Courtesy of Pam Martens.
The Obama administration pushed through the full Senate vote on the nomination of Jack Lew for Secretary of the Treasury late yesterday afternoon, just one day after the Senate Finance Committee voted to confirm the nomination. One suspects the rush was to prevent further details of Lew’s lavish pay packages, loans and other perks at his previous employers, New York University and bailed out bank, Citigroup, from gaining traction in the press.
But rest assured, this is no win for the President’s legacy or his party. The Democrats’ progressive base was just as adamant against Lew for U.S. Treasury Secretary as were most Republicans who took a careful look at Lew’s history.
Robert Scheer, writing at The Nation Magazine said:
“I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary. Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who unfettered Wall Street greed and then took his own considerable cut of the action.
“Rubin went to work at Citigroup, the world’s largest financial conglomerate whose legality was enabled by legislation he advanced while in government. He made off with a salary of $15 million a year during his decade at that bank, which specialized in toxic mortgage derivatives and had to be bailed out by taxpayers to avoid bankruptcy.”
Lew also cashed in his chips at Citigroup, taking a job there from 2006 through early 2009 that paid him millions, including a $940,000 bonus in early 2009 that was paid with bailout funds from the U.S. taxpayer after the company became insolvent from soured mortgage bets. Lew served as Chief Operating Officer of the very division that the SEC charged with hiding $39 billion of subprime debt off its balance sheet in Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs).
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