Sorry. This being BushAmerica, make that $100K.
Eric Lipton and David Kirkpatrick write in an NYT story today that the same players involved in the S & L bail-out of the Clinton years are playing both sides of the fence in the Bush bail-out, advising wealthy clients how to take advantage of the policies they've just advised the govt to design. Quite a scam if you can work it. As one of these comfortable sleeze artists, John Douglas, put it, "It is a good time to be me." I bet.
A tight-knit group of former senior government officials who were central players in the savings and loan bailout of the 1990s are seeking to capitalize on the latest economic meltdown, enjoying a surge in new business in their work now as private lawyers, investors and lobbyists.
With $700 billion in bailout money up for grabs, and billions of dollars worth of bad debt or failed bank assets most likely headed for sale or auction, these former officials are helping their clients get a piece of the bailout money or the chance to buy, at fire-sale prices, some of the bank assets taken over by the federal government.
“It is a good time to be me,” said John L. Douglas, a partner in Atlanta at the law firm Paul Hastings and a former lawyer for bank regulators who helped create the agency that administered the last federal bailout, the Resolution Trust Corporation.
Some of these former federal officials, like L. William Seidman, the first chairman of the R.T.C., are serving as advisers — sharing ideas with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the transition team for President-elect Barack Obama — even while they are separately directing investors or banks on how to best profit from this advice.
“It is an enormous market,” said Mr. Seidman, who has already joined two such potential money-making efforts and is evaluating proposals to participate in a third. “I am enjoying this.”
This is, of course (or used to be), illegal or at least unethical. One wasn't allowed to advise both sides in a negotiation. It was considered, you know, a MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST. But in BushAmerica, it's how things get done...when they get done at all. What's disturbing is not that Bush is allowing and Henry Pauson encouraging the vultures to feed on the govt corpse - one expects them to do that, that's why they were put there with corporate $$$. What's disturbing is that Obama and his people are right there, acquiescing in illegal and unethical c of i's as if that were the most normal, banal, and common of everyday rituals.
After the Bush Decade and scandal after corporate scandal, we seem to have become so inured to corruption that we've apparently decided to quit worrying about it and accept it as a standard business practice. I shouldn't have to explain why this is a really Bad Idea. That I probably do have to explain it - to Obama's transition team if to no one else - is a signal of how far gone, how low sunk our values and belief in law and civilization are after 30 years of conservative rule.
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