Apparently That Hope And Change Thing Doesn't Include Wall Street Predators

American president's, regardless of party, usually pick an economic team friendly to Wall Street. In fact, key Wall Street players usually are the heart and "soul" of presidential economic teams. Peter Orszag may be a decent OMB director but the team is mostly a bunch of predatory bankster shills, barely an iota better than the disastrous team Bush fielded. Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin and the rest of the team may get high marks from Villagers for being "bipartisan," but, clearly, they work for the corporate managerial elites and ownership class, not for the American people. Geithner, under attack from the right-- an attack motivated exclusively by partisan rancor-- for advocating basically GOP approaches to economic policies, has few progressive voices defending him. Progressives don't want to attack Obama but they sure wish Geithner and Summers would fall off a cliff-- or onto their swords. Today the White House seems to be floating rumors that they could get someone even worse than Geithner for Treasury Secretary, someone like JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon.

Right now Geithner is as busy defending the status quo as any Republican Secretary of the Treasury would. He vociferously opposes the kind of financial transaction tax that the world needs the U.S. to buy into before moving forward.

The fourth highest ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, John Larson, has put forward a plan to impose a 0.25% tax on derivatives transactions. Another congressman, Peter DeFazio, has recruited five colleagues and an array of unions to champion his proposal for a much broader tax... Wall Street remains opposed, arguing that any measure would hurt wealth generation. But Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the US treasury could be persuaded to see a tax as an aid in plugging a huge looming budget deficit. "I think it has a chance," said Baker. "People are really, really angry with the financial industry. We do have budget deficits and this is getting a lot of interest."

Among those signed up to DeFazio's plan are America's largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO, and activist groups such as Americans for Financial Reform and the Campaign for America's Future.

The Obama administration, which has been reluctant to cast itself as anti-Wall Street, is unenthusiastic. The US treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, said this week that he has "not seen a version of that tax that I think would be appropriate for our country," though activists suggested this was a softening of his line from earlier in the month, when Geithner simply said that a financial transaction tax was "not something we are prepared to support."

The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said a Tobin tax was "not a priority" but she did not rule it out, saying simply that the US could not act single-handedly: "We couldn't do it alone, we'd have to do it as an international initiative."

Wall Street, having largely dodged any substantive crackdown on bonuses, is yet to take the idea seriously. Americans, who are less likely than the British to have employer-managed pension plans, invest directly in the stockmarket more commonly than Europeans, and any tax would face stiff opposition from free marketeers.

The Democratic House leadership, despite signals from Obama's Wall Streeters, are moving forward, albeit cautiously, with a tax on large financial transactions to help pay for jobs-creation legislation. The Democrats pushing it-- populists Pete DeFazio (D-OR), Michael Arcuri (D-NY), Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), Bruce Braley (D-IA), Betty Sutton (D-OH), Bob Filner (D-CA) and Tom Perriello (D-VA)-- want to raise $150 billion a year with the transaction tax, half to pay down the deficit and half to fund job creation efforts.

The tax rate would range from 0.02 percent for swaps, futures and credit-default swaps to 0.25 percent for stocks, according to the lawmakers’ letter. Options would be taxed at the rate that applies to the type of the underlying asset.

The tax would eliminate the incentive for “excessive speculation because much of the excessive risk on Wall Street is high-volume, short-term speculative trading,” the letter said. “We must make it clear to our constituents that we know Main Street is suffering and a restored Wall Street should now share in its recovery with everyone else.”

The tax would be refunded for transactions less than $100,000 and for those involving assets kept in individual retirement accounts, education savings accounts and health savings accounts, according to the letter.

The organizations that control and carefully steer the teabagger groups are hysterically opposed but feel there is little to fear because of adamant opposition in the highly bought-off Senate. Surely it won't help that yesterday reports seeped out that Goldman Sachs only pays an effective 1% corporate income tax-- $14 million for Bush's last year in office (2008), down drastically from the $6 billion they paid in 2007.

U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said steps by Goldman Sachs and other banks shifting income to countries with lower taxes is cause for concern.

“This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs,” Doggett said. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore.”