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Jack Lew Bagged $950,000 Bonus


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Jack Lew Bagged $950,000 Bonus

After Citigroup Bailout

by Wynton Hall 9 Jan 2013

obama-jack-lew-wh-photo.jpg

In the wake of the financial meltdown, President Barack Obama derided Wall Street bonuses as “obscene,” calling them examples of “fat cats who are getting awarded for their failure.”

But now, Mr. Obama has announced that he will nominate as his next Treasury secretary Jack Lew, a man who in 2009 bagged a $950,000 bonus after his bank, Citigroup, received billions in a taxpayer-funded bailout.

Mr. Lew is the former chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit—a group that bet billions against homeowners paying their mortgages.

As the Huffington Post reported in 2010, during Mr. Lew’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director confirmation, “neither the Senate's Budget Committee nor its Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee bothered to ask a single question about Lew's tenure at Citigroup, transcripts of the proceedings show.”

In total, Citigroup received $476.2 billion in cash and guarantees.

Citigroup claims taxpayers made a profit on the bailout and says Mr. Lew “was not responsible for investments or fund management.”

But how can Mr. Obama allow a Wall Street “fat cat” who received an “obscene” $950,000 bonus to be rewarded with the top job at Treasury?

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/09/Jack-Lew-Bagged-950-000-Bonus-After-Citigroup-Bailout

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Sen. Sessions: 'Jack Lew

Must Never Be Secretary of Treasury'

by Wynton Hall 9 Jan 2013

jack-lew-obama-wh-photo.jpg

On Wednesday, the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said he plans to vigorously oppose President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew.

"Jack Lew must never be Secretary of Treasury,” said Mr. Sessions in a statement. "His testimony before the Senate Budget Committee less than two years ago was so outrageous and false that it alone disqualifies.”

On Feb. 13, 2011, Mr. Lew appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley and said of Mr. Obama's proposed budget:

Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we're not adding to the debt anymore; we're spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.

During Senate testimony, Mr. Sessions blasted Mr. Lew’s false statement and said he was “flatly in error”:

Lew, who is a former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has at times displayed a striking level of ignorance over how the budgetary process operates.

During the Crowley interview, Mr. Lew said that the reason Mr. Obama has failed to pass a budget in the Senate is because such bills can be filibustered. But as anyone familiar with the process knows, budgets are considered “privileged,” meaning they do not require a filibuster-proof majority 60 votes and can instead be passed with a simple majority.

Mr. Lew repeated the elementary error to NBC’s David Gregory. “One of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people don’t realize,” said Mr. Lew confidently, “is that it takes 60 votes, not 50, to pass something.”

One would think the former head of OMB—the nation’s top budget post—would know how the budget process works. But apparently Mr. Lew does not.

Now, Mr. Lew has been nominated to become Treasury Secretary of the United States in the worst economy since the Great Depression. That, says Mr. Sessions, cannot happen:

It’s time for a Secretary of Treasury to look the American people in the eye and lay out an economic plan for America that will end our debt path that has endangered our future and which will find support among the American people and the world’s financial community. Far from being a positive force towards this essential good, Mr. Lew has given priority to the political interests of the President, in whose White House inner circle he has now served for several years.

At this time of unprecedented slow growth, high unemployment, and huge deficits, we need a Secretary of Treasury that the American people, the Congress, and the world will know is up to the task of getting America on the path to prosperity not the path to decline. Jack Lew is not that man.

Questions have also emerged over a $950,000 bonus Mr. Lew received in 2009 in his role as chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit—a group that bet billions against homeowners paying their mortgages. Mr. Obama has previously railed against “obscene” Wall Street bonuses wherein “fat cats” get “awarded for their failure.” Still, Mr. Lew took the money.

In a letter to Mr. Lew, Sen. Chuck Grassley asked, “How is it in the public’s interest for you to receive a $1 million bonus on the eve of a massive $301 billion commitment to rescue Citigroup?”

Mr. Lew’s response: “My position at Citi was a management position. I was not an investment adviser. My compensation was in line with other management executives at the firm and in similarly complex operations.”

