While You Weren’t Looking . . .

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. . . Congress did it again:

Congress quietly repeals financial transparency rules for government officials

With little fanfare, the House quickly voted Friday to repeal a financial transparency requirement for senior government officials, which was part of a much-heralded government transparency bill last year.

Members passed S. 716 by unanimous consent, with no debate and no description on the floor about what the bill would do. The Senate passed it in the same fashion on Thursday.

The bill amends the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which was passed last year on the heels of complaints that members of Congress and senior officials are using their government knowledge to enrich themselves through stock trades or other actions.

Among other things, the STOCK Act required roughly 28,000 senior officials to post their financial details online. But that requirement was immediately criticized by these officials, some of whom said it could pose a national security risk.

Congress twice delayed the reporting requirement, and the last delay was due to expire on Monday, April 15. That delay called for a study of the issue by the National Academy of Public Administration to study the requirement further.

On April 1, that group recommended ending the requirement for senior officials.

The bill approved by the Senate on Thursday and by the House today would permanently end this requirement, by saying the reporting requirement for senior government officials “shall not be effective.” The reporting requirements would still apply to the president, vice president, members of Congress and candidates for Congress.

House passage of the bill sends it to President Obama for his signature into law.

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Obama quietly signed it into law today.

Who said bipartisanship was dead? I believe the expression “Thick as thieves” is appropriate here.

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NOTE: I stickied this to the top of the front page because I think it’s an important story and it originally posted just minutes before the explosions in Boston. I’ll leave it stickied until there is more news tomorrow.

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It’s a Greek Tragedy

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Jazz Shaw:

Scarborough: Former congressman Jesse Jackson’s facing jail time after pleading guilty to misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign funds. A tearful Jackson apologized to his family and friends. NBC’s justice correspondent Pete Wlliams takes us through this sad case.

[Video clip of Williams is played]

Mika: That was NBC’s Pete Williams reporting.
Scarborough: It’s a sad story. Harold, you served with Jesse. As did I.
Harold Ford: I know Jesse. It’s sad. I know the family well. My prayers go out to his kids and to the entire family. And I hope there is another chapter in his life.
Mika: I hope they can turn it around.
Scarborough: Yeah.

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That’s about the moment when my head exploded, ruining what was otherwise a perfectly nice, Thursday morning breakfast. At what point did this become a “sad story” exactly? The criminal was caught and brought to justice. The system worked. Aren’t we generally happy about that? To reiterate what I was ranting about on Twitter, this guy stole nearly a million dollars from the people of his district, many of whom live below the poverty level! Was anybody “sad” when Bernie Madoff got caught? Was anyone praying for “a new chapter” in Madoff’s life where he would “turn things around?”

And before any of you Jackson loving sycophants get all up in arms over the comparison, there is virtually zero difference between Bernie Madoff and Jesse Jackson jr. except in terms of scale. Madoff stole money from innocent people looking to invest in the future for their retirement. Jackson stole money from working class people willing to invest in the future of their state and country by supporting somebody promising to make their future better. They are the same. Madoff was just better at it.

And while we’re on the topic, what prompted Joe to choose the word “misused” regarding the missing funds? They weren’t “misused,” Joe. They were stolen and spent on Rolex watches, stuffed animal heads, Michael Jackson’s guitar and a huge list of additional swag. Misusing campaign funds is when you authorize a payment to a consultant or pollster who isn’t registered properly. This was theft to finance his own lifestyle above and beyond his means, plain and simple.

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Jesse Jackson Jr. spent his whole life being the son of Jesse Jackson. He never held a real job in his life. He went to college at his dad’s alma mater. Then he went to seminary school but he was never ordained. Then he went to law school but he never took the bar. At age 35 he became a congressman, representing one of the Democratic party’s safe seats – a majority black district covering the South Side of Chicago. His wife became a Chicago alderman and ran a political consulting firm.

Those campaign funds he “misused”? He has never faced a real challenge for reelection, so what did he need the money for in the first place? As a congressman he was making $174,000 year plus really good benefits. I guess that wasn’t enough to cover a Rolex.

JJJr’s rehabilitation program has already started. He hid in a clinic for months, claiming he suffered from a mood disorder. When he gets out of prison he’ll find employment with some NPO with a side job doing commentary for MSNBC. Don’t be surprised if he writes a book confessing to his sins and describing his journey of redemption.

After all, “disgraced Democrat” is an oxymoron.

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The Chicago Way

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Federal charges filed against Jesse Jackson Jr., wife

Former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. was charged today with violating federal law by misusing $750,000 in campaign funds.

Jackson, 47, a Democrat from Chicago, was charged in a criminal information with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and false statements. Typically, federal prosecutors use an information to charge defendants when a plea deal has been negotiated.

Jackson faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and other penalties, according to federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., where the charges were filed.

