Toss Off the GOP-Goldman Elite

It’s hard to imagine a better endorsement of Donald Trump’s economic policies – whatever they may be, whenever he finds the time to explain them – than the recent endorsement of Hillary Clinton by former Goldman Sachs CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.  As the man in charge of the biggest explosion of corporate welfare in world history – the “TARP” bailouts, he defined himself as a sworn enemy of capitalism and a socialist when it comes to the capital markets.  Socializing billions of dollars in investment bank, insurance company, and automobile industry losses with taxpayer dollars qualifies Paulson as deserving of the S-word label.  As such, Hillary Clinton may well have found a new political and financial soulmate.

Paulson began his career and cut his political teeth with some of the sleaziest and most disastrous political hacks in American history – first as a Pentagon assistant to the secretary of defense from 1970-1972, then as a Nixon administration assistant to John Ehrlichman, the convicted Watergate felon.  Such sterling credentials earned him a position at Goldman Sachs, where he presumably mastered the political dirty trick skills that he must have learned from Ehrlichman and the rest to eventually claw his way up to the CEO position.

The real purpose of the bailout of GM (and Chrysler) was a demonstration of why the Republican Party is known in some quarters as The Stupid Party.  Had those two companies downsized or even declared bankruptcy, and the free market was allowed to work, there would have simply been a transfer of automobile production (and jobs) from the older, less-efficient, unionized factories to the mostly non-union factories in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama.  These are all right-to-work states where Republicans are more prevalent than in the heavily unionized “rust belt” states.  The “GM bailout” was partly bailout of the United Autoworkers Union and its bankrupted pension plan.  It is safe to assume that it did not result in a single vote, or a single dollar in campaign contributions to Paulson’s Republican party.

After showering Goldman Sachs and his other Wall Street cronies with tens of billions of tax dollars, Paulson returned to Goldman where he must have been very handsomely rewarded indeed.  When it comes to the Wall Street banksters like Hank Paulson, the “revolving door” between business and government is literally paved with gold.  His endorsement of “pay-to-play” corporate welfare queen Hillary Clinton is as perfect a political match as one can imagine.

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