Choice is like a fox watching a henhouse

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Thursday, January 17, 2013

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Choice is like a fox watching a henhouse



Currently President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Jacob Lew was an executive at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008 at the time of the financial crisis. He backed financial deregulation efforts while he headed the Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton. During that time, Clinton enacted two key laws to deregulate Wall Street: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.



Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont criticized Lew’s nomination for treasury secretary, saying, quote, “We don’t need a treasury secretary who thinks that Wall Street deregulation was not responsible for the financial crisis.”



The most destructive deregulation came under Clinton, and Lew was there for much of the deregulation by rule. The unit that he was heading would have not been permissible but for the deregulation of getting rid of Glass-Steagall under Clinton.



We haven’t talked about the fact that he got a huge bonus for helping to destroy the world at Citicorp. And he got it through the bailout of Citicorp by the U.S. government. So he produces disaster, profits from the disaster, we pay him bonuses for causing the disaster, and then we have the absurdity of the president saying that this is a man with a track record of unmitigated success.



Ted Rudow III

Palo Alto