Feb 12 2009
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Timothy Geithner and the Ruling Class 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.
