@8: "Why is that f**kwit Constant ALWAYS so in love with Obama's neocons????"

Because Constant's job exclusively entails bitching about all the mean things those dastardly conservatives say about Obama the Great. Duh.

On today's Democracy Now! (video):"Failure of Epic Proportions": Treasury Nominee Jack Lew’s Pro-Bank, Austerity, Deregulation Legacy

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Black, let’s start with you. Your assessment of Jack Lew?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, on financial matters, Jack Lew has been a failure of pretty epic proportions, and he gets promoted precisely because he is willing to be a failure and is so useful to Wall Street interests. So, you’ve mentioned two of the things in terms of the most important and most destructive deregulation under President Clinton by statute. But he was also there for much of the deregulation by rule, and a strong proponent of it, and he was there for much of the cutting of staff. For example, the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, lost three-quarters of its staff, and that huge loss began under Clinton. And the whole reinventing government, Lew was a strong supporter of that. And, for example, we were taught—instructed by Washington that we were to refer to banks as our "clients" in our role as regulators and to think of them as clients.

He goes from there to Wall Street, where he was a complete failure. You noted that part of what Citicorp did was bet that housing would fall. That was actually one of their winning bets. But they actually made a bunch of losing bets, as well. And the unit that he was heading would have not been permissible but for the deregulation of getting rid of Glass-Steagall under President Clinton. And you saw, as an example of Citicorp, why we shouldn’t be doing this. Why would we create a federal subsidy where all of us, through the U.S. government, are on the hook for Citicorp’s gambling on financial derivatives for its own account, you know, running a casino operation? That makes absolutely no public policy sense.

Then he comes into the Obama administration, and he was disastrously wrong. He tried very hard to impose austerity on the United States back in 2011, which is—he wanted, you know, the European strategy, which has pushed the eurozone back into recession, and Spain, Greece and Italy into Great Depression levels of unemployment.

And this is the guy, after all of these failures, who also is intellectually dishonest. He will not own up to his role and deregulation’s role and de-supervision’s role in producing this crisis—and not just this crisis, but the Enron-era crisis and the savings-and-loan debacle.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Matt Taibbi, your reaction to the nomination of Jack Lew by President Obama?

MATT TAIBBI: I think there’s a couple things. I agree with everything that Professor Black said. I think it’s—the symbolism of this choice is, I think, very important for people, just the mere fact of picking somebody from Citigroup and from that same Bob Rubin nexus that Timothy Geithner came from. And, you know, you heard Barack Obama, as he’s introducing Jack Lew, praising Tim Geithner as somebody who’s going to go down in history as one of the great treasury secretaries of all time. I think what this tells everybody is that Jack Lew is going to represent absolute continuity with the previous treasury secretary, who had a very specific agenda when it came to Wall Street. And I think we’re just going to expect more of the same, more of the same really being overt and covert support of these too-big-to-fail institutions that Lew worked for, Citigroup being the worst and most disastrous example of that kind of company. So I think it’s—the choice of somebody from that particular firm is fraught with pretty upsetting symbolism for the country, I think.

Why is that f**kwit Constant ALWAYS so in love with Obama's neocons????

Naked Came the Treasury Secretary

Another Epic Fail of Obama’s neocon administration

Years ago, a group of anonymous newsies wrote a book on sex (the equivalent of the present day’s 50 Shades of Grey type stuff), called Naked Came The Stranger --- several entertainingly erotic stories, the rest your usual “sex as a weapon” or “have sex and suffer the consequences” type drivel.

We see much the same writing with the latest newsy bullcrap on the recent presidential appointment.

Obama’s latest necon/Wall Street stooge appointment, Jacob “Jack” Lew, is being spun by corporate newsies as a “change” or “alteration” from Timmy Geithner, fave of Wall Street and the Rockefeller/Kissinger/Peterson gang.

Bullcrap to the max! ! !

Lew has consistently been a major promoter of shadow banking --- credit derivatives and securitizations: fantasy finance instruments based upon never-ending layers of debt.
Lew is an inveterate liar, poser and shill; nothing which would or should recommend him for any government position.

A leader in "regulatory capture” --- the modern term for absolute corruption!

From the stock pools of yesteryear, leading up to the Great Crash of 1929, to the dark pools of today, leading to the economic meltdown and the Great Deleveraging (which should last for another 20 years or so, at least), this very day we have both stock pools (proprietary trading and HFT) and dark pools (opaque hedge funds and private equity funds, etc.).

With the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s latest report, the compiled list of derivatives of the banksters as of the end of 2011, we see that 97% of the credit derivatives held by the banks is composed of credit default swaps (“unregulated insurance”), with 40% of that figure in the speculative category (“naked swaps”) --- actually something of a misnomer, since they themselves define which are used for speculation and which aren’t, and since they can all conceivably be used for such, it may very well be that all 97% are, or will eventually be, naked swaps!

Of course, if said credit derivatives were actually valued at mark-to-market --- or street value --- they would be worthless, which was why the accounting rules were allowed to be changed enabling the banksters to declare the value of their “assets” themselves, much the same manner as they now declare the American worker as having no value, hence their justification for offshoring as many jobs as possible, and paying as little in wages as possible, for the foreseeable future.

Were those credit derivatives held by JPMorgan Chase valued honestly, tomorrow there would be NO JPMorgan Chase, and Jamie Dimon could move on to his very own reality-comedy show, titled: “Jamie, Jamie, Jamie!!!”

Sidebar: In between the Clinton and Obama administrations, during Lew’s stint at NYU “..Lew aided the university in ending graduate students' collective bargaining rights. The Obama administration has maintained that Lew supports workers' union rights.”

“In June 2006, Lew was named chief operating officer of Citigroup's Alternative Investments unit, a proprietary trading group. The unit he oversaw invested in a hedge fund "that bet on the housing market to collapse."

“Lew co-chaired the Advisory Board for City Year New York.[22] He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution Hamilton Project Advisory Board, and the National Academy of Social Insurance.”

(FYI: Hamilton Project is Robert Rubin’s creation to promote the privatization of EVERYTHING!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lew