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A post by Pat

Did you get in early on the subprime scheme?
Are you a CEO affiliated with a bank under federal probe?
Are you a bundler for the Democrat Party?
Are you a union bigshot who has taken the Fifth?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, you could be one of the distinguished citizens outside the government who qualify for the Economic Advisory Board.

Obama said he wanted to bring a diverse set of perspectives and voices from different parts of the country and different sectors of the economy to bear in the formulation and evaluation of economic policy and this is what came of it.

Big donors dominate Obama panel

… Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, surfaced during a Clinton-era federal investigation into a money-laundering scheme involving the Democratic Party and Teamster’s President Ron Carey. Court documents and a congressional report claimed that Mr. Trumka helped divert $150,000 in union funds to Mr. Carey’s 1996 re-election campaign through a liberal consumer-advocacy group known as Citizen Action.

Mr. Trumka, former head of the United Mine Workers, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to testify on three occasions before a federal grand jury in New York, the House education and the workforce subcommittee on oversight and investigations, and a federal elections appeal master called in to investigate the Carey campaign

Penny Pritzker, chairwoman of Classic Residence by Hyatt, a chain of luxury senior living communities. Listed among Forbes magazine’s 2008 richest Americans with a net worth of $2 billion, she served as the campaign finance chairwoman for Mr. Obama and was one of his bundlers, personally raising $200,000. Ms. Pritzker saw her Chicago-area bank shut down after it pursued a failed strategy of subprime loans.

Critics have cited [a] letter as evidence of Ms. Pritzker’s continuing stewardship of the bank and her advocacy for a subprime lending practice that Mr. Obama has criticized. In the letter, Ms. Pritzker wrote that her family was recapitalizing the bank and pledged to “once again restore Superior’s leadership position in subprime lending.” The bank was shut down two months later.

…Ms. Pritzker and two other advisory board members – Robert Wolf, president and chief operating officer for UBS Investment Bank and chairman and chief executive officer for UBS Group for the Americas, and Mark Gallogly, director of Dana Holding Corp. – are listed as bundlers for the Obama campaign

Eleven of the 16 new board members personally contributed a total of $262,698 to Mr. Obama and other Democrats during the 2008 elections, led by Mr. Gallogly with $73,600, including $2,300 to Mr. Obama. The two unions represented on the panel – the AFL-CIO by Mr. Trumka and the Service Employees International Union by Anna Burger, the union’s secretary treasurer – accounted for more than $3.6 million in donations to Democrats in 2008.

There are less notorious characters on the team. With few exceptions, they are also Democrat contributors.

There have been some embarrassing picks in the past for a spot in the Obama administration so the vetting is really tightening up. We see the evidence of that in those sterling picks mentioned above. The scrutiny is so intense that those who did manage to pass the high ethical bar are complaining about lack of staff.

Vetting Delays Obama Picks.

The White House defended its progress. “We are on target to put together a team of the best and brightest in all areas of government, and less than six weeks into the presidency we have not only filled hundreds of key positions, but we have done so with the highest ethical bar in government history,” Jennifer Psaki, deputy press secretary, said yesterday.

But Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, whose agency is a critical player in infrastructure spending under the economic stimulus bill, still has called the vetting a “complicated, tortuous process” and a “real slog” that is challenging his department’s effectiveness.

Tough luck for that Canadian bus-riding, cannibalistic decapitator. According to the high ethical standards apparent from the Economic Advisory Board menagerie, if he had been a big Democrat contributor, he could have gotten a job as a transportation expert the minute he gets out of the asylum.

(HT Jeweytunes)