His wife, Sandi Jackson, was charged in an information with one count of filing false tax returns. She faces up to three years in prison, a fine of up to $100,000 and other penalties. Her attorneys released a statement saying she has “reached an agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office to plead guilty to one count of tax fraud.”

Jesse Jackson is accused of diverting $750,000 in campaign funds for personal use.

Federal authorities allege that Jesse Jackson used campaign funds to purchase a $43,350 men’s gold-plated Rolex watch, $5,150 worth of fur capes and parkas, and $9,588 in children’s furniture. The purchases were made between 2007 and 2009, according to the criminal information, which authorities noted is not evidence of guilt.

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I first became aware of JJJr. back in 2008 when he played the race card on Hillary. Karma is a bitch.

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Toothless Watchdog

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Obama administration’s multiple Hatch Act violations raise questions

A troubling pattern of illegal campaigning by government officials, including two members of President Obama’s cabinet, is raising questions about the federal oversight agency that monitors such infractions.

The Office of Special Counsel, which investigates federal employees for engaging in partisan politics, previously found that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did indeed break the law last year when she campaigned for President Obama during an event in North Carolina. But according to new information obtained by watchdog organization Cause of Action, the DNC improperly reimbursed the federal government for the trip.

The DNC fired back at Cause of Action, calling the accusation “utter nonsense.”

“This is utter nonsense being peddled by right-wing partisans who have nothing better to do than dredge up an issue that has long since been resolved,” said DNC spokesperson Brad Woodhouse in a statement.

Sebelius may have also broken the law when she attended a campaign event for Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Brown’s campaign reimbursed HHS for her trip, indicating that the visit was political in nature.

The penalty for Sebelius’s North Carolina violation alone should have been termination, or a 30-day suspension. Instead, the Obama administration chose not to take any action against her.

The Hatch Act of 1939 restricts federal government employees’ from participating in partisan politics in their capacity as public officials. Infractions of the law are investigated by the OSC, which is headed by a presidential appointee.

But the OSC isn’t pursuing Hatch Act violators in the Obama administration as diligently as it should, said a Cause of Action spokesperson.

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It’s really no surprise – we saw the same thing in the Bush administration, and with campaign contributions to Obama. Nothing ever happens except sometimes they have to pay back some money.

What is the point of a law if it isn’t enforced?

Hey, look! Something shiny!

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Boomtown is full of rats

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‘Boomtown’ Special Angers, Resonates with Americans

Fox News will re-air “Boomtown” on Sunday at 9 p.m. EST and 9 p.m. PST. “Boomtown” is a one-hour investigative special that assails Washington, D.C.’s permanent political class for “extracting” taxpayer dollars from Americans and growing the size of government to enrich themselves and their cronies without creating anything of use.

Fox News’ “Hannity” first aired the blockbuster special on Friday, and the show immediately resonated with viewers across the country. This is in part why Fox News is re-airing the one-hour special.

On the show, Peter Schweizer, the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI), Steve Bannon, Breitbart News’ Executive Chairman, and Fox News host Sean Hannity detailed how Washington, D.C. has become the nation’s wealthiest and most lavish region. Their investigation concluded and revealed those in Washington’s permanent political class and aristocracy only have incentives to grow the size and scope of government to further enrich themselves and their cronies.

Viewers expressed their outrage at the permanent political class on Twitter as they were watching the show. After the show, viewers sent heartfelt emails to GAI and Breitbart News. Many asked if the show would re-air and if they could purchase DVDs of “Boomtown.”

You don’t have to wait until tonight. Here it is.

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The Most Transparent Administration Ever

Lisa Jackson

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Daily Caller:

EPA chief Jackson resigns amid transparency investigations

A Washington attorney says that Environmental Protection Agency Chief Administrator Lisa Jackson’s resignation and investigations into the EPA’s use of secret email accounts are not coincidental.

“Life’s full of coincidences, but this is too many,” Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Chris Horner told FoxNews.com. “She had no choice.”

The Justice Department also plans to release emails Jan. 14 in which EPA Chief Jackson’s alias account discusses coal regulation. According to Horner, this clearly is a factor behind Jackson’s decision to leave the agency.

“Two full committees and one investigative subcommittee of the House of Representatives have asked several federal agencies, including EPA and the White House,” Horner said in a press release, adding that the Department of Justice acknowledged “12,000 emails from Lisa Jackson’s ‘secondary’ email account that discuss the Obama administration’s war on coal, in response to litigation we have filed over this practice.”

Jackson announced she would be leaving after the president gives the State of the Union address, but made no mention of the investigations .

“So, I will leave the EPA confident the ship is sailing in the right direction, and ready in my own life for new challenges, time with my family and new opportunities to make a difference,” she said in a statement.

Last month, Horner told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the name “Richard Windsor” was the name of one of Jackson’s alias email accounts.

