Posted on 01/19/2013 7:36:28 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Barack Obama vilifies both “Wall Street speculators “who pay themselves big bonuses when times are bad” and the greedy top Two Percenters who do not pay “their fair share” by exploiting tax loopholes. With such strongly articulated views, his nominee for Secretary of Treasury, Jack Lew, and his current Secretary of Treasury, Timothy Geithner, appear to be unlikely choices for such a sensitive cabinet position.
Jack Lew collected over two million dollars for his short stint at the collapsing Citigroup. Tim Geithner, whose earnings placed him in the top two percent, conveniently forgot to pay a substantial portion of his taxes. Although the sums of money involved in the Lew and Geithner cases are small, they are of enormous symbolic value. They show that Obama is prepared to accept behavior from his closest associates that he demagogues for others in his public persona.
Lew’s confirmation hearings will explore his stint as CEO of Citigroup’s alternative investments group from January 2008 until he lined up a new job in the state department before the end of the year.
Citi’s alternate investment group lay at the epicenter of the financial crisis. Under Lew’s tenure, it lost $509 million in the first quarter of 2008 alone. More than 50,000 employees, or one-seventh of Citigroup’s global workforce, were laid off in November, and the stock price dropped about 75 percent. Despite these horrendous losses, Lew was paid $1.1 million in 2008 for less than a year’s work, according to financial disclosure statements. Citigroup’s risky hedge fund activities resulted in huge losses, requiring massive “too big to fail” bailouts from the federal government. Shortly after he left Citigroup but before he began work at state, Lew received a one million dollar bonus.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Barack Obama is an opportunistic mush, a flip flop to beat all flip flops.
I would suggest to all who care. Download as a PDF, John Flynn’s, “The Roosevelt Myth”. Obama is de ja vu, but a thousand times worse.
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