Author Archives: AnnabelCorrigan

Goldman Sachs Has Been Very Good to Trump’s Top Economic Adviser

by AnnabelCorrigan Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump the tycoon railed against big banks, claimed he cared passionately about the little guy, and vowed to make the economy work for struggling middle-class Americans. But after winning, he placed the American economy in the hands of Gary Cohn, the chief operating officer and president of Goldman Sachs. In January, Trump named Cohn chairman of the National Economic Council, the president’s top financial and economic whizzes. Cohn would be the highest authority on the economy within the White House. He quit his Goldman Sachs gig, but he left with an estimated $285 million severance package and agreed to sell a $16 million-stake in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

Cohn certainly lives in a different economic reality than most Americans, and thanks to financial disclosure forms released on Friday night by the White House—which cover 180 of its officials and staffers and detail their finances when they arrived at the White House—the public can see just how different.

In 2015 and 2016, according to the form for Cohn, he earned between $39 million and $45 million from Goldman Sachs. This includes salary ($1.8 million last year), annual $5.4 million cash bonuses, and tens of millions of dollars in stock options, dividends, and interest. This doesn’t count what he brought in via various Goldman Sachs-operated retirement accounts. Nor does it take into account the money he pocketed from his sprawling brokerage accounts, which included Goldman Sachs investment funds. Cohn also had millions invested in hedge funds, real estate properties around the country, and numerous companies, including that Chinese bank, a high-end cosmetic retailer, and multiple medical technology firms. All told, it appears Cohn earned as much as $75 million last year.

Cohn is not the only Goldman alum to join the Trump administration. Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary, worked at Goldman for years, and last month Trump hired another former Goldman Sachs top executive to be Mnuchin’s No. 2 at Treasury. The bank has been wildly successful over the last two decades, but it also has become a symbol of Wall Street’s excesses. It played a key role in the 2008 financial crash that led to a nationwide economic meltdown. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton was slammed repeatedly—by both her Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders and Trump—for giving paid speeches to Goldman executives. And before he wrapped up the GOP nomination, Trump attacked Republican rival Ted Cruz, pointing out that Cruz’s wife worked at Goldman Sachs and that he had received a loan from the firm.

Cohn’s full financial disclosure can be found below.

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Gary Cohn Financial Disclosure (PDF)

Gary Cohn Financial Disclosure (Text)

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Goldman Sachs Has Been Very Good to Trump’s Top Economic Adviser

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Awlaki Assassination Memo Finally Released

by AnnabelCorrigan Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

A federal court has finally released the Obama administration’s memo justifying the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen who was apparently a top Al Qaeda operative. I think we mostly knew this already, but the memo confirms that the decision to kill Awlaki was based primarily on the Authorization to Use Military Force passed a few weeks after 9/11:

“We believe that the AUMF’s authority to use lethal force abroad also may apply in appropriate circumstances to a United States citizen who is part of the forces of an enemy authorization within the scope of the force authorization,” reads the Justice Department memorandum, written for attorney general Eric Holder on 16 July 2010 and ostensibly intended strictly for Awlaki’s case.

Among those circumstances: “Where high-level government officials have determined that a capture operation is infeasible and that the targeted person is part of a dangerous enemy force and is engaged in activities that pose a continued and imminent threat to US persons or interests.”

I’ve never taken a firm stand on the decision to kill Awlaki. Everything I’ve read persuades me that he was, indeed, a high-ranking Al Qaeda operative, and a dangerous one. If we were engaged in a normal war, there would be no question about our right to treat him like any other enemy combatant.

But we aren’t engaged in a normal war, are we? There’s no specific enemy, no specific battlefield, and no way of knowing if and when the war is over. The AUMF is open-ended, both in time and geography, and is famously vague about just who it authorizes the president to make war against. It specifies “those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” and that takes in a helluva lot of ground.

Thus, the problem I’ve always had isn’t specifically with the targeting of Awlaki, but with the fact that the targeting was based on such a flimsy legal pretext. However, despite the fact that I’m disappointed in Obama’s decision to interpret the AUMF widely, most of the blame on that score should be directed not at Obama, but at Congress. The AUMF is now more than a dozen years old, and it’s long past time for Congress to emerge from its fetal crouch and write a new law specifically designed for our present circumstances. Among other things, it should address the president’s ability to target American citizens for killing. If Congress wants to give the president that power, it should debate and pass a law and the courts should rule on its constitutionality. That’s the rule of law. And regardless of whether I liked the law, I’d accept it if Congress passed it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court declared it constitutional.

Instead, as usual, Congress prefers to do nothing. This leaves them free to kibitz if they don’t like what the president is doing, or to simply avoid having to take a stand at all. It’s shameful.

Read the full Justice Department memo here.

Source:

Awlaki Assassination Memo Finally Released

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