“That is the name — sorry, one of the alias names — used by Obama’s radical EPA chief to keep her email from those who ask for it,” said Horner, who discovered the use of alias email accounts while writing his book “The Liberal War on on Transparency.”

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I’m getting old. But I still remember when I got my first email account. It was way back in the nineties when Bill Clinton was still president. I also remember the whoop-ti-doo and hoopla when it was reported that the Bush White House had managed to lose millions of emails they were supposed to save and there were rumors that Bush administration officials were using private email accounts to to conduct official business in order to skirt the law on storing of official emails. Lefty bloggers seemed to think that was real important stuff back then.

But you get older and times change. Quaint notions like government transparency and the rule of law fall by the wayside. What could the head of the Environmental Protection Agency possibly want to keep secret? Not to mention that she is African American, so even questioning her honesty and integrity is racist.

Hey, look! A squirrel!

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There are none so blind as those who will not see

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Matthew Continetti:

See No Evil

If a campaign finance story is not about David Koch or Sheldon Adelson, do liberals care?

Consider the reaction to Kenneth Vogel’s important report on the winter meeting of the Democracy Alliance, the secretive organization of progressive millionaires and billionaires who finance an extraordinarily byzantine network of liberal foundations and Super PACs that operate with undisclosed “dark money.”

What reaction? Exactly. There wasn’t any.

The left-wing VIPs assembled at the luxury W Hotel across the street from the White House, but only Vogel reported on the story. The gathering did not merit inclusion in either the Washington Post or the New York Times, both of which have offices within blocks of the W, and both of which have devoted reams of newsprint to Mitt Romney’s donor retreats and various Koch-affiliated fundraising summits. Was New York Times campaign finance reporter Nicholas Confessore too busy appearing on NOW with Alex Wagner to cover the event?

More likely the media simply ignore data that complicate their preferred narrative. When it comes to the fraught relationship between money and politics, that narrative is as follows: Money in politics is corrupting only because rich businessmen trade campaign donations to Republicans for low taxes and fewer environmental regulations.

The 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, the narrative continues, assisted such transactions by treating corporate and union PAC donations as protected speech. Republicans are better at fundraising because they are selfish, whereas Democrats are more concerned with the common good. And when Democrats abandon the principles of campaign finance reform, they do so with heavy hearts and the tragic sense that they could not compete otherwise.

The end.

Not only is this fairy tale nonsense, it is the biggest myth in American politics. Liberals use this just-so story to salve their consciences and reinforce their collective prejudices against conservatives. They cannot conceive that progressive donors engage in the exact sort of influence peddling they so lustily condemn.

This willful refusal to face facts leads to repression and confusion. A liberal whose understanding of the 2012 election derived from mainstream media and Team Obama emails would not know that the president’s campaign outraised and outspent Mitt Romney’s campaign by hundreds of millions of dollars. She would be unaware that three of the top five Super PACs were aligned with Democrats. Indeed the overall Republican financial advantage was minimal, a little more than 10 percent. That figure does not include the indirect spending by labor unions that is hard to track. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has outraised the Republican Party in each of the last three election cycles. Remind me where the GOP’s huge money advantage lies?

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His ability to raise vast sums of money was one of the original selling points on Obama. And that’s why they keep Nasty Nancy around too.

If the Democrats really cared about campaign finance reform they would have passed something back when they had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. Why should they want to change the rules now? They’re winning!

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The Chicago Way

Chicago Politics

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Un-fucking-believable:

Mel Reynolds, an ex-con convicted of bank fraud and having sex with a 16-year-old girl when he was in his 40s, wants to replace the embattled Jesse Jackson Jr. in Congress.

Standing in front of signs that read “Redemption” Reynolds held a news conference on Wednesday saying he would run in a special election after Jackson resigned in disgrace last week in the midst of a federal investigation.

It was Reynolds who Jackson replaced 17 years ago —in a special election — after Reynolds himself resigned in disgrace after his conviction.

“It’s what you do after the mistakes,” Reynolds said, adding that his crimes were “almost 18, 20 years ago,” and shouldn’t be a life sentence. “I want to serve.”

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The worst part is he very well could win. In fact, if he wins the primary, it’s a sure thing he’ll win the special election.

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SHOCKER – ABC’s Brian Ross does some real reporting

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When I caught this story last night I was so shocked I almost swallowed my bubblicious. But I wasn’t surprised by the hypocrisy – I’ve known for a while that the Obama Democrats are thoroughly corrupt – I was shocked that somebody in the media reported it:

Red Carpet for Solyndra Figure at Democratic Convention

The Obama campaign rolled out the red carpet this week for a former top Energy Department official who was at the center of the ill-fated government loan to Solyndra, a California solar panel firm that wound up in bankruptcy.

