Geithner for Pirate Captain

Word is out that President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy J. Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury. With stocks rising nearly 500 points, Wall Street seems to be welcoming the news. So color me suspicious.

Geithner was a deputy under Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a right-wing deregulationist. Geithner himself has been at the heart of the big bank bailout, engineering the rescue of Bear Sterns for which the US taxpayers are out $29 Billion.

Three Blind Mice
By KAREN TUMULTY AND MASSIMO CALABRESI

The largest government bailout in U.S. history was born before dawn on Sept. 17, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke woke up at 6 a.m., checked his BlackBerry and saw the very thing he had dreaded: the futures market in free fall. Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed president Timothy Geithner had spent the past year staving off one disaster after another, for the most part working behind the scenes. Earlier in the month, they had let investment bank Lehman Brothers slide into oblivion and then ushered another, Merrill Lynch, into the arms of Bank of America. Just the night before, the trio had wrapped up a deal to rescue insurance giant American International Group and gone to bed praying it would halt the panic and worrying it wouldn't. It didn't. [Time: More...]

This is not the change I was hoping for...

Hold off on Holder

Word is out today that President-elect Barack Obama plans to nominate Clinton era Deputy AG Eric Holder to the top spot in the Justice Department. This is not the change we were looking for.

Holder, the highest ranking Africa-American in the DOJ, served admirably under Bill Clinton. But he sullied his legacy with his involvement in Clinton's midnight pardon of white-collar corporate crook, Marc Rich, whose wife had bribed the Democratic Party in order to secure the pardon (which came just hours before George W. Bush assumed office in the stolen election of 2000.

Eric Holder lied* before Congress when he testified that he had first heard of the plan to pardon Rich (who was a fugitive at the time) late in November 2000. Email has since come to light which indicate Eric Holder was approached for the quid pro quo pardon eas early as February 2000.

[Holder] contends he knew little about the Rich case, and would have opposed a pardon application if it had come across his desk.But former White House Counsel Beth Nolan, as well as Clinton, have said that Holder leaned in favor of the pardon. Nolan and the rest of Clinton's legal team opposed it. Also, Justice's pardon attorney Roger Adams has testified that Holder knew that Rich was a fugitive before he did, and yet Holder didn't tell Adams. (WorldNetDaily: More...)

Now more than ever, America needs a leader in the Department of Justice free of the taint of corruption.

*I'm not a lawyer, and i don't pretend to play one on this blog. So i suppose i should include this disclaimer that these are mere my opinions that Marc Holder is lying. It could be he's simply incompetent (although i doubt that... Seems like he came through for this one big spender).