Jack Lew, Head of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments Arm, Is Obama’s Choice To Lead Treasury

Several of us have blogged about this previously at FreedomWorks, but I simply can’t get over how absurd it is that President Obama has nominated Jack Lew for Secretary of the Treasury. (Click here for a list of all Jack Lew articles on the blog.) If you thought Timothy Geithner was bad, you should check out Jack Lew’s record. Between Geithner and Lew, it should be plainly obvious to anyone that Obama has no intention of holding Wall Street accountable, despite his campaign promises to the contrary.

In 2007 during the campaign, Obama said, “When I am President, I will make it absolutely clear that working in an Obama administration is not about serving your former employer, your future employer, or your bank account – it’s about serving your country, and that’s what comes first.”

Over at National Review, Rich Lowry paints a bit of a different picture of Obama’s choice. “He left the Clinton administration, where he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, for what turned out to be the extremely lucrative field of nonprofit education. At New York University, he made more than $800,000 in 2002. According to his W-2, examined by staff on Capitol Hill, he made $1.2 million in total compensation in 2006.” Later, according to Lowry, “He went to Citigroup, which NYU had made its primary private lender for student loans in exchange for a cut of those loans. (Coincidences happen to everyone, including Jack Lew.) At Citi, Lew established beyond a doubt his expertise at getting paid. In 2008, as the bank nearly blew up and laid off one-seventh of its employees, Lew ran its disastrous Alternative Investments unit — and got paid $1.1 million.”

In 2012, The Atlantic called Lew a “part of the 1%”:

Don’t take his liberalism to mean that Lew is a wild-eyed socialist though. In fact, he’s a former banker. In 2008, he served as chief operating officer of Citigroup Alternative Investments, a division of the Wall Street behemoth. That group was involved in controversial practices like proprietary trading, and was involved in shorting the housing market as the economy lurched toward collapse.

Yes, the man who ran point for some of the shadiest practices by one of the biggest players in the economic meltdown, and got huge bonuses for doing so, is the man Obama wants running the Treasury.

Look, this is not even about policy decisions or what a cabinet nominee did in his previous stops. It’s all about the hypocrisy of Barack Obama. This nomination is a perfect embodiment of where Obama truly stands in his self-professed fight to save the middle class. This really is a reflection of those who voted for Obama on his style over his substance. The country has swallowed his Robin Hood talking points hook, line and sinker. But his policies and the people he puts in place in the most important positions in our government reveal that he has very little interest in living up to his campaign rhetoric of saving the middle class and protecting Main Street against Wall Street.