Re: Jon Corzine ~~ He makes Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, and yes, even Al Capone look like pikers. (One doesn't have to physically kill a person.....Corzineeconomically murdered millions of investors by his "mismanagement and gambling with money not his" And still, the Media manages to just not mention the D behind his name....IF they mention him at all.
I'm surprised that there haven't been more comments to this, Peter....
Each paragraph of that story is like a bomb has hit the cement....and yet, Corzine still dodges trouble....UNBelievable!
These pieces of the paragraphs are telling....
>>>>>Perhaps the best description of Corzine's mismanagement came, not surprisingly, from his successor, Chris Christie, in a February 2011 speech at the American Enterprise Institute:
When I came into office we confronted a $2.2 billion budget deficit for fiscal year '10. The one that had five months left. The one that Governor Corzine told me was just fine, cruise path into the end of the fiscal year; Governor, don't worry about it, everything is fine. $2.2 billion...Imagine that. The state that has the second highest per capita income in America had so over-spent, over-borrowed, and over-taxed—that it would not meet payroll in March of 2010. So we acted immediately to use the executive authority of the governorship to impound $2.2 billion in projected spending…without raising taxes on the people of the state who had had their taxes raised and fees 115 times in the eight years preceding my governorship. 115 tax and fee increases in eight years. <<<<<
>>>>>Corzine has given nearly $3 million dollars to Democrats, mostly through donations to the Democratic National Committee, as well as serving as major "bundler" for Barack Obama's presidential campaigns.
So it should come as no surprise that two of Jon Corzine's biggest supporters are Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. At a Corzine campaign rally in Edison, New Jersey, in October 2009, speaking of the administration's quandary regarding how to deal with the banking turmoil in 2008, Biden made it clear why, in retrospect, the Obama administration's economic policies are so reckless and confused:
I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine and said "Jon, what do you think we should do?" The reason why we called Jon is because we knew he knew about the economy, about world markets, about how we had to respond, unlike almost anyone we knew.
Biden went on to say that Corzine gave the administration the framework for a national economic recovery plan. Thus, the Obama stimulus, which wasted a trillion dollars of our children's future earnings, was inspired and perhaps designed by an inveterate reckless gambler and financial mismanager. <<<<<
>>>>>In 2010, following passage of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill, the CFTC proposed a change to its Rule 1.25 that would have prohibited the investment of "customer segregated funds" by MF Global and similar firms in foreign nations' sovereign debt. The New York Times reported that "Mr. Corzine and other members of the firm met with the commission in July to discuss the proposed changes." Would anyone like to guess how much additional weight MF's position was given due to Mr. Corzine's connection to Gensler and other high-power officials? <<<<<
>>>>>THE BIGGER PICTURE HERE, however, is not just Corzine-Gensler-Dudley, but rather the cozy relationship between Goldman Sachs and the Democratic Party. The "mainstream" media, Democratic Party leadership, major unions, and the Occupy Wall Street movement routinely describe the GOP as a tool of Wall Street. But the numbers say something very different, especially about the Street's most prominent investment bank. <<<<<
In the aggregate, political contributions by the Security and Investment industry from 1990 until today have been split roughly 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans. But the big hitter is always Goldman Sachs. Indeed, in OpenSecrets.org's "Top All-Time Donors, 1989-2012" list, only one corporation (AT&T) has given more total money to candidates and parties than Goldman Sachs has. (In the top 20 donors, only three are companies; the rest are unions, industry associations, and political action committees.)
Liberal media outlets make little or no mention of this nation's biggest example of crony capitalism: the revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the U.S. government. Again, it's not just Corzine, Gensler, and Dudley. Former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin are both ex-Goldman. Neel Kashkari, a former vice president at Goldman, was hired by Paulson into the Treasury Department in 2006 and ended up managing the government's $700 billion TARP (bank bailout) fund. Although Paulson is a registered Republican and has given more than $100,000 to Republican candidates and campaigns, his actions while Treasury Secretary seemed, as Robert Novak put it in 2007, those of "less a true Republican secretary than a transition to the next Democratic Treasury." <<<<<
>>>>>A 2009 Mother Jones report notes that the revolving door moves influence in both directions:
Goldman Sachs, which has more than 30 ex-government officials registered to lobby on its behalf, tapped one-time House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) to lobby his former colleagues in Congress on issues related to the Treasury Department's Troubled Assets Relief Program. Goldman, which paid Gephardt's firm $70,000 in the last quarter of 2008, received $10 billion in TARP funds. (As a counterparty to AIG's disastrous credit default swaps, Goldman pocketed an additional $12.9 billion in bailout money given to the insurance firm.) Other insiders lobbying for Goldman include former SEC commissioner Richard Roberts and Faryar Shirzad, once a top economic aide to President George W. Bush.
It's no wonder that many critics of the firm call it "Government Sachs."<<<<<
>>>>>The ever-less-mainstream media avoided covering the story for as long as possible. Can you imagine the air time MF Global's collapse would be receiving if Jon Corzine were a Republican? <<<<<
>>>>>>Again, the real story isn't just Jon Corzine. It's the corrupting influence of Government Sachs, especially among Democrats. The world of people who understand the operations of financial firms well enough to run or regulate them is small. It is unsurprising that there is movement between such firms and important finance-related areas of government. What is surprising and dangerous is the excessive political influence of a single firm, especially—but not only—when the political party it has financed runs the executive branch of our federal government. MF Global's collapse at the hands of Jon Corzine and his well-placed Goldman-Democrat cronies is just the latest example of the damage such influence can inflict on American taxpayers and investors. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/02/15/the-collapse-of-jon-corzine |
