The Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq – a “free-fraud zone” where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped create

On October 13th, when the U.S. Treasury Department announced the team of “seasoned financial 13, 2008 veterans” that will be handling the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, one name jumped out: Reuben Jeffery III, who was initially tapped to serve as chief investment officer for the massive new program.

On the surface, Jeffery looks like a classic Bush appointment. Like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, he’s an alum of Goldman Sachs, having worked on Wall Street for 18 years. And as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2005 to 2007, he proudly advocated “flexibility” in regulation – a laissez-faire approach that failed to rein in the high-risk trading at the heart of the meltdown.

Bankers watching bankers, regulators who don’t believe in regulating – that’s all standard fare for the Bush crew. What’s most striking about Jeffery’s résumé, however, is an item omitted when his new job was announced: He served as executive director of Paul Bremer’s infamous Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, during the early days of the Iraq War. Part of his job was to hire civilian staff, which made him an integral part of the partisan machine that filled the Green Zone with Young Republicans, investment bankers and Dick Cheney interns. Qualifications weren’t a big issue back then, because the staff’s main function was to hand over stacks of taxpayer money to private contractors, who were the ones actually running the occupation. It was this nonstop cash conveyor belt that earned the Green Zone a reputation, in the words of one CPA official, as “a free-fraud zone.” During Senate hearings last year, when Jeffery was asked what he had learned from his experience at the CPA, he said he thought that contracts should be handed out with more “speed and flexibility” – the same philosophy he cited back when he was in charge of regulating Wall Street traders.

Full Story: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/24012700/the_new_trough