Meet Mnuchin- Trump's Sec of Treasury, "Swamp Drainer"

UPDATE Nov 30:

As Carl Icahn predicted 2 weeks ago, Trump picked Steve Mnuchin and Wilber Ross to head his Treasury and Commerce departments.

Here again is background and bio on the new appointees...

 Trump is Thrilled to Be in the Crony Club
 

Carl Icahn Today: "Mnuchin, Wilber Ross Considered For Treasury And Commerce"

Run on a Populist Platform. Govern on an Elitist Platform- Soren K.

Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Steven Mnuchin has been recommended by Donald Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury secretary, according to two people familiar with the process, and the choice is awaiting the president-elect’s final decision. Mnuchin, the campaign’s national finance chairman, has been considered the leading candidate for the job.  Before joining Trump, Mnuchin rose through the kind of elite institutions the president-elect spent his campaign vilifying. Mnuchin was:

  1. tapped into Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society,
  2. became a Goldman Sachs partner like his father before him,
  3. ran a hedge fund, worked with George Soros, 
  4. and bought a failed bank, IndyMac, with billionaires including John Paulson. They renamed it OneWest, drew protests for foreclosing on U.S. borrowers, and ultimately generated considerable profits, selling the business last year to CIT Group Inc. for $3.4 billion.

Source: Bloomberg

 

Profile in Privilege

Mnuchin was born into a level of privilege that makes Trump’s deluxe childhood look ordinary. His grandfather, an attorney, co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons, and his father, Robert, was a top Goldman Sachs trader who later became an art dealer. Mnuchin followed his father to Yale, where he lived in the old Taft Hotel with Eddie Lampert, now a billionaire investor, and Sam Chalabi, whose uncle, Ahmad, later ran the Iraqi National Congress. Mnuchin drove a Porsche in college, two friends say. His classmate Michael Danziger, an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, says he was also tapped to join Skull and Bones but turned down the secret society. “You’re going to live to regret this,” he recalls Mnuchin saying. Danziger, who knew his classmate was headed into finance, says he answered: “You put the ‘douche’ in fiduciary.” Mnuchin says the exchange never happened.

full article here

Mnuchin "Can't Run his own little bank"

Swamp Drains Trump

Alice Salles and theAntiMedia.org | On November 8th, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was elected president. To many, the image of an outsider promising to “drain the swamp” was enough to secure him the position.

When he was campaigning, Trump promised to rid Washington D.C. of corrupt politicians and outside interests, evoking the same sentiment President Ronald Reagan did decades ago. One year after taking office, Reagan told Americans it was “hard when you’re up to your armpits in alligators to remember you came here to drain the swamp.”

 

Just days after being elected, the Trump team published and distributed a list showcasing the president-elect’s transition team. What many in the media promptly noticed was the presence of certain corporate consultants and lobbyists, begging the question: Is he or is he not going to “drain the swamp?”

Two names that stand out are Michael Catanzaro and Michael Torrey, who are heading the “energy independence” portfolio and the Department of Agriculture, respectively.

Catanzaro, the New York Times reports, is a lobbyist “whose clients include Devon Energy and Encana Oil and Gas,” two companies that “tried to challenge the Obama administration’s environmental and energy policies.” Torrey is also a lobbyist running “a firm that has earned millions of dollars helping food industry players such as the American Beverage Association and the dairy giant Dean Foods.”

Another lobbyist listed as a member of Trump’s transition team is Michael McKenna, whose client, Southern Company, is said to lobby heavily against climate change legislation.

Also on Trump’s list is the chairman of the Washington law firm representing the Association of American Railroads and the National Asphalt Pavement Association, Martin Whitmer, who is set to oversee “transportation and infrastructure.” Other advisers with ties to a variety of industries include David Malpass, the “former chief economist at Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank that collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis,” and current president of Encima Global, a firm that provides “independent economic and market research to institutional investors.”

Jeffrey Eisenach, who was picked to help Trump restructure the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s staff, is a telecom industry consultant who helped cellular companies fight FCC-proposed regulations mandating “net neutrality,” a policy that was heavily criticized by former congressman Ron Paul for “stifling competition and promoting favoritism.”

Heading the transition team for the Office of the United States Trade Representative is former chief executive of the steel company Nucor, Dan DiMicco. DiMicco is known for arguing that “China is unfairly subsidizing its manufacturing sector at the expense of American jobs.”

While Trump’s pivot is certainly noteworthy, for all the attention lobbyists and certain consultants on his team received from the media, few publications showed much concern for President Obama’s 2008 transition team.

President-Elect Obama filled his team with “more than a dozen [individuals who had] … worked as federally registered lobbyists.”

One of Obama’s transition board members was Mark Gitenstein, a lobbyist who “worked on million-dollar lobbying contracts with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and promoted legislation for giant defense contractors Boeing and General Dynamics.” Before the election, however, candidate Obama had promised to put an end to the “K Street lobbying culture he encountered when he joined the U.S. Senate.”

Despite the names with ties to private industries on Trump’s team, the New York Times adds, a “number of the people on that list are well-established experts with no clear interest in helping private-sector clients,” suggesting that most members of Trump’s transitional team aren’t beholden to private special interests.

Regardless of the team’s lack of private ties, some are veterans from other administrations, such as former Bush administration official and lobbyist Christine Ciccone and former Reagan Attorney General and Heritage fellow Edwin Meese. Others include former president of the Heritage Foundation Edwin Feulner, former Senate Budget Committee staffer Eric Ueland, former Rep. Mike Rogers, and Sen. Jeff Sessions’ former chief of staff, Rick Dearborn.

The team is headed by Vice President-Elect Mike Pence with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie serving as the vice chairman of the transition team’s executive committee, a change adopted recently by the Trump team. Others serving on the Trump executive committee include Dr. Ben Carson, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Sessions, and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who once admitted the rise of the Islamic State was “a willful decision” of the Barack Obama administration. He has also criticized drone warfare and torture.

Read more by Soren K.Group