It is presently unknown whether Mr. Sessions plans to filibuster the Jack Lew nomination.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/09/Sen-Sessions-Jack-Lew-Must-Never-Be-Secretary-of-Treasury

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The never ending revolving door of ex Wall Street fat cats through the OBlah-Blah cabinet!!! Sickening!

I feel your pain, but in reality all administrations operate the same way, and departments as well.

Need someone to run the FDA? Get a pharmaceutical CEO. SEC or treasury? Wall Street banker. Agriculture? Somebody from Monsanto will work. And on and on.

When flatdawg becomes Preisident, all my department heads will come from academia.

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I feel your pain, but in reality all administrations operate the same way, and departments as well.

Need someone to run the FDA? Get a pharmaceutical CEO. SEC or treasury? Wall Street banker. Agriculture? Somebody from Monsanto will work. And on and on.

When flatdawg becomes Preisident, all my department heads will come from academia.

Don't even get me started on Monsanto. They could be the worst of the bunch, which sadly, is pretty impressive.

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The US Treasury better hold a considerable amount of IQD and there better be some kind of RV to fund this administrations enetitlements, or we are going faster to hell in a hand basket. I was watching FOX last night and Charles Krauthammer described Lew as believing Social Security is solvent until 2037, funded by some magical trust. Now I thought that statement was rather weird. What's even stranger is Lew is taking credit for balancing the Clinton budget in the 90's. I know this is going out on a limb, but in relation to Kuwait's RI in the 90's and hopefully Iraq's possibl RV in the near future, could this be the reason why Obama has chose Lew as Treasury Secretary? I know this sounds crazy, but there are so many things that do not ad up with Obama's blatant disregard for spending on entitlements, wracking up trillion in defecits, increasing taxes only on the rich, and the amount of tax to be collected is a pebble in the sand on what he's spending. Below is an article on Lew.

Jack Lew: Architect of Obama’s Trillion-Dollar-Deficit Budgets

January 10, 2013 By Tom Blumer Comments (10)<br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Droid Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; text-align: justify;">

[/url]printer_famfamfam.gif Print This Postafp-516314650_001-4_3_r560-450x337.jpgOn Wednesday, Julie Pace and Martin Crutsinger, two of the usual suspects at the Associated Press, began paving the way for what they clearly hope will be a worry-free Senate confirmation of current Obama administration Chief of Staff Jack Lew to become the nation’s next Treasury Secretary.

Towards that end, the AP pair larded on the compliments and historical revisionism with reckless abandon. Among other things, their report lauded Lew as ”one of Washington’s most knowledgeable budget experts to manage prickly fiscal negotiations with Congress and steer the still-shaky national economy”; said that he would “bring to Treasury a mastery of federal budget mechanics”; claimed that he had “helped negotiate a balanced budget agreement with Congress, something that has eluded Washington ever since”; and described Lew as “a pragmatic liberal … [who] is well-liked in Washington by both Democrats and Republicans[.]”

Along the way, Pace and Crutsinger couldn’t make up their minds about the current condition of the economy. After the “still-shaky” characterization just noted in their first paragraph, they later evaluated it as “now stabilized, if still sluggish.” Those two conditions can’t exist at the same time, given that “shaky” is an antonym of “stable.” Although it would have required more verbiage, the AP pair should have characterized the current economy, as a result of the derelict stewardship of Obama, the soon-departing Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as “the worst since Franklin Delano Roosevelt needlessly extended the Great Depression by over eight years during the 1930s.” Because it is.

The AP also decided to have a little fun with Lew’s signature, which will appear on the nation’s currency if he is confirmed, commenting in a separate item that his sign-off, a ”J” followed by “seven loopy scribbles,” is “illegible.”

What’s really loopy is AP’s collection of contentions about Lew.

