lessening the income disparity and putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle-class, and I agree with his stance on getting our troops out of Iraq and drawing that war to a close, neither of those are the transcendent issues that are facing our country, in my opinion.

The most important problem we face is spanning this chasm of partisan political division and public discourse that is eating away at our society like an aggressive form of cancer. In this election, our only hope of building a bridge across this divide and restoring some sense of common purpose among all our people is to elect Barack Obama.

I believe Colin Powell had it exactly right, Obama is a “transformational figure” at a time when our political system is in need of transformation perhaps like no other time in our nation’s history.

And in this election our choice is crystal clear. Do we allow the politics of division and personal destruction to win and in so doing insure another 4 years of partisanship and bickering while the problems facing us go from bad to worse? Or do we at least start down the road of putting this country back together with the only candidate capable of doing that.

Here are the closing paragraphs from an article Andrew Sullivan wrote in December of last year that sums it all up for me:

“If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one … if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We cannot let this moment pass.”

 

 

October 20, 2008

Powell Endorsement Unleashes Republican Racism

Filed under: Election 2008, McCain, Obama, Politics, Uncategorized — Craig @ 11:33 pm
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I am so angry this morning I can barely steady my finger long enough to write this post. The blatant racism that has been unleashed by the Republican Party in the closing weeks of this presidential campaign, and particularly since Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama yesterday on Meet The Press, makes me sick to my stomach.

First of all, it is as if the usual Republican suspects–Buchanan, Will, Limbaugh, Gingrich, et al, had their statements ready before Powell made his announcement. Powell endorsed Obama simply because he is black, they all spewed. Obviously these GOP mouthpieces didn’t listen to a word Gen. Powell had to say.

He gave a well-reasoned, well-thought out, detailed argument for his decision. Powell did much more than endorse Obama for president, he issued a scathing indictment of the Republican Party as a whole. See for yourself:

 

 

 

Then the tirades from the Republican Bigotry Brigade began.

Pat Buchanan: “Alright, we gotta ask a question, look would Colin Powell be endorsing Obama if he were a white liberal democrat.”

George Will attributes support for Obama to white guilt: “Barack Obama gets two votes because he’s black for every one he loses because he’s black because so much of this country is so eager, a, to feel good about itself by doing this, but more than that to put paid to the whole Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson game of political rhetoric.”

 

What Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have to do with anything is anybody’s guess. Oh I forgot, they’re both scary black men, just like Obama. What’s the matter George, you couldn’t work Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X in there somewhere?

 

Rush Limbaugh went even further: “Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race, OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I’ll let you know what I come up with.”

Not to be left out of the ‘scare white Americans with references to angry black men’ chorus, Newt Gingrich said on This Week that Obama would govern the country “like Reverend Wright.”

Now keep in mind these are some of the same neo-con chicken hawks who were singing the praises of Gen. Powell when he was useful to them in helping make the case for George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

But now that he dares to stray off the Republican plantation and speak his mind rather than blindly support the Party nominee, he is branded as having based his decision solely on Obama’s skin color. I guess in the eyes of the GOP bigots Powell is not ‘one of the good ones’ anymore.

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