Liberal Media Anxious To Get Geithner Confirmed
By Cliff Kincaid
January 22, 2009
Page 2 of 3
The hapless Senator Max Baucus, the committee chairman, accidentally wandered into this delicate subject of economic warfare, offering an opinion about America's "addiction" to buying Chinese goods and China's "addiction" to lending us money. All of this became a discussion about the U.S.-China "strategic dialogue," which was launched by Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and a Geithner associate, but neither Baucus nor Geithner wanted to address the fact that China is under no obligation to buy any more of our debt.
Clearly, Geithner's job as Treasury Secretary will be to make sure that the Chinese money keeps flowing into the U.S. economy and that the communist regime keeps buying U.S. debt. It is the same policy that helped get the U.S. into this financial mess.
Geithner, who speaks Chinese and lived in China, is a protégé and former employee of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, now an adviser to companies doing business in China and a prominent board member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. This is the group that recently rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in celebration over China's economic ascent. All of this was done out in the open, but few in the media noticed or commented upon its significance.
Geithner's father, former Ford Foundation official Peter F. Geithner, sits on the board with Kissinger of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He sat behind his son at the Senate confirmation hearing. He supervised the work of Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, when she worked for the foundation in Indonesia.
Geithner's taxes are a distraction not only to the Obama Administration and congressional liberals but to a foreign policy establishment with extensive connections in the major media. It's no accident that the Council on Foreign Relations, which operates in part on the basis of major funding from news media organizations and their parent companies, has many media members.
But taxes do matter to millions of Americans who are forced to pay them on time. And this is why so many people are calling Senate offices in protest of the Geithner nomination. It is a classic case of the elites versus the people.
The people can still act. The Senate switchboard is 202-224-3121.
The nub of the issue is that Geithner did not pay certain taxes for the years 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, when he worked for the International Monetary Fund. In 2006, after an IRS audit identified his failure to pay these taxes in 2003 and 2004, he paid the taxes for those two years. But he didn't pay the taxes for 2001 and 2002 until he was approached for the job as Treasury Secretary. This is about two months ago and eight or nine years late.
Wouldn't it have occurred to him after the IRS audit in 2006 had identified the problem for 2003 and 2004 that he also owed taxes for the preceding two years? After all, he had to know that he had made the same "mistake" on those taxes for all four of those years.
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