Lew may actually be “knowledgeable” and have a “mastery of federal budget mechanics,” but he hasn’t demonstrated either. As Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget in early 2011 following service in that same position during Bill Clinton’s final 32 months in office a decade earlier, Lew was the primary compiler of that February’s proposed White House Budget. That document blessed the idea of running a full-year fiscal 2011 deficit of $1.645 trillion while coveting $1.5 trillion in taxes over the next 10 years beyond those already locked in by the previous year’s passage of ObamaCare.

An Investor’s Business Daily editorial made mincemeat of Lew’s handiwork, correctly describing it as “gutless” because it chose to do nothing about runaway entitlement spending, even with the available political cover of Obama’s own Simpson Bowles Commission. That panel had recommended sweeping changes to the Social Security system and significant Medicare and Medicaid reforms just two months earlier.

As to Lew’s vaunted negotiating skills, give me a break.

The Clinton administration’s agreement with Congress early in his second term did balance the budget and generate surpluses for a few years, but Lew’s role appears to have been minimal. The key players in that drama were then-Congressman, now Ohio Governor John Kasich and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The AP itself in 2009 acknowledged Kasich’s role as “chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Budget Committee in 1997 that balanced the nation’s budget for the first time in more than 30 years.”

Jack Lew did not become Bill Clinton’s OMB Director until May 1998. Concerning 1997, when the measures which ultimately led to a balanced budget became law, including the reduction in the capital gains tax which caused related tax receipts to skyrocket during the next several years, Lew’s Wikipedia entry currently only says that he “frequently served as a member of the Administration negotiating team.” Big whoop.

When he has been a player in negotiations, he has been anything but constructive. Breitbart.com’s Joel Pollak noted on Wednesday that, according to Bob Woodward’s book, The Price of Politics, Lew “so irritated congressional Republicans during debt ceiling negotiations in 2011 that Speaker of the House John Boehner personally asked Obama to exclude Lew from the talks.” Pollak believes that the Lew nomination “is a clear sign that he intends to drive a hard bargain with Republicans and that he is even less interested in compromise than he was during his first term.” It’s hard to see how he could be wrong. So if you thought Geithner’s condescending, punkish comment to Congressman Paul Ryan about Ryan’s plan to prevent the country’s deficit- and debt-driven financial implosion was bad — “we (don’t) have a definitive solution … What we do know is, we don’t like yours” — you probably haven’t seen anything yet.

AP’s suggestion that Lew is “pragmatic” is nonsense. In early 2011, Lew showed himself to be beyond doubt a doctrinaire leftist unconcerned with facts or the truth.

It all began when a USA Today editorial called Social Security’s trust fund, “at least in cash terms, a fiction,” correctly asserting: “In reality, the trust fund is no more than a collection of IOUs.” (More on Social Security’s dire situation can be found in my Tuesday FrontPage column, “Social Security: Even More Insolvent Than You Thought.”)

Lew took umbrage at USA Today’s contention in an opposing column there. Included in his collection of laughable claims were these howlers: “Social Security does not cause our deficits,” and “Social Security benefits are entirely self-financing.”

That was too much for Washington Post syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, who flung verbiage from Clinton-era reports issued by Lew’s own OMB back in his face:

Lew doubled down a day later while attacking Krauthammer at the White House’s OMB blog. In addition to repeating the lies contained in his USA Today column, he also blamed the country’s budget problems on “the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.” Unfortunately for Lew, federal collections rose by 44% from fiscal 2003 through fiscal 2007 after those cuts took full effect, and the federal budget was within $163 billion of achieving balance in fiscal 2007. As to the drug benefit, also known as Medicare Part D, it was indeed an ill-advised move by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, but competition-enhancing aspects of that law have caused the program’s costs to rise at a much lower annual rate than health care costs in general.

Krauthammer got in the last word in his next column, correctly arguing that Lew’s false arguments justify “precisely the kind of debt denial and entitlement complacency that his boss is now engaged in.”

The Lew nomination tells us that we can expect four more years of “debt denial and complacency.” Moves like this lend further credence to the idea that Obama really doesn’t mind if the country falls apart financially by the time he leaves the White House — assuming he plans to.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/jack-lew-architect-of-obamas-trillion-dollar-deficit-budgets/

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