Steven J. Spinner joined other top fundraisers for a VIP tour of the Democratic National Convention floor in Charlotte Monday evening, posing and waving for a photographer while standing behind the podium. When he saw ABC News cameras, however, he ran for the exit.

[...]

This week, Spinner has been attending a number of events organized for the campaign’s top donors — members of the National Finance Committee. He is sporting a badge that identifies him as a “Finance Guest.”

He appears also to be a top donor to the convention’s host committee, which accepts up to $100,000 from individuals to help offset the cost of the three-day Charlotte event. The host committee organized the podium tour that Spinner attended.

ABC News made repeated attempts to interview Spinner as the Solyndra saga unfolded, and he declined. When he was approached by ABC News on the convention floor Monday, he bolted for an exit.

A DNC employee blocked ABC News reporters from following Spinner as he broke into a run.

“You can’t follow people,” the aide said, as he held up his arms to keep the camera from filming Spinner as he left the venue.

Neither the Obama campaign nor the White House responded to requests for comment about Spinner.

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Spinner wasn’t the only big donor being given the high-roller treatment in Charlotte this week. There are special events that even the delegates aren’t invited to, like private concerts and parties.

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20/20 CDS

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Matt Stoller has it:

Bill Clinton’s $80 Million Payday, or Why Politicians Don’t Care That Much About Reelection

“There was a kind of inflection point during the five-year period between 1997 and 2003 — the late Clinton and/or early Bush administration — when all the rules just went away. You went from a period, a regime, where people did have at least some concern about going to jail, to a point where everything is legal, and derivatives couldn’t be regulated at all and nobody went to jail for anything. And looking back I would say that this period definitely started under Clinton. You absolutely cannot blame this on George W. Bush.” – Charles Ferguson of Inside Job

“I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I’ve done reasonably well since then.” Bill Clinton

On December 21, 2000, as President, Bill Clinton signed a bill known as the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. This law ensured that derivatives could not be regulated, setting the stage for the financial crisis. Just two months later, on February 5, 2001, Clinton received $125,000 from Morgan Stanley, in the form of a payment for a speech Clinton gave for the company in New York City. A few weeks later, Credit Suisse also hired Clinton for a speech, at a $125,000 speaking fee, also in New York. It turns out, Bill Clinton could make a lot of money, for not very much work.

Today, Clinton is worth something on the order of $80 million (probably much more, but we don’t really know), and these speeches have become a lucrative and consistent revenue stream for his family. Clinton spends his time offering policy advice, writing books, stumping for political candidates, and running a global foundation. He’s now a vegan. He makes money from books. But the speaking fee money stream keeps coming in, year after year, in larger and larger amounts.

[...]

Over the course of the next ten years after his Presidency, Clinton brought in roughly $8-10 million a year in speaking fees. In 2004, Clinton got $250,000 from Citigroup and $150,000 from Deutsche Bank. Goldman paid him $300,000 for two speeches, one in Paris. As the bubble peaked, in 2006, Clinton got $150,000 paydays each from Citigroup (twice), Lehman Brothers, the Mortgage Bankers Association, and the National Association of Realtors. In 2007, it was Goldman again, twice, Lehman, Citigroup, and Merrill Lynch. He didn’t just reap speaking fee cash from the financial services sector – corporate titans like Oracle and outsourcing specialist Cisco paid up, as did many Israel-focused groups, Middle Eastern interests, and universities. Does this explain the finance-friendly, oil-friendly and Israel First-friendly policies pursued by the State Department under Hillary Clinton? Who knows? But if you could legally deliver millions in cash to the husband of a high-level political official, it wouldn’t hurt your policy goals.

Speaking fee money isn’t just money, it is easy money. In one appearance, for one hour, Clinton can make $125,000 to $500,000. At an hourly rate, that’s between $250 million to $1 billion annually. It isn’t the case that Clinton is a billionaire, but it is the case that Clinton can, whenever he wants, make money as quickly and as easily as a billionaire. He is awash in cash, and cash is useful. Cash finances his lifestyle. Cash helped backstop his wife’s Presidential campaign when it was on the ropes.

[...]

We don’t call it bribery, but that’s what it is. Bill Clinton made a lot of money when he signed the bill deregulating derivatives and repealed Glass-Steagall. The payout just came later, in the form of speaking fees from elite banks and their allies.

Ironically, Clinton has come to express regret about deregulating derivatives. He has not given the money back.

Some of you may remember Matt Stoller from his days at OpenLeft, a cesspool of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Matt is living proof that CDS never dies. It is no coincidence that Clinton-hate is prevalent among the Obotians. These days the left hates Bill and Hillary more than the right does.

Stoller doesn’t mention a few things, like the peace and prosperity of the Nineties. He also skips over the fact that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed Glass-Steagall passed in 1999 with veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress.

Sarah Palin has done very well financially since she left the governorship of Alaska. She has sold two books, been on television and gets hefty speaking fees too. So what does Stoller think she is being bribed to do?

