Timothy Birdnow

The Donald promised to drain the swamp. Why, then, does he keep appointing employees of Goldman Sachs to important offices?

The latest is his transition head at State. Erin Walsh, a former State Department official (and the State Department is hopelessly politicized and corrupt) who moved to Goldman Sachs is now responsible for doing the draining.

Here is part of her bio:

"Prior to Goldman Sachs, Erin served as Senior Advisor in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the US Department of State. She established extensive programs focused on the empowerment of women across 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Previous to that position, she was head of International Strategies and Partnerships for Cisco, bringing an education technology curriculum to 90 developing and emerging market countries through public private partnerships. Erin has also worked for the United Nations Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the US Mission to the United Nations, the Blair House and the White House. Erin earned a BA from Georgetown University and a MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Erin serves on the King Hussein Cancer Foundation, USA advisory board, and as a Woodrow Wilson Center, "Women in Public Service Project” Champion."

End excerpt.

So, she works for GS, but prior was active in "empowering women" in foreign countries and screwing with education. She worked for the utterly corrupt U.N. and even more corrupt White House.

Doesn't sound much like a swamp drainer, rather like a swamp rat in her element.

Trump has appointed a host of Goldman-Sachs employees or former employees, including his Chief of Staff Stephen Bannon. His list includes Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former GS partner, Gary D. Cohn, former GS #2 as head of the National Economic Council, Anthony Scaramucci - a member of the transition team, Monica Crowley was a former GS associate and a member of Trump's National Security team. There are any number of these swamp rats moving into positions of power despite Trump saying Goldman Sachs robbed the working people of America.

You do not drain a swamp then pour stagnant water back in.

Goldman Sachs is sometimes called "Government Sachs" because it has had a heavy hand on the levers of power inside the U.S. government for decades. Here is a rundown of the decades of GS connected bigwigs in top government posts. The influence of Goldman Sachs goes back to the left wing Johnson Administration and includes such luminaries as:

Henry Fowler, LBJ's Treasury Secretary
Deputy Secretary of state John C. Whitehead
Treasury's Robert Rubin
Stephen Friedman George W. Bush's chief economic advisor
John Corzine
Gary Gensler, Bill Clinton's Commodity Futures Trading Commission at Treasury
Kenneth Brody, Clinton's president of the Export-Import Bank
Bush Jr. White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton
Robert Steele, undersecretary of Treasury
William Dudley, head of the Federal Reserve in New York
And Henry "Hank" Paulson, Bush's Treasury Secretary, the man who, along with Timothy Geitner, was most responsible for the economic collapse in 2008 that ushered in the Great Recession and gave us 8 years of Barack Obama.
(See William Been's Masters of Audacity and Deceit to see how Paulson was at the heart of the disaster and likely working with the Democrats.)

It's a strange swamp draining that puts the water back in.

The whole point of Trump was to rid ourselves of the influence of these types of people, yet here we are with Trump appointing the same people he promised to chuck. This does not make me feel comfortable at all with him; it's as though we have been successfully fooled and business as usual will resume. Please note that most of these Goldman Sachs people hold internationalist views.

State may be headed by Tillerson, an outsider from Goldman Sachs, he holds a number of internationalist views, as I pointed out in my article on him.

I realize it is hard to find people who are qualified outside of the swamp, but surely they could try. There are lots of talented executives and administrators in the heartland who do not need to work their way up through Goldman Sachs, or through the other power brokers. There are other universities besides Harvard and Yale, and there are other government people outside of Washington and New York. Why not go to the states, find some ex governors or lieutenant governors? Why not look to midwestern companies? Younger, non Wall Street entities? I don't like what is happening with these appointments at all.

If I wanted to be beholden to Goldman Sachs I would have applied for a job there. Americans are supposed to own our government, not a fat-cat corporation.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 01:19 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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