Treasury Sec. Lew describes successful Warren opposition to Obama nominee Antonio Weiss as 'unfair'
Last edited Fri Jan 23, 2015, 04:40 PM - Edit history (1)
'UNFAIR,' is how former Obama chief of staff and current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew described the opposition led by Elizabeth Warren to the nomination of Antonio Weiss to the position of under secretary for domestic finance last year. Lew heralded Weiss's first day Monday to the position Lew defiantly hired him to assume in the Treasury Dept. as 'counselor' (bypassing the Senate confirmation process) and rejected the notion that his Wall Street ties should be disqualifying.
During the nomination hearing of Lew in 2013, it was revealed that he had received a $940,000 bonus from his former employer, Citigroup upon his acceptance of his government position. Likewise, investment banker Antonio Weiss revealed that he would receive a bonus of $20 million dollars from Lazard if he were successfully nominated as Under Secretary of the Treasury.
from Occupy the SEC:
Mr. Lew’s employment contract with Citigroup guaranteed him a bonus of $940,000, provided that he did not quit the firm. An important exception allowed him to keep the bonus if he took on a “high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.” During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Lew defended this bonus by stating that he was only “compensated in a manner consistent with other people.
To put this figure into perspective, consider that, by becoming Treasury Secretary, Jacob Lew became entitled to a lump sump bonus that exceeds the amount that a Senator earns in a four-year term or an average American earns over twenty years.
It's little wonder that he's defending and enabling his fellow corporatist, Weiss, into government. “The revolving door rips the heart out of independent government service,” Sen. Warren said in her speech opposing his nomination.
from the Hill:
(Warren) argued Weiss, the top investment banker at the Lazard financial firm, lacks appropriate experience, and she criticized his role in his current job helping companies shrink their tax bill through corporate maneuverings known as inversions.
“Why does the revolving door matter? Because it means that too much of the time, the wind blows from the same direction,” she said. “Time after time in government, the Wall Street view prevails.
She also ran down the “enormous” number of top administration officials under Obama and past presidents who spent time making money from the financial sector. She noted that three of the past four Treasury secretaries have spent time working for Citigroup, and the fourth turned down a job leading the bank. And other top spots in current and past administration were filled by officials who previously worked on behalf of names like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.
“That’s the context for thinking about the nomination of Antonio Weiss,” she said.
Indeed, that has been the criticism of the Obama Wall Street appointees from the very beginning of his administration. Wall Street litters the political process with campaign cash, and in turn, are gifted with key positions in the financial sectors of our government, then are welcomed back into the industries and corporations they benefit with the decisions they encourage into action or law in office.
from the article:
...in the interview, Lew also called the provision repealing swaps push-outs that Republicans slipped into the comprehensive spending package in December a “mistake” but suggested it’s not the end of the world.
“It did not repeal the core provisions of Dodd-Frank that give us the ability to see what's happening in the derivatives market and to make the system safe. It took away something that was of value, but it didn't take away everything we have by a long shot,” he said.
The provision allows banks to directly engage in derivatives trading.
It's not surprising to see the administration treat the new republican Congress with indifference and barely a ripple of objection to their attempt to advantage their banker benefactors in dumping their debt with the benefit of taxpayer-sponsored guarantees against risk, providing lower interest rates on their heady investments. In his new job at the Treasury, Weiss will be comfortably positioned in our government to make good on his Wall Street allies' investment in him.
“This is somebody who has very good knowledge of the way that the financial markets work, and that is critically important when you’re asking somebody to take on a position in the federal government that has such a significant bearing on those markets,” WH spokesman Josh Earnest had said in defense of the nomination.
That's exactly what the opposition to Lew as Treasury Secretary warned about; foxes and their cohorts guarding the chicken coop. The end-around Congress' confirmation process (assuredly with the support of President Obama) makes clear this WH's determination to allow Wall Street to dictate U.S. financial policy; ensuring that corporations will always win out over the needs and concerns of the majority of working-class Americans.
In the U.S., the top 1 percent earns a mean household annual income of $1,318,200. This is approximately 70 times the annual income of the average American worker. The 1% now own approximately 36 percent of America’s wealth, and over the last decade, the wealth of the top 1% has grown, while the bottom 80%'s wealth fell from approximately 20% of the U.S. economy to around 10%...
Is it any wonder why?
= new reply since forum marked as read
William K. Black
Assoc. Professor, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City; Sr. regulator during S&L debacle
EXCERPT...
The unobvious aspects of the pattern compound these problems. First, Obama likes to surround himself with failures. Geithner set the pattern. He was supposed to be the principal regulator of most of the largest U.S. bank holding companies. He was an abject failure. His speeches and his statements at the Federal Reserve System's FOMC meetings during the crisis demonstrate that he remained clueless to the end. For reasons of brevity, I discuss only three of his failures as Treasury Secretary below.
Lew has gone from failure to failure. He was one of the architects of both of the Clinton administration's disastrous statutory deregulatory actions that helped produce the epidemic of accounting control fraud that drove the Great Recession.
Emanuel and Daley were failures as directors of Fannie and Freddie. Lew was a failure at Citicorp's proprietary derivatives trading arm. That failure is particularly dangerous because the purpose of the Volcker rule was to ensure that federally insured banks did not take proprietary positions in derivatives. Obama has put failed anti-regulators in positions where they can best undermine the reregulatory effort that is essential to reduce the risk and harm of future crises.
Obama's senior financial advisors have also failed ethically. Lew's great moral challenge was whether he would be honest about his errors. Honesty is essential to preventing future harm. Lew failed this second, less obvious, test as well. The CBS special notes:
During a 2010 Senate hearing to confirm him as White House budget chief, Lew seemed to soft-pedal the role of financial deregulation in the housing crash, saying, "I don't) personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don't believe that deregulation was the proximate cause."
CONTINUED w/Links...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/jacob-lew-another-brick-i_b_2446848.html
Just because somebody in Legal says it's OK doesn't mean it's legal or OK. Great post, bigtree -- every word.
Calling him "Obama Treasury Secretary" is redundant. Everyone here knows under which administration he serves.
Asshole Treasury Secretary would work, though. 
