The swamp recycles

On Wednesday, former Defense Secretary James Mattis rejoined the board of General Dynamics, a massive defense contractor whose IT division works with the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) on issues related to the “needs of unaccompanied children.” Mattis joins John Kelly, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary and White House Chief of Staff, as former Trump cabinet members who helped implement the zero tolerance policy and now stand to benefit from its continued effects and Trump’s immigration policy.

  CREW

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Such a Deal

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, the agency responsible for negotiating two massive upcoming trade deals, is being led by former lobbyists for corporations that stand to benefit from the deals, according to disclosure forms obtained by The Intercept.

  Unofficial Sources

I know; you’re shocked.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade accord between the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim countries; the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a similar agreement between the U.S. and the E.U.

[...]

Critics say the deals will provide corporate interests with sweeping powers to challenge banking and environmental regulations.

[...]

Many of the former clients of the trade officials now negotiating these agreements stand to gain immensely.

Sharon Bomer Lauritsen and Christopher Wilson both represented biotech companies. As economist Joseph Stiglitz has argued, the TPP could restrict competition in the pharmaceutical industry by undermining government regulation of drug prices and by creating new rules to obstruct the introduction of generic drugs.

Robert Holleyman represented software companies. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the TPP “contains DRM [Digital Rights Management] anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own.”

Of course, it’s hard to discuss these deals, because the people formulating them are meeting in secret.

The contents of the trade deals are secret and therefore still veiled from scrutiny by the public and even most members of Congress. Only trade officials and select corporate representatives have been able to review them.

And Obama wants to fast track the deals so that Congress doesn’t have time to review them properly when it comes time to vote.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Obama's Bad Replacement Choice for His Current Bad Treasury Sec

[Jack] Lew was only at Citi for about a year and a half—but it was the year and half leading up to the 2008 financial crash, which also totaled CAI. When Lew walked away from the wreckage, he managed to take his $1.1 million salary and a $900,000 bonus with him—even as Citigroup was becoming a poster child for the Treasury’s new AFDC (Aid to Financially Dependent Corporations) program.

The gory details of how Lew earned his money at Citi (by shorting the housing market, in cahoots with a hedge fund manager who helped Goldman Sachs do the same at the expense of its long clients) have already been well reported, so I won’t reexamine the entrails here.

  Billmon

President Obama won reelection in part by beating up on his opponent for receiving big corporate payouts in exchange for dubious work and for socking away money in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands.

So it’s a bit, well, rich that Obama chose as his new Treasury secretary a man who received a big corporate payout for dubious work and who socked away money in the Cayman Islands.

[...]

Lew, who was White House chief of staff while Obama’s campaign was pummeling Romney over his pay and taxes, received a $945,000 bonus in January 2009 after a brief tenure at Citigroup — just as the bank announced huge losses and took a taxpayer bailout. Lew also invested $56,000 in a Citigroup venture-capital fund registered in the Cayman Islands — registered in the very building[Ugland House], in fact, that Obama labeled “the largest tax scam in the world.”

[...]

“It’s no wonder that maybe you and the president haven’t proposed legislative solutions to what you consider, or what the president considers, a tax scam,” Grassley observed.

[...]

Lew’s confirmation isn’t in doubt, a fact supported by the way he sauntered down the hall to his hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, hands in pockets.

  Dana Milbank - WaPo

They like to take shots at each other, but as long as the end result is the status quo, their arguments are just for show.

Have a quick look at the information available at the time Obama made Lew his Chief of Staff. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Another Bankster at the White House

When President Obama last January announced the departure of Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff, many liberals were furious that his replacement was the Midwest Chairman of JP Morgan and Boeing Director William Daley, who was also an opponent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a critic of Obama’s health care bill as too leftist.

[...]

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.

  Glenn Greenwald

You can’t say President #Compromise isn’t forward thinking when he chooses his appointments.

So let’s have a look at the new Chief of Staff, Jacob Lew (previously serving as a top aide to Hillary Clinton).

President Barack Obama's choice to lead the White House budget office 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.

[...]

[His unit made] investments in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market to collapse -- a reality suffered by millions of American homeowners.

[...]

That sounds pretty nasty, doesn't it?" said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a group that monitors the budget office. "Any activity and any player that contributed to the economic calamity needs to be looked at.

"We already got enough players in this administration that certainly were key players in the economic malaise that we currently have," Bass continued. "Why shouldn't we have another one?" he said with a slight chuckle.

But Bass added that he thought Lew was an otherwise excellent choice for the position, noting that as budget director Lew has a proven track record (he held the position during part of the Clinton administration).

  Huffington Post

Sure. Crooks can be good at their regular jobs, can’t they?

"Obviously, Jack has been through a vetting process before," [WH Press Sec Robert] Gibbs told a reporter who had asked whether Obama ever questioned Lew about his work at Citigroup. Gibbs eventually said he didn't know.

Asked if Lew's time at Citigroup was "relevant" and whether it would be "relevant" during his next confirmation hearing, Gibbs said that "those questions have been dealt with."

Indeed.

And, as a result of Lew’s unit’s losses, Citi got that huge bailout ($45 billion) from the taxpayers, Lew himself receiving a $1 billion salary and a $900,000 post-bailout bonus.

And why would Obama question Lew about his work at Citigroup? He already knows. They just shuffle these guys around amongst themselves up there in the Big House.

In case you’ve forgotten, Mother Jones listed the banksters and financial fraudsters who were brought directly from their roles in the financial collapse into the Obama administration. You can read it here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.