Timothy Geithner and the Ruling Class

by Morgan Reynolds
by Morgan Reynolds

A new, fact-rich book by investigative journalist Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means For America (2009), performs a vital service by clarifying how intertwined oil, Wall Street, intelligence and the Ivy League Universities are. These are the "powerful forces" Baker identifies that rule America. As Baker explains, the "fundamentally amoral financial-intelligence-resource apparatus" antedates World War II: "Before there was an Office of Strategic Services (July 1942–October 1945) or a Central Intelligence Agency (founded in 1947), corporations and attorneys who represented international businesses often employed associates in their firms as private agents to gather data on competitors and business opportunities abroad. So it was only to be expected that many of the first OSS recruits were taken from the ranks of oil companies, Wall Street banking firms, and Ivy League universities and often equated the interests of their high-powered business partners with the national interest" (p. 17).

When referring to a shadowy, collective entity like the "ruling class," we need to deflect the slur of "conspiracy theorist." Justin Raimondo put it best in his comment on the penetrating analysis of Murray Rothbard: "Here there is no single agency, no omnipotent central committee that issues directives, but a multiplicity of interest groups and factions whose goals are generally congruent. In this milieu, there are familial, social, and economic connections, as well as ideological complicity, and none is better than Rothbard at ferreting out and unraveling these biographical details. Taken together, the author's small and studied brushstrokes paint a portrait of a ruling class whose ruthlessness is surpassed only by its brazen disloyalty to the nation" (Murray Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, 1984). The nature of the ruling class has never been portrayed more accurately.

Enter Timothy Geithner, President Obama’s "new" Treasury Secretary who bravely announced a "new" trillion-dollar plan this week for "stabilizing the financial system" yet, it turned out, he had no plan to announce. Like his predecessor, the charming and vivacious Hank Paulson from Goldman Sachs, the new non-plan will be a monstrous bailout of Wall Street bankers at the expense of the American people with a flimsy cover story about getting the credit markets going again to speed economic recovery on behalf of the American people. Geithner’s flop on Tuesday proves that he and his cronies are making it up as they go along in their attempts to repair the unrepairable.

Who is Geithner? He is a creature of the eastern banking establishment and ruling class through and through. His résumé nicely matches his actions in handing out government money and guarantees to the "right people." Geithner’s father Peter is director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation, a New World Order operation. Peter Geithner oversaw the "microfinance" programs developed in Indonesia by Ann Dunham-Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother. Geithner’s maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Eisenhower and vice president of Ford Motor Company, according to Wikipedia. Geithner’s wife Carole Marie, like Geithner a 1983 graduate of Dartmouth College (Ivy League), is daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sonnenfeld of Princeton, N.J., a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University (Ivy League) for 27 years.

After Timothy Geithner graduated from Dartmouth he picked up an M.A. at Johns Hopkins in something called "international economics" and East Asian studies. That is the extent of Geithner’s formal training in economics, as far as I can tell. Then he worked for Kissinger and Associates for three years, a Rockefeller satrapy, before a series of government appointments, mostly at Treasury where he was Under Secretary for International Affairs under Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Rockefeller’s notorious Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and then Lawrence Summers of Harvard University (Ivy League), World Bank and CFR. Summers, of course, is currently Obama’s head of the National Economic Council. Want a solution for the financial and economic woes? Why, hire the same experts who caused the problem(s).

Geithner departed Treasury to join the International Monetary Fund and CFR in 2001–2. In October 2003 he was appointed president of the New York Fed where he subsequently arranged rescues of Bear Stearns, AIG and other well-connected, world-class losers, all in the best interest of the American people, of course.

Geithner is change? A better slogan would be "continuity" or more of the same. Perhaps we should call the new "stabilization" spending PP: "Plunder for Plutocrats," for that is what it is. This folly cannot persist, if only because someday there will be little or nothing left to plunder.

February 12, 2009

Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D. [send him mail], is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX. He served as chief economist for the US Department of Labor during 2001–2, George W. Bush's first term. Visit his new website.

Copyright © 2009 LewRockwell.com

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