Non-change … you can believe it!

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Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees last year from firms that have direct financial interests before the government or are intimately involved in the White House’s bank relief programs.

(Summers Received Hundreds Of Thousands In Speaking Fees From TARP Recipients, Huffington Post, 04/03/09)

Still feelin’ that hope for change? Then how’s about …

Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, was paid about $5.2 million by hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the past year, financial disclosure forms released by the White House showed on Friday.

(Hedge fund paid Obama adviser Summers $5.2 million, Boston.com, 04/03/09)

More on Summers …

In the Bill Clinton administration of 2000, the Treasury secretary was Larry Summers, who had just been promoted from number two under former Goldman Sachs banker Robert Rubin to be number one when Rubin left Washington to take up the post of Citigroup vice chairman. As I describe in detail in my new book, Power of Money: The Rise and Fall of the American Century, to be released this summer, Summers convinced President Clinton to sign several Republican bills into law that opened the floodgates for banks to abuse their powers. The fact that the Wall Street big banks spent some US$5 billion in lobbying for these changes after 1998 was likely not lost on Clinton.

(Geithner’s dirty little secret, Asia Times, 04/03/09)

Oh, and that “dirty little secret” referred to in the aforementioned title?

The “dirty little secret” that Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple. There are only at most perhaps five US banks that are the source of the toxic poison causing such dislocation in the world financial system.

. . .

The top three are, in declining order of importance: JPMorgan Chase, which holds a staggering $88 trillion in derivatives; Bank of America with $38 trillion, and Citibank with $32 trillion. Number four in the derivatives sweepstakes is Goldman Sachs, with a mere $30 trillion …

(ibid)

We already know that Geithner and Summers are as much part and parcel of Wall Street’s status quo as anybody the cheney/bush administration put out there.

There’ve been a few gnawed bones thrown out there for progressives: ending the abortion gag rule and uh … oh a tiny pretension to open government … uh … hmmmm …. ***sigh***.

It seems “change we can believe in” was more about a few quarters in our pockets than real difference.

3 thoughts on “Non-change … you can believe it!”

  1. BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.

    For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.” In fact, the man you’re about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s.

    WILLIAM K. BLACK: These numbers as large as they are, vastly understate the problem of fraud.

    BILL MOYERS: Bill Black was in New York this week for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists gathered to ask the question, “How do they get away with it?” Well, no one has asked that question more often than Bill Black.

    Watch the video at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/jour…

  2. US banks that have received government aid, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, are considering buying toxic assets to be sold by rivals under the Treasury’s $1,000bn (£680bn) plan to revive the financial system.

    (Bailed-out banks eye toxic asset buys, Financial Times, 04/02/09 – requires free registration for all but the leading paragraph)

    So how’s that feet to the fire thing going?

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