But let’s assume that Stoller is correct and politicians are receiving delayed bribes. What can we do about it? Should we pass a law placing a lifetime ban on employment, speaking fees, book deals and other financial gifts and compensation for all former politicians? What about their families?

As WMCB is fond of pointing out, the only way to limit government corruption is to limit the size and power of government. A watchdog media would be helpful, but these days they are feeding at the same trough as the people they are supposed to watch.

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Like a fresh coat of paint on a termite infested house

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STOCK Act signing axes congressional ‘insider trading’

Bill-signing ceremonies are pretty rare events in these times of gridlock and congressional backlog; so are moments of bipartisan backslapping and handshaking. But both happened briefly today when President Obama, surrounded by a few actual Republicans, signed and praised legislation passed by Congress.

The measure was the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, better known was the STOCK Act. A long-lingering piece of legislation, it shot to the top of the priority list after a “60 Minutes” investigation highlighted instances of what the program called congressional “insider trading” — lawmakers using information gleaned on the job, “non-public information,” for personal profit.

The STOCK Act affirms that lawmakers and staff are not exempt from federal insider-trading laws and gives the House and Senate ethics committees the authority to enforce new rules. It also requires lawmakers to disclose more information about their stock trades.

The bill as it passed was watered down in the House, angering some advocates. The House stripped out a provision that would have required people who gather “political intelligence” to register as lobbyists, and left out measures relating to prosecuting corruption.

The liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said it was “lukewarm” on the legislation.

Still, lawmakers and the president, who pushed for the legislation in his State of the Union speech, took a victory lap.

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Between the federal budget and its power to regulate commerce any bill coming out of Congress can make a company’s stock value skyrocket or plummet. If you happened to have inside knowledge as to what Congress was going to do next you could make a fortune. As a matter of fact, some members of Congress have done pretty well playing the stock market, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Martha Stewart went prison for insider trading. If you or me did what she did, we’d get locked up too. But for years those rules didn’t apply to Congress. I’m not gonna get ecstatic because they finally closed one barn door.

The STOCK act may sound pretty, but it’s just the illusion of reform. It’s like slapping a band-aid on a cancer. And they only did that because 60 Minutes exposed them.

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They aren’t stealing it, they’re laundering it

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Yeah, I know, it’s another one of those dreadful wingnut websites. Unfortunately it’s hard to find any liberal websites that are willing to tell the truth about Obama.

PJ Tatler:

Video: Obama Campaign Disables Credit Card Verification, Accepts Donation from ‘Nidal Hasan’

This video is a follow-up to Adrian Murray’s facebook post over the weekend, in which he says that he donated to the Obama campaign as “Adolph Hitler,” occupation “Dictator” living at a German address. As you can see in the clip, citizen journalist George Scaggs of Austin tries the same thing at three different campaign sites, that of Obama, Romney and Santorum. Only the Obama site accepted the donation without the verification number.

[...]

Only the Obama campaign’s web site lacks the security code field. The others require it, and will not accept donations unless the security code and payment information match up.

Obama’s campaign implemented the same lack of verification in 2008, but the mainstream media never called them on it. It appears as though that episode has prompted a repeat in 2012.

This means three things are likely true. One, the Obama campaign disabled the verification system. The verification system is turned on on web sites that accept credit cards, by default. I used to manage the website for the Texas Republican Party, so I know this from personal experience. Someone had to take the action of turning it off on the Obama site. Two, the Obama campaign can accept donations without the identity of the donor being positively verified. Three, not only can people in foreign countries donate to the Obama campaign in violation of federal campaign law, so apparently can identity thieves who have access to stolen credit card numbers. People who do not know that their credit cards have been compromised may not notice small amounts in the $3 dollar donation range that the Obama campaign has been targeting, when such donations show up on their statements.

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Talk about missing the obvious!

The security features for online credit card transactions and other forms of online banking are intended to prevent two things:

A. Someone stealing your money

B. Someone stealing the bank’s money

Who is the favorite candidate of the financial and banking industries? Barack Obama.

So lets say you are a banker and you want to give Obama a million dollars. That would be illegal.

But what if you set up a bunch of phony credit card accounts and used them to make lots of small donations to his campaign? It would still be illegal, but who would know?

Nobody is gonna report the money missing. No one will complain about unauthorized charges. Since you’re doing it from inside the bank no alarm bells will sound. If you create the right program you could automate the process so there were no witnesses.

Easy peasy.

The best part – for a small fee you can launder donations from other members of the 1% too!

