As our life savings and being very close to 60, retirement funds, diminish, adding another few years onto my work life and yours, too, the former head of Lehman Brothers, Richard S. Fuld, Jr., was being grilled by members of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee. Click here for the NY Times story, which is quite incomplete.
Once again, too late.
“Nobody, including me, anticipated how the problems that started in the mortgage markets would spread to our credit markets and banking system and now threaten our entire financial system and our country,” he said. “Like many other financial institutions, Lehman Brothers got caught in this financial tsunami.”
Notice the use of the passive voice. Lehman Brothers as victim, um?
In a report from All Things Considered this evening on NPR, it was reported that Fuld would neither admit that he did anything wrong nor that the government failed to regulate.
It's all show, once again, and all too late.
And if you really want to get mad, take a look at the compensation packages CEO's like Fuld received despite the fact that they ruined their companies, ruined the lives of their employees, and ruined our economy.
While the stock market jumped around as if it was having a heart attack, John McCain was calling Obama "touchy" and Sarah Palin was in Florida claiming that Obama is palling around with terrorists. Not exactly on point. But don't be fooled, this was all distraction from the fact that Henry Paulson, the Treaury Secretary, was appointing one of his Goldman Sachs proteges as the head of the government bailout program. His name is Neel Kashkari, and the office he is going to head is called the Office of Financial Stability. I'm not kidding! We are indeed right in the middle of "newspeak" from George Orwell's 1984.
From the Wall Street Journal: Kashkari’s appointment is another example of how deep those Goldman Sachs ties go. In fact, Paulson himself was recruited by a former Goldman Sachs banker: former White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten. Bolten overcame Paulson’s reluctance to persuade him to take the job as Treasury Secretary at a time when Paulson was so wary of the job that he declined to meet with President Bush because he knew he couldn’t say no to the President himself. According to an article in The International Economy by Fred Barnes in 2006, Paulson also believed that the Bush administration would not be able to accomplish many financial changes in 2007 and 2008. Kashkari’s new job show just how wrong Paulson was back then.
It's clear that McCain doesn't want the election focus to stay on the economy or on banking. He's already admitted to how ignorant he is about economics, despite his service on the Senate Commerce Committee, and he's already shown how in the bankers' pockets he comfortably sits. Remember the Keating Five, the debacle that led to the savings and loan crash, which coincidentally also required a federal government bailout? If you don't, here's a clip from the Obama campaign to educate voters: http://www.keatingeconomics.com/
And although Sarah Palin might make for good comedic material on SNL, don't be distracted: her "hecks," "darns," "hockey moms," and "Joe six-packs" are coded racial messages. When was the last time you met an African American ice hockey player? And when she refers to McCain as a servant, that is also a code message to attract the attention of fundamentalist Christians.
Today is the opening of the October Term for the U.S. Supreme Court. Keep that in mind, too, as the election approaches.
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