Obama's Economic Dream Team?

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By Stephen Lendman (about the author) Page 4 of 5 page(s)

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"He now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is a consultant to Goldman Sachs, and is a managing director of the DE Shaw & Company hedge fund. His name is being floated as the leading candidate for Treasury secretary, and as Michel Chossudovsky states: "Putting a Hedge Fund manager (with links to the Wall Street financial establishment) in charge of the Treasury is tantamount to putting the fox in charge of the chicken coup," and more evidence that Obama plans the kind of business as usual that he pledged to get rid of."

Treasury no, NEC yes where along with Geithner and Bernanke he'll be foxy indeed, and look at his record. In the 1990s, he helped deregulate financial markets with among other measures the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed (1933 enacted) Glass-Steagall. It let commercial and investment banks and insurance companies combine and opened the door to the kinds of rampant speculation, fraud and abuse that created today's mess.

In 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) came next. It was so odious it had to be tucked undebated into an appropriations bill near the end of Clinton's tenure. It legitimized "swap agreement" and other "hybrid instruments" at the core of today's problems. It prevented regulatory oversight of derivatives and leveraging and turned Wall Street sharks loose on unsuspecting investors.

It also contained the "Enron Loophole" for its "Enron On-Line" - the first internet-based commodities transaction system, unregulated to let Enron do as it pleased, and the rest, as they say, is history.

After his World Bank tenure, Summers joined the Clinton administration in 1993 where he served as Treasury Under-Secretary for International Affairs and later as Secretary. As a result, he played a major role in a decade Professor James Petras calls "the golden age of pillage." Summers was involved in all economic policy decisions ranging from fiscal ones to NAFTA, WTO, and various neoliberal responses to the decade's financial crises:

-- in 1995, the destruction of Mexico's economy by raising interest rates to unmanageable levels and all of NAFTA's wreckage ;

-- pillaging Russia that began before his tenure, continued throughout the decade, and exploded during the country's 1998 financial crisis; and

-- the 1997 Asian crisis; manufactured in Washington; debt bondage and open markets became the solution, and human wreckage the price for resolution.

At the end of his tenure, Summers was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Medal, the Treasury department's highest honor.

Bill Richardson

He'll become Commerce Secretary, is currently New Mexico's governor, and served earlier in the Clinton administration as Energy Secretary and UN Ambassador. He's a former congressman, was Democratic National Convention chairman in 2004, and Democratic Governors Association chairman in 2005 and 2006. He also earlier worked for Kissinger Associates and sat on various energy company boards of directors.

Peter Orszag

Another Rubin protege, he'll become Office of Management and Budget director. He earlier was on the Council of Economics Advisors under Clinton and has been Congressional Budget Office director since 2007. In 2004, he co-authored a book titled "Saving Social Security" in which he predicts its insolvency and advocates a revamping by a combination of payroll and "benefits adjustments" - meaning slow destruction by cutting retiree payouts.

Jason Furman

Reportedly to become a senior economic adviser, he also wants Social Security benefits cut and the System privatized for Wall Street. Under the Clinton administration, he served as a special assistant to the President for Economic Policy and on the Council of Economic Advisors staff. He also headed the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, a Robert Rubin-founded economic think tank advocating the policies he supported as Treasury Secretary that left human wreckage everywhere.

Christina Romer

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I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.

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