“Take a good look at some of the 17 people our nation’s president-elect chose last week for his Transition Economic Advisory Board. And then try saying with a straight face that these are the leaders who should be advising him on how to navigate through the worst financial crisis in modern history”
I’ll take ‘what do Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board and accounting scandals have in common for $1000, Alex‘. Meet Obama’s Bailout Bunch:
- First, there’s former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Not only was he chairman of Citigroup Inc.’s executive committee when the bank pushed bogus analyst research, helped Enron Corp. cook its books, and got caught baking its own. He was a director from 2000 to 2006 at Ford Motor Co., which also committed accounting fouls and now is begging Uncle Sam for Citigroup- style bailout cash.
- Two other Citigroup directors received spots on the Obama board: Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Officer Anne Mulcahy and Time Warner Inc. Chairman Richard Parsons. Xerox and Time Warner got pinched years ago by the Securities and Exchange Commission for accounting frauds that occurred while Mulcahy and Parsons held lesser executive posts at their respective companies.
- Mulcahy and Parsons also once were directors at Fannie Mae when that company was breaking accounting rules. So was another member of Obama’s new economic board, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. He’s now a member of the executive committee at JPMorgan Chase & Co., which, like Citigroup, is among the nine large banks that just got $125 billion of Treasury’s bailout budget.
- Laura Tyson. She’s been a director for about a decade at Morgan Stanley, which in 2004 got slapped for accounting violations by the SEC and a month ago got $10 billion from Treasury.
- Penny Pritzker, the Obama campaign’s national finance chairwoman. She was on the board of the holding company for subprime lender Superior Bank FSB. The Chicago-area thrift, in which her family held a 50 percent stake, was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2001. The thrift’s owners agreed to pay the government $460 million over 15 years to help cover the FDIC’s losses.
- Warren Buffett was on the audit committee of Coca-Cola Co.’s board when the SEC found the soft-drink maker had misled investors about its earnings.
Former SEC Chairman William Donaldson, was on the audit committee from 1998 to 2001 at a provider of free e-mail services called Mail.com Inc. Just before he left the SEC, in 2005, the agency disciplined the company over accounting violations that had occurred on his watch.
- Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who was a director at Freddie Mac in 2000 and 2001 while it was committing accounting fraud.
Ed:
Weil calls on Obama to scrap his board entirely and start from scratch. Perhaps he might do so, after seeing how damaging Jim Johnson’s past was during his campaign and unhesitatingly tossing the former Fannie Mae chair under the bus last spring. If not, this looks like a Who’s Who of the kind of villains Obama painted in his vapid populist rhetoric over the last two years — which says volumes about his commitment to the ideals he espoused as a presidential candidate.
November 12, 2008 - 08:34 AM on November 12th, 2008
[...] exend to private conversations in Obama’s world. I guess ethics don’t extend to the Bailout Bunch on Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory [...]
November 12, 2008 - 06:31 PM on November 12th, 2008
People wanted change ,they got it,hope they hide a pistol so they can all commit russian roulette
November 18, 2008 - 04:39 PM on November 18th, 2008
[...] about his relationship with Ayers, had Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson on his VP vetting committee, the Bailout Bunch on his Transition Economic Advisory Board, but not to worry, Wink Wink, Obama Transition Team Adopts Ethics Rules, Wink [...]