What's Going On With The Treasury Secretary?

BECAUSE of my rising anger at our crumbling economy and those who were asleep at the wheel and allowed so much of it to crumble, I've been paying close attention to Tim Geithner, our new treasury secretary. He recently announced that new guidelines for bailing out financial institutions won't require them to free up credit and lend the money to businesses and the ordinary Americans who need the loans.

How can this be?

Today, Frank Rich in yet another provocative NY Times column opines:

[T]he political problems caused by Geithner’s tax infraction are secondary to the larger questions raised by his past interaction with the corporations now under his purview. To his credit, Geithner, like Obama, has devoted his career to public service, not buckraking. But he still has not satisfactorily explained why, as president of the New York Fed, he failed in his oversight of the teetering Wall Street institutions. Nor has he told us why, in his first major move in his new job, he secured a waiver from Obama to hire a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. Nor, in his confirmation hearings, did he prove any more credible than the Bush Treasury secretary, the Goldman Sachs alumnus Hank Paulson, in explaining why Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail while A.I.G. and Citigroup were spared.

What's going on here?