Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Who is Robert Steel?

He's the new deputy mayor for economic development, that's who. Mayor Bloomberg appointed him to the job on Monday. Naturally the press and the powers-that-be are cheerleading the appointment, saying he's a great choice. Oh, he has glittering credentials, one of those smartest guys in the room types.

I'll admit that I know nothing about this guy. Problem is, neither does anyone else.

But there are two things on his resume that I find highly disturbing. First, he used to be a top guy at Goldman Sachs, the company that Matt Taibbi so brilliantly described as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity." He wrote of the company in 2009: "...the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates ... The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going."

Second (as if that wasn't bad enough), Mr. Streel was also an undersecretary for domestic finance in the Bush administration. You know, the same administration that exploded the national debt, bogged us down in two unwinnable wars, corrupted the Justice Department, ignore Hurricane Katrina, and oversaw this country's collapse into the greatest economic crises since the Great Depression?

Yes, that administration. This Steel guy worked for a company and an administration that, in their various slimy ways, destroyed the nation's economy in order to benefit the wealthy. And now, apparently, he's coming to NYC to do the same thing to all of us.

Happy happy joy joy!

Only a pompous, out-of-touch elitist like Bloomberg could think this guy is a good choice to run the city's economy. In my opinion, guys like Steel should be in jail, not serving in government.

Be afraid NYC. Be very, very afraid.

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