Darrell Issa’s personal Goldman rep arranged Elizabeth Warren perjury showdown
~ There are more and more wrinkles in the troubling saga of the former Goldman Sachs VP hired by Issa to protect Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms from accountability on the Hill. It now looks as though he was also personally responsible for the scheduling disagreement between Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Patrick McHenry that quickly mushroomed into a debacle of McHenry twice accusing Warren of perjury.
Goldman Sachs has dropped millions on lobbying Congress and now it looks like they've gotten themselves a mole as well, courtesy of Darrell Issa. Issa and McHenry, of course, have themselves been the beneficiaries of generous campaign donations from giant financial firms throughout their careers.
~ While on that subject, the Goldman exec in question claimed last week that he had change his name to honor his family's Transylvanian heritage. Submitted with nothing but amazement, it appears that heritage is about service to an Hungarian fascit military dictator who was an early ally of Hitler's regime in Germany. So... there's that.
~ Some credit where it's due -- Issa has been ahead of the curve on government giving up. Back in January, he proposed not just ending the HAMP program designed to help struggling homeowners, but replacing it with nothing. His plan was to just spend the money instead on... well... nothing. Now it looks like $30 billion originally earmarked for foreclosure relief will be spent on nothing, because congressional Republicans aren't interested in rerouting the money.
~ New numbers show that in the last few years, private companies have seen record profits per employee, indicating that these businesses can but are not hiring. The profit rate has spiked 12% during the same period that Darrell Issa and others have continued insisting that supply-side economic policies of giving more money to private companies would spur job growth.
~ It isn't just looking like Issa's trying to steer morning to the wrong side of the economic equation. The National Association for Business Economics reports this week that an overwhelming majority of its members find the current business regulatory climate to be "'good' for American businesses and the overall economy." That flies in the face of Issa's entire raison d'etre over 8 months at the helm of Oversight, during which he's constantly pressed to relieve what he considers to be the regulatory burden facing businesses. NABE also knocked down the notion of economic uncertainty as a convenient stand-in for a range of other issues, contradicting the multi-millionaire corporate CEO (who's spent hundreds of thousands to elect Republicans) who Issa's been using recently as a spokesperson for small businesses. It's unclear if that's because Issa couldn't find a small business owner who agreed with him, or simply prefered a rich, corporate political ally.
~ In another clash, Issa was on Twitter trumpeting the economic insights of actor Rob Lowe, who has also heard some concern about 'uncertainty.' Issa was so impressed that he loaded the brief clip onto the Oversight Committee's YouTube channel (which is taxpayer-funded). It came a week after Warren Buffett begged the government to stop coddling the super rich and tax them already, setting up an interesting collision of perspectives. Issa has, of course, been a staunch supporter of the Bush tax breaks for the super-rich, also known as tax breaks for Issa personally. Issa gets extra satisfaction from those tax breaks because, breaking with Congressional precedent, he still maintains direct control over his near-half-billion-dollar empire instead of keeping it in a blind trust.
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posted by Lucas O’Connor at 7:00 am