All hail the new treasury secretary! All hail the bold new start that he represents!
The official spin on Henry M. “Hank” Paulson, Jr. is that this CEO from Goldman Sachs brings credibility, financial star power, gravitas, and dynamic new energy to the shaping of George W’s economic policies. Much is being made of the fact that Paulson has an environmentalist streak and disagrees with Bush’s head-in-the-sand stance on global warming. See, they say, Hank is his own guy – so, look for changes!
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Yeah, but be sure to bring a big magnifying glass. You see, Paulson isn’t in charge of environmental policy – his turf is the economy, and on this the Wall Street banker is in lockstep with the same plutocratic policies the Bushites have been pushing for five years.
After all, Hank took home $38 million in pay last year and is sitting on a $700 million fortune. He’s all for Bush’s cuts in taxes on capital gains and dividends– nearly half a which will go to millionaires like him. He’s also been the premier Wall Street pusher of moving American capital into ventures in China – ventures that move more U.S. jobs to that low-wage sanctuary. As for the crushing national debt that Bush is putting on the backs of our children, Paulson airily calls it “a necessary and understandable side effect of what needed to be done to stimulate the economy.” Of course, it’s the millionaires who’ve had their economies “stimulated” – while America’s workaday majority hasn’t even kept up with inflation.
Hank has also backed the Bushites with big bucks, putting more than $150,000 into George W’s ’04 race and hundreds of thousands more into GOP congressional campaigns.
This is Jim Hightower saying… This guy isn’t about bringing any policy changes, but about adding some PR pizzaz to the same, tired approach. As a Paulson friend says admiringly: “Hank is a salesman’s salesman.”
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