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Occupy this guy

Jacob Lew

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Glenzilla:

The new WH Chief of Staff and Citigroup

Yesterday, the White House announced Daley’s departure — he will now co-chair Obama’s re-election campaign, which basically means raising huge amounts of money from his Wall Street friends — and unveiled his replacement as Chief of Staff: Jacob Lew. In 2010, Lew became head of the Office of Management and Budget when Peter Orszag left and then, a couple months later, accepted a multi-million dollar position as a high-level Citigroup official. Lew has spent many years in various government positions, but he has his own substantial ties to Citigroup. Here is what Lew was doing in 2008 at the time the financial crisis exploded, as detailed by an excellent Huffington Post report from last year:

[Lew] oversaw a Citigroup unit that profited off the housing collapse and financial crisis by investing in a hedge fund king who correctly predicted the eventual subprime meltdown and now finds himself involved in the center of the U.S. government’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs. . . .

[I]t is his few years at Citi — in particular the one year he spent at its then-$54 billion proprietary trading, hedge fund and private equity unit — that’s likely to raise the most eyebrows in the coming weeks as Lew faces a Senate confirmation hearing.

Especially his unit’s investments in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market to collapse — a reality suffered by millions of American homeowners.

[...]

For his work at Citigroup, work that included betting on the housing collapse, Lew received a salary of $1.1 million. After Citigroup received its $45 billion taxpayer bailout, Lew — two weeks before joining the Obama administration — received another $900,000 from Citigroup as a bonus. This was revealed only in 2010; in 2009, when Lew first joined the administration as a State Department official, both he and the administration refused to say if he had received a post-bailout bonus from Citigroup (at the time, there was a huge political scandal over Wall Street executives receiving large bonuses despite needing taxpayer bailouts). There’s certainly nothing illegal about betting on a housing market collapse, but it’s quite symbolic that those who made millions of dollars from the crisis are now running government policy.

Lew (like so many key Obama officials) also participated in the orgy of Wall Street de-regulation that took place in the 1990s when he served as Clinton’s OMB head; after leaving Citigroup to join the Obama administration, he unsurprisingly said in response to questioning from Sen. Bernie Sanders that he does not believe deregulation contributed to the financial crisis. The New York Times today says that Lew “has built a reputation as a pragmatic liberal who believes Democrats must compromise with Republicans on long-term deficits in order to forestall draconian cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.” The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein was a bit more blunt: Lew “has emerged as one of the members of the Obama administration Republicans prefer working with.” Whatever else one might want to say, Lew, a fairly standard-issue Democrat with less of a “centrist” reputation than Daley, is a perfect fit for this administration.

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Here is another chance for OWS to show they really mean what they say. They won’t affect the outcome of the GOP primaries (or the election in November) but this might be doable.

Block the nomination of Jacob Lew.

This guy is a perfect target. The job of White House Chief of Staff does not require Senate approval but if OWS is really serious about breaking the revolving door between the White House and Wall Street and if they have any muscle at all they might be able to raise enough hell that they succeed in getting Obama to withdraw Lew’s name.

I’ll sit down while I’m waiting. I’m sure for reasons I don’t understand (having never attended an Occupation or tried the Koolaid) that OWS can’t do something like this. I mean we wouldn’t want them to get tainted by politics or anything, right?

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Wall Street Occupies The White House

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Kevin D. Williamson:

Not far from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street was fragrantly encamped, I noticed a young man wandering into a store to buy a pack of cigarettes on a bright Saturday morning, wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a $237,000 Vacheron-Constantin watch. In a world of $600,000 cars (consult your local Maybach dealer) and $4,300-a-night whores (consult Eliot Spitzer), it’s no big deal to buy a president, which is precisely what Wall Street did in 2008 when, led by investment giant Goldman Sachs, it closed the deal on Barack Obama.

For a few measly millions, Wall Street not only bought itself a president, but got the start-up firm of B. H. Obama & Co. LLC to throw a cabinet into the deal, too — on remarkably generous terms. President Obama, for a guy prone to delivering prim and smug little homilies denouncing greed, greed, greed — the only of the seven deadly sins that truly offends Democrats (though Mrs. Obama has done some desultory work on gluttony) — is strangely comfortable among the Gordon Gekkos of this world. Shall we have a partial roll call? Beat the drum slowly and call out the names: With unemployment still topping 9 percent, the catastatic world economy teetering on the brink of another, even larger financial catastrophe, and trillion-dollar U.S. deficits as far as the green-shaded eye can see, let’s hear it for Obama’s first National Economic Council director, Lawrence Summers (of hedge-fund giant D. E. Shaw and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz), who has had some nice paydays courtesy of Lehman Bros., JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup. Let’s hear it for Citigroup’s Michael Froman, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national-security adviser for international economic affairs, for Hartford Financial’s Neal Wolin, deputy Treasury secretary, for JPMorgan’s William Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, and for his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel of Wasserstein Perella. Let’s hear it for Fannie Mae’s Tom Donilon, national-security adviser. (No, seriously: One of the luminous interstellar geniuses who brought Fannie Mae to its current aphotic state of affairs, upside down to the tune of trillions of dollars, is running national security, and the former director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, was on the board of IndyMac when it finally went toes up — sleep tight, America!) And, lest we forget, let’s have three big, sloppy cheers for economic-transition team leaders Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup) and folksy tax enthusiast/ghoulish billionaire vulture Warren Buffett.

