Sunday, January 16, 2011

A Dog Buried Here, Part 1

In Swedish, there is an old saying: Det ligger en hund begraven här. It has the same meaning as "I smell a rat", but conveys the idea of a buried dog:


With this series, I will take a closer look at how we in the United States have the best government that money can buy.

:)

Perhaps the best place to start examining this is with what I call the Bush-Obama Bank Bailout Scheme.

:)

You can see how each Senator and each Representative voted on this scheme back in October, 2008.

Senate Vote

House Vote

My interest is in those elected officials who supported the scheme, and are now still in public office. I am also interested in what happened to those who opposed the scheme, as well as what became of those who supported the scheme but have since left, uh, "public" service.

It is interesting that bailout funds were administered by Neel Kashkari, a special assistant to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. What else is interesting is that Secretary Paulson used to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and brought Mr. Kashkari over to the Treasury from there.


What else is interesting, is that Goldman Sachs was a big recipient of the money that Secretary Paulson & Co. disbursed. In fact, Goldman Sachs tied with Morgan Stanley for fifth place on the list of 706 recipients.


But, how is it that the Bush-43 Administration was able to pull off this Banana Republican stunt? After all, don't we have a different branch of government - namely, Congress - that is supposed to provide oversight and prevent this kind of stuff from happening?

Oh, yeah - most members of the Senate and House voted to support this scheme.

Did you know that Goldman Sachs has an associated political action committee? It's called the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Political Action Committee.

This PAC buys a lot of influence in Congress for the various election cycles: 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010

Can you guess which way this series is going?








Perhaps more to the point, can you smell a few rats?

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