Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Geithner enlists lobbyist as top aide

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner picked a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist as a top aide Tuesday, the same day he announced rules aimed at reducing the role of lobbyists in agency decisions. < Mark Patterson will serve as Geithner's chief of staff at Treasury, which oversees the government's $700 billion financial bailout program. Goldman Sachs received $10 billion of that money. Melanie Sloan, executive director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said President Obama was retreating from his own ethics rules barring lobbyists from working on the issues they lobbied about during the previous two years. "It makes it appear that they are saying one thing and doing another," she said. **Please note that as of 1/28/09--the website for Ethics at whitehouse.gov is currently "under construction"--though it was up and running last week. Is someone having second thoughts?** (website)
Politics at its finest.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I suppose next you're going to tell me that Barney Frank's boyfriend is a Fannie Mae exec?!
What? He was? And he did benefit from Barney's legislation?

Anonymous said...

It is a perfectly appropriate thing for a Democrat to whine about ethics and then do the inexorably unethical. Has been since Clinton. Oh, is there another Clinton? And does her husband receive mucho funding from Arab sheiks? Gosh, is that a conflict?