That’s a pretty fantastic lineup, from Wall Street’s point of view, but the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.

But high finance is not the only corporate mystery to be unraveled here: President Obama’s repetitious denunciations of Big Oil have not stopped his man David Axelrod’s firm from setting up Astroturf campaigns on behalf of Exelon subsidiary ComEd, or stopped the president from appointing GE chief executive/tax-minimization engineer/offshoring guru/bailout baby Jeff Immelt to his risible White House jobs commission, or choosing former Kraft and Duke Energy board member Mary Schapiro to run the SEC.

When President Obama opined during his 2011 State of the Union speech that a corporate tax-rate cut might be just the thing for America after a year of record corporate profits, his left-wing base was shocked and dismayed. Heck, some conservatives were caught offguard, too. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed who was running the Obama administration: In large part, the same guys who plan to be running the next Republican administration.

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If you believe that Wall Street has too much control over our government then you must believe that Barack Obama is Public Enemy Number One. If you really meant the things you say you would focus on him, mic check his speeches, occupy the White House, support a primary challenger, hound Obama into retirement.

Of course that would alienate your financial supporters (the ones who kicked in $500 thousand for smoked salmon and grilled veal at the Zuccotti All-You-Can-Eat Buffet). It would also piss off all those pro-Obama government employee unions that swell your ranks whenever you feel like wankmarching through lower Manhattan. The corporate media wouldn’t have been so nice to you either.

But that’s okay, next Spring you can boost your self-esteem by harassing Mitt Romney and the Republicans. Then next Fall you can hold your nose and vote for Obama.

But don’t expect me to be cheering for your victory.

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More Evidence that Paulson belongs in jail

Another shocking story, this time from Bloomberg Businessweek. This goes back to July 2008, when Congress was panicking about Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac being the next dominoes to fall.

How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word of Fannie Mae Rescue

On the morning of July 21 (2008), before the Eton Park meeting, Paulson had spoken to New York Times reporters and editors, according to his Treasury Department schedule. A Times article the next day said the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were inspecting Fannie and Freddie’s books and cited Paulson as saying he expected their examination would give a signal of confidence to the markets.

A Different Message

At the Eton Park meeting, he sent a different message, according to a fund manager who attended. Over sandwiches and pasta salad, he delivered that information to a group of men capable of profiting from any disclosure.

Around the conference room table were a dozen or so hedge- fund managers and other Wall Street executives — at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., of which Paulson was chief executive officer and chairman from 1999 to 2006. In addition to Eton Park founder Eric Mindich, they included such boldface names as Lone Pine Capital LLC founder Stephen Mandel, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.

After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil, the fund manager says, the discussion turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.

Stock Wipeout

Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So too would the various classes of preferred stock, he said.

The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information — to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.

He’s not the only one who was shocked.

William Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, can’t understand why Paulson felt impelled to share the Treasury Department’s plan with the fund managers.

“You just never ever do that as a government regulator — transmit nonpublic market information to market participants,” says Black, who’s a former general counsel at the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. “There were no legitimate reasons for those disclosures.”

Janet Tavakoli, founder of Chicago-based financial consulting firm Tavakoli Structured Finance Inc., says the meeting fits a pattern.

“What is this but crony capitalism?” she asks. “Most people have had their fill of it.”

A Lawyer’s Advice

The fund manager who described the meeting left after coffee and called his lawyer. The attorney’s quick conclusion: Paulson’s talk was material nonpublic information, and his client should immediately stop trading the shares of Washington- based Fannie and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie.

Martha Stewart went to jail for much, much, less. Why is Hank Paulson still walking around free and rich?

It Just Might be a Lunatic You’re Looking for

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

The Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 1

There are three qualifications to be president of the United States. You have to be a natural born citizen, at least 35 years old and be a resident for 14 years. The Constitution doesn’t even say you have to be white or a man. One president may not have even been a natural born citizen, Chester A. Arthur.

Every other qualification for the presidency is arbitrary. The executive branch has one simple task, decide close calls. The president can either sign or veto legislation, but can be overridden by a 2/3 majority. He can negotiate treaties, pending Congressional approval. When international business requires a head of state, the president is it.

When media personalities talk about qualifications, they mean previous experience being a politician. Generally, presidents are former governors. Others are former Vice Presidents. A small number held positions in Congress and jumped right into the White House. Most politicians at the federal level are lawyers. Nearly all judges are lawyers, too, even though there is no law requiring it.

