From the Huffington Post
Warning that Americans of the continuing influence and control of Wall Street insiders' embedded in the Obama administration, Linda Keenan questions Paulson's loyalties during the period preceding the 2008 bail-out in this article in the Huffington Post. You need to read the whole article, but here are some interesting paragraphs.
Paulson brought in several recently "retired" Goldman bankers to assist in the bailout, including Dan Jester. He was hired as a "contractor", not a government employee, with far fewer rules to contend with, and he appeared to be Paulson's de facto representative in these high-stakes meetings. Jester's story is a stark example of the flexian in action: a player whose influence isn't conveyed by mere titles, who fuses state and private power, and for whom the question "who is he?" is difficult to answer. William Cohan, writing in the New York Times , summed up what this "contractor" was involved in.
Jester seems to have had his finger in every pie: the rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the A.I.G. calamity, the decisions to bailout Citigroup, G.M. and Chrysler, and the creation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Cohan cites a report suggesting Jester was holding Goldman stock during much of his backroom negotiating. Whose interests was Jester representing during those meetings that would affect the entire global economy? Again, we may never know. The Times reported in 2008 this: "...according to the Treasury Department,
hired as and not required to disclose financial holdings."
And consider this account of Goldman's shadow influence, from a Washington Post review of Andrew Ross Sorkin's book Too Big to Fail:
Sorkin documents a meeting .... between Paulson ... (former head of Goldman Sachs), and the board of Goldman Sachs. As the storm clouds gathered at the end of June 2008, Paulson spent an evening talking substance with the board -- while agreeing not to record this "social" meeting in his official calendar. We do not know the content of the conversation, but the appearance of this kind of exclusive interaction shows how little our top officials care about public perceptions of favoritism.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-keenan/emshadow-eliteem-goldman_b_547500.html
Many of us are already aware of these facts, but we need to keep them in mind as Congress proposes new regulations on Wall Street. These regulations do not begin to deal with the underlying problem which is
the imbalance in our government between the influence of large corporations, banks and Wall Street and the rest of us. It is not that large corporations, banks and Wall Street should have no influence. It is that their influence should be in balance with the influence of the interests of ordinary Americans.
And right now there is a total imbalance. Everything -- our out of control war machine, our ailing schools, our environment, nearly all of our problems are related in some way to the fact that a few institutions and individuals who have no knowledge, understanding or in some cases even contact with ordinary Americand have far too much money and power in our system. Some of the powers behind the Paulsons and the Rubins are not American citizens. I'm thinking of the Saudi princes among others. Why should they be involved in our government at all? Even indirectly?