Posted on 05/30/2006 11:20:11 AM PDT by boryeulb
The Senate should reject President Bush’s nomination of Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson for Treasury secretary. Under Paulson’s leadership, Goldman Sachs participated in ethically, and perhaps legally, questionable business practices. Paulson also supports the economy-killing Kyoto Protocol and has demonstrated little respect for private property rights.
On the ethical front, Paulson has refused to answer questions about his apparent use of Goldman Sachs’ corporate assets to advance his personal interests. In 2002, Paulson used at least $35 million of shareholder money to help environmental groups stop a “sustainable forestry” project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Environmental groups had delayed the project for years—to the point where financial stress on the project developer became acute and forced the sale of the land. Goldman swept in and bought the land, promptly turning it over to Paulson’s environmental allies.
The environmental groups involved in the transaction included The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the actual recipient of the land donation from Goldman Sachs. At the time of the transaction, Paulson was a member of the board of directors of TNC—after the transaction he was elevated to chairman. Paulson’s son is now listed on tax returns as a “trustee” of WCS’.
When I confronted Paulson with these accusations at the March 31, 2006, annual shareholder meeting, Paulson and Goldman Sachs attempted to deny the involvement of TNC in the “land steal.” At a very minimum, however, tax records indicate that Goldman Sachs paid TNC more than $144,000 in consulting fees related to the transaction. Moreover, the TNC acknowledges the WCS as one of its “organizational partners.”
On the legal front, the Washington Post reported just last week that Goldman Sachs participated in transactions with scandal-ridden Fannie Mae that “that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, [said federal regulators], was always the same: To shape the company’s books, not in response to accepted accounting rules but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for executives…”
Aside from the potential ethical and legal issues surrounding Paulson, he has decidedly anti-economy and anti-property rights leanings.
Paulson supports economy-killing global warming regulation. Paulson transplanted TNC’s pro-Kyoto position into Goldman Sachs, an investment bank with no known expertise in climate science. Now Goldman Sachs not only supports greenhouse gas regulation, but has said it will lobby for such policies. No doubt this will be much easier, with Paulson as Treasury secretary.
Private property owners should also be unhappy with Paulson’s nomination. Paulson’s TNC is the world’s richest environmental group with $3 billion in assets and is a major opponent of private property rights.
A series of Washington Post articles in May 2003 exposed the Nature Conservancy as more than just a “land bank.” In the past it has also acted as a broker of too-sweet-to-be-true land and business deals for wealthy insiders and corporate supporters, often at taxpayer expense.
In one scheme reported by the Post, “…the Conservancy bought raw land, attached development restrictions and then resold the land to state trustees and other supporters at greatly reduced prices. Buyers then voluntarily gave the Conservancy charitable contributions roughly equivalent to the discounts, sums that were written off from the buyers’ federal income taxes. The deals generally allowed the buyers to build homes on the land.”
As Treasury secretary, Paulson will be in charge of the Internal Revenue Service. Should he be in charge of the government organization that has oversight over any tax problems that TNC might have?
With a Republican administration and Republican-controlled Congress in trouble for abandoning conservative principles and a scandal-ridden Washington, Hank Paulson as Treasury secretary is the wrong choice at the wrong time. Since the politically tone-deaf President Bush is unlikely to withdraw Paulson from consideration, it will be up to the Senate to do the right thing.
Mr. Milloy is executive director of the Free Enterprise Education Institute. He publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Just keep up the drubeat. You're less than 6 months away from Speaker Pelosi. Speaker P-E-L-O-S-I.
I have no idea whether this guy will be any better or worse than any of the other jerks we've had as Treasury Secretary, however, I'm also not jumping the gun one way or the other until I've heard enough info to make an informed decision. An innuendo-filled smear about how this guy comes from the Evil Goldman-Sachs Deathstar doesn't impress me in the slightest.
greed, power.
And you know because they let you in on when they plan on meeting up with the Freemasons and poisoning the wells?
so we can't comment on this choice, we must be silent, because of the threat of Pelosi?
Bush could have chosen alot of other people, he decided to choose this one, so now it's fair game.
its a pretty simple concept to grasp - that the inner circle at Goldman Sachs, the guys at the top, are a much smaller group of personalities and agendas to deconstruct - then your claim about the "Marine Corp produced Lee Harvey Oswald".
The business gurus on TV don't think much of this choice, saying he has a questionable background on Wall St. Hello, is anyone awake at the White House? They said the head of Morgan Stanley would have been a much better selection.
Corzine is not Jewish and never has been.
it automatically makes him SUSPECT. the same way if I found out he was a business associate of Al Gore, I'd be asking similar questions.
Human Events is a conservative publication and their articles are food for thought.
99 other Senators were business associates of Al Gore for every term he was elected to the US Senate.
or James Baker, or Phil Graham maybe, etc, etc.
This is indeed puzzling!When is"W"FINALLY going to come to grips with the fact that"Making Nice"with The LEFT doesn't work???????????
I've reluctantly concluded that while the President gives lip service to free market principles, he is essentially a crony capitalist, like Ferdinand Marcos.
I held out hope for years that he, unlike his father, was something of a stealth supply-sider. Now I wish I could just give him credit for being a misguided but principled Keynesian, but even that is not supported by his nominations.
I'm mad about this nomination. It will go quite a long way in offending the base and ruining the next election.
I guess I was under the impression that Paulson was nominated to Treasury, not Interior or the EPA.
Was I mistaken?
well, obviously part of that agenda involves some hard left environmental positions.
let's ask - why does this guy even want this job? what does he hope to accomplish there, what ends does he want to further by taking it?
But of course, I can't ask any such questions now can I.
the point is - why do we need this guy at Treasury? why do we need this particular guy, with these views, when other qualified candidates are available. and why does he even want the job?
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