If you look at Congress, you can tell it’s run by lawyers. They have mastered parliamentary process. The legislation is often voluminous and convoluted. Eliminating legislation always takes a back seat to compensatory legislation. The best way to fix bad law is to tweak it with more laws.

If you believe the political class, most of whom are the same legal minds who created the US government as it exists today, voting for a non-politician or one that isn’t deemed electable by a party is crazy. Benjamin Franklin, not a lawyer, said that doing the same thing over and expecting the same result is insanity. Maybe the electorate could do with going a little crazy.

Bloomberg FOIA suit reveals Massive Secret Fed Loans

You have to click on this jaw-dropping article to see the interactive graphic that shows which bank got how much, and to read how the Fed and our favorite Money Men gave banks billions without Congress having a clue.

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret.

…

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

…

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

…

Lawmakers knew none of this.
They had no clue that one bank, New York-based Morgan Stanley (MS), took $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, enough to pay off one-tenth of the country’s delinquent mortgages. The firm’s peak borrowing occurred the same day Congress rejected the proposed TARP bill, triggering the biggest point drop ever in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (INDU) The bill later passed, and Morgan Stanley got $10 billion of TARP funds, though Paulson said only “healthy institutions” were eligible.
Mark Lake, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment, as did spokesmen for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
Had lawmakers known, it “could have changed the whole approach to reform legislation,” says Ted Kaufman, a former Democratic Senator from Delaware who, with Brown, introduced the bill to limit bank size.

I guess this guy is proven right once again:

I think there are people in the Fed and the Treasury who should go to jail for this. Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner — some of the most successful white-collar criminals of all time.

Republican Senator Dumps Stocks Days Before Crash

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Via Legal Insurrection:

How Congress Insider Traders Abused The Public’s Trust During The Financial Crisis

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island also made a flurry of trades in the days after the Paulson-Bernanke meeting with legislators.

At minimum, Whitehouse sold $250,000 in the stocks below between September 18-24, 2008. He may have sold as much as $600,000 in the stock below according to disclosures.

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The stocks that were sold lost as much as 35% of their value within days of the sale.

In response, Senator Whitehouse (R-RI) denies he had anything to do with the sale and says it was all a coinky-dink.

This is an outrage! We should Occupy his front lawn until he confesses the truth and resigns.

What’s that? Whitehouse is a Democrat?

Oh, never mind.

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Oh what a tangled web we weave . . .

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Via Hot Air:

Emails tie Obama fundraiser to Solyndra push

Advisers to Obama fundraiser George Kaiser discussed Solyndra and other government contracts during their visits last year to the White House, according to emails released Wednesday by House Republicans.

The emails between Kaiser and two of his top business associates center in part around Solyndra’s failed bid to win a second loan guarantee from the Energy Department for $469 million.

In one exchange from Feb. 27, 2010, Ken Levit, executive director of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, said aides to Vice President Joe Biden responded enthusiastically when the topic of the California solar company came up during a meeting about stimulus funding.

“They had an orgasm in Biden’s office when we mentioned Solyndra,” Levit wrote to Steven Mitchell, a managing director at Kaiser’s venture capital firm, Argonaut Private Equity.

“That’s awesome! Get us a doe loan,” Mitchell replied.

Republicans pounced on that email exchange and several others, arguing they “directly contradict” earlier claims from Kaiser and the Obama administration that they did not talk about Solyndra during more than a dozen meetings with senior White House officials, including then chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett.

[...]

In a March 5, 2010, exchange, Kaiser and Mitchell discussed the push for a second loan guarantee and Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet’s “good call” with DOE loan guarantee chief Jonathan Silver.

“Apparently our application has been caught up with several other groups who were also wanting a second bite at the DOE loan guarantee apple,” Mitchell wrote to Kaiser.

But Silver “championed the cause that they should [get a second loan] and he has just this week apparently won that battle.”

“He would not say that we are the first one that will be considered but he all but did — he conceded that we are the only company to have actually closed and funded our loan and most of the other companies still have no revenues,” Mitchell added, noting that Energy Secretary Steven Chu “is apparently staying involved in Solyndra’s application and continues to talk up the company as a success story.”

“Sounds good,” Kaiser replied. “I assume that we would not move ahead with the offering until we have formal DOE approval or would you issue while you are under due diligence.”

“BTW, a couple of weeks ago when Ken and I were visiting with a group of Administration folks in DC who are in charge of the Stimulus process (White House, not DOE) and Solyndra came up, every one of them responded simultaneously about their thorough knowledge of the Solyndra story, suggesting it was one of their prime poster children.”

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There is an old joke about a congressman meeting with some lobbyists. The congressman says “Gentlemen, we can discuss money or we can discuss legislation. But if we discuss them at the same time we’ll all go to jail.“

BTW – The words “orgasm” and “Biden” in the same sentence made me puke in my mouth.

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