5:56 PM, Jan 9, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
President Obama’s first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once sat on the board of troubled federal mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Bill Daley, the president’s chief of staff whose departure was announced today, was previously a top executive at financial firm J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. So of course there should be little surprise that Obama’s latest chief of staff, announced today by the president himself, also has deep ties to the financial industry himself.
From 2006-2008, Jack Lew was chief operating officer of Citibank’s alternative investments division. And it was his division that made billions of dollars betting “U.S. homeowners would not be able to make their mortgage payments,” as the Huffington Post reported.
The piece also reported: “Lew made millions at Citi, including a bonus of nearly $950,000 in 2009 just a few months after the bank received billions of dollars in a taxpayer rescue, according to disclosure forms filed with the federal government. The bank is still partly owned by taxpayers.”
Of course, one should not begrudge Lew his personal, professional, and financial successes. But one might wonder what kind of message the president is sending with this appointment.
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Getting those campaign dollah’s. Get money out of politics.
Intuitively, yes, take money out of politics. In reality, and speaking practically, how would that actually work?
Nothing could be simpler. Public funded elections. After all you fought for your right to vote, but won’t pay for it?
Plenty of countries have public funded elections already.
Just add a requirement that you need to gather “x” signatures before you become eligible for funding. Would also depolarize politics as independents would actually have a chance without being billionaires or famous.
The corruption is not in the financing the elections, its in what the elections buy. If you think about it, one billion to be able to direct $3 trillion in gummint cash is the leverage opportunity of a lifetime.
Make government smaller, less aggregated, and more local. That’s the only way to lower — if not rid (that’ll never happen)us — of the endemic corruption of bloated bureaucratic statist gov’t.
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woodshedder takes page from fox news with too balanced news