http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24933.html
Why is Steve Rattner resigning from White House auto czar post?
By EAMON JAVERS | 7/15/09
EXCERPT
One possibility raised by insiders: He did it for the money.
Rattner, a former New York Times reporter who went on to found the multibillion-dollar Quadrangle Group private equity firm before joining the Obama administration, shepherded both Chrysler and General Motors through enormous and complicated bankruptcies. In a Wall Street culture of swaggering deal makers, Rattner is now the swaggering-ist.
“Can you imagine the amount of money he can make now?” gasped one industry insider. “These guys live for the deal, and this was the biggest deal ever. He’s at the peak of his marketability right now — he’s ‘Steve Rattner, the guy who turned around General Motors.’”
The General Motors bankruptcy is actually the fourth-largest bankruptcy ever, behind Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual and WorldCom. But it’s the biggest industrial company to go through Chapter 11, and there are few companies with the same name recognition. Insiders suspect Rattner’s turnaround skills could net him tens of millions of dollars on Wall Street in coming years.
The second possibility: He’s running for office.
Geithner’s statement hinted as much, saying, “I hope that he takes another opportunity to bring his unique skills to government service in the future.” Rattner has long been known to harbor political ambitions, but there’s no clear political path for him right now in New York. One insider speculated that Rattner is the first player on the bench to help fill out a second-term Obama Cabinet. But a lot can happen between now and then, which brings us to the third possibility.
He’s outrunning a scandal.
Rattner’s name surfaced as part of a joint Securities and Exchange Commission and New York state investigation into whether kickbacks were given as part of his firm’s participation in a $122 billion state pension fund. Rattner has not been accused of any wrongdoing. But The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Rattner held a 2004 meeting with a “politically connected consultant about a finder’s fee.” Later, the firm received an investment from the state pension fund and paid fees of $1.1 million. That’s the kind of thing that political opponents can use to great advantage.
And of course, you can never rule out one last possibility — that the timing was just as Geithner laid out in his statement: “With the emergence of both General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy, we enter a new phase of the government’s unprecedented and temporary involvement in the automotive industry.”
Rattner was outrunning the scandal is right. The owner of that 5 million dollar car dealership had a lawsuit and very nearly exposed Obama’s ineligibility, but lost the lawsuit (likely a bought off judge).
They are running the biggest scam in history - they go from on industry to the next to “transform” it. And then they invent some new scams to inflict damage to existing business.
The old - “it’s broken” and “it needs fixing” is the trail to follow on transformation.
Gruber wasn’t saying the Americans were stupid so much as he was saying “we are the con artists” and we are experts at it through experience.