Here's the lowdown on Obama's team. Know his friends so you can know his master.
Meet
Bob Rubin, the padrino of the economy team:
Here's a family portrait for starters.
The year is 1999, the president is Bill "tech bubble" Clinton, his treasury secretary is soon-to-be-Citigroup-board-member Bob Rubin, and his Fed chairman is Alan "irrational exhuberance" Greenspan. Rubin helps Citigroup to usher the Gramm-Leach Act that revokes New Deal banking regulations through Congress, getting the dems on board and suppressing dissident voices. This allows Citigroup to merge with an insurance company and Rubin to get a juicy position on Citigroup's executive board, which he joins as soon as the bill is voted by both parties and signed by Bubba.
Here's what the NY Times wrote about Rubin's Citigroup capers:
When he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible by allowing banks to expand far beyond their traditional role as lenders and permitting them to profit from a variety of financial activities. During the same period he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent.
And since joining Citigroup in 1999 as a trusted adviser to the banks senior executives, Mr. Rubin, who is an economic adviser on the transition team of President-elect Barack Obama, has sat atop a bank that has been roiled by one financial miscue after another.
After cratering Wall Street, Obama's economy czar Bob Rubin craters Citigroup:
Citigroup insiders and analysts say that Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin played pivotal roles in the banks current woes, by drafting and blessing a strategy that involved taking greater trading risks to expand its business and reap higher profits. Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin both declined to comment for this article.
NY Times, "Citigroup Saw No Red Flags Even as It Made Bolder Bets"
Bob Rubin's protégé and Obama's Treasury man
Tim Geithner lobbies for the Citigroup bailout:
Tim Geithner, president of the New York Fed, was in the thick of the drama, hours before he was expected to be unveiled as President-elect Barack Obamas pick for Treasury secretary.
Financial Times,"US agrees bail-out for Citigroup"
So those are Obama's financial friends.
Who are his foreign policy friends?
Chuck Hagel and Rick Lugar, the Republican foreign policy heavies who mentored the junior senator from Illinois and propelled him on his meteoric rise to greatness are first in line. His current foreign policy friends, theones who are prepping him backstage, are Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. All of these good people are CFR alumni, IOW they are the representatives of the Rockefeller dynasty, as are all those nice folk from Citigroup. So now you know who owns Obama.
Are you mixing me up with George Bush, like you mixed Obama up with Zachor? Who's McCain - moomoo?
Trial by-proxy, eh?
Either give us what he thinks and does on these matters or go back to the cave times, or at least quasi-communist times, when sons were responsible for what their fathers did...
