Treasury Secretary Jack Lew Perfectly Symbolizes the Obama Administration’s Two-Faced Hypocrisy — See Alec MacGillis’ Summary of Parasite Jack’s Trail to Power

© 2013 Peter Free

 

01 March 2013

 

 

Citation — to the Alec MacGillis essay

 

Alec MacGillis, Why Did Democrats Give Jack Lew a Pass? New Republic (28 February 2013)

 

 

President Obama likes to pretend that he’s on Joe and Mary Average’s side — but he’s not, and his cabinet appointments consistently prove it

 

Take the just sworn in Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew — yet another parasitic plutocrat.  Lew is cut from former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s Wall Street insider mold.

 

Insider Lew is not likely to want to recover the billions that Wall Street’s criminal shenanigans stole from the 99 Percent.

 

Nor is he probably going to do anything to slow down the financial sector’s Too Big to Fail designs on the rest of your wallet.

 

 

Jack Lew at work — from Alec MacGillis’ mild perspective

 

MacGillis’ essay points out the following about Lew’s slime trail — in my words and emphases:

 

(1) After leaving the Clinton Administration, Mr. Lew went to work for non-profit, tax-exempt New York University as Vice President for financial operations from 2001 to 2006.

 

His salary, says MacGillis was $800,000 more than NYU’s president.  That’s odd, isn’t it?

 

The peculiarity is highlighted by the fact, writes MacGillis, that Lew received a $1.5 million mortgage loan from the University on his private residence, $440,000 of which was “forgiven”.

 

So what was J-L doing for these ostentatious perks?

 

Let’s take a guess.

 

(2) In 2007, then New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo stuck it to NYU for a 0.25 percent kickback operation that involved an alleged agreement between Citigroup and the University, which made the bank the lender of choice for NYU students.

 

NYU would up having to pay lots of money back to the students, even though the school would not admit it had done anything wrong.

 

When questioned by Congress afterward, in true plutocrat style, Lew couldn’t “recall” the Citigroup-NYU agreement.

 

(3) Good Ole Jack then went to work for Citigroup — which in itself should raise some eyebrows about his “don’t recall” evasion:

 

 

By early 2008, Lew had become head of the Citigroup unit that, in the Washington Post’s words, "housed many of the bank's riskiest operations, including its hedge funds and private equity investments.

 

Massive losses in that unit helped drive Citigroup into the arms of the federal government, which bailed out the bank with $45 billion in taxpayer money that year."

 

Lew has greatly downplayed his role at Citigroup, saying that he was working merely "as a manager, not as an investment adviser."

 

But he was senior enough to make at least $1.1 million in that annus horribilis of 2008.

 

© 2013 Alec MacGillis, Why Did Democrats Give Jack Lew a Pass? New Republic (28 February 2013) (at Item 4) (paragraph split)

 

(4) Apparently a canny negotiator with an eye to the future, Leeching Jack managed to get himself rewarded for leaving Citigroup for government service — as opposed to going to one of the bank’s competitors.

 

According to MacGillis, Lew raked in $944,578 as a voluntary separation bonus:

 

(a) having apparently contributed nothing of black ink value to Citigroup

 

and

 

(b) having simultaneously been a significant player in Citigroup’s contribution to America’s economic collapse.

 

 (5) Today, Slimy Jack is the United States’ Treasury Secretary — by President Obama’s own, self-revealing choice.

 

 

The moral? — President Obama is just as much a narcissistically plutocratic player as Secretary Lew is

 

But you wouldn’t know that, given the Democratic Party base’s deafening silence, when it comes to criticizing the Administration’s puke-inducing hypocrisies.

 

For partisans of both political parties, “our” Slime Ball is always better than “yours”.

 

With culturally missing objectivity like that, our society is destined for the Toilet of Self-Governance Dreams.