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.
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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.
Perhaps Ms. Sloan hasn’t quite caught on to the drift of the financial bailout package. Where is the conflict of interest when everybody seems to be getting some Fed money whether their bank needs it or not?
We appreciate her pluck and willingness to point out an empty and now violated campaign promise but the helicopter is gassed up and its time to take to the air and scatter mass quantities of tax payer largesse across the fruited plain.
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1 comment:
He's not a lobbyist anymore, he's a Secretary. Way to get them off the street Barry!
'Dawg
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