I plan to work and vote for Obama. But there are days he makes it difficult. As the main page reports, Jack Lew is going to be Obama's new Chief of Staff. Before re-entering government, Lew worked for Citibank (no one at Goldman must have been available - that's a joke - sort of).
As the Huffington Post notes:
Citi paid Lew $1.1 million for his year at Alternative Investments, according to an ethics disclosure report filed in January 2009. He was also eligible for an undisclosed bonus. Lew did not immediately return a call for comment.
His unit, though, lost as much as billions of dollars in 2008 as its bets turned sour. In the first quarter of 2008 alone the unit lost $509 million; the company stopped publicly disclosing the unit's individual numbers soon thereafter, but the part of the company that absorbed Alternative Investments lost $20.1 billion in 2008, according to the bank's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Got that - Obama's new Chief of Staff lost millions at a bank that took Billions in TARP money.
Hoping that Obama will be tougher on the banks? Think that the banks were allowed to get away with murder, and that Glass-Stegall shouldn't have been repealed? Don't look for help from Lew, who said:
Jacob "Jack" Lew, Obama's nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the White House agency entrusted with ensuring that federal regulations reflect the president's agenda, was asked Thursday during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Budget Committee by Sen. Bernie Sanders whether he believed that the "deregulation of Wall Street, pushed by people like Alan Greenspan [and] Robert Rubin, contributed significantly to the disaster we saw on Wall Street."
Lew, a former OMB chief for President Bill Clinton, told the panel that "the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation," and after discussing those issues, added that he didn't "personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don't believe that deregulation was the proximate cause."
The same Huffington Post Article notes that Obama has said exactly the opposite many times in public.
Lew is supposedly more than competent - but this does not strike me as the most politically savy appointment in an election year.
And of course, at a certain level, it just stinks.