Ok one victory for the good guys...
Politico:
Antonio Weiss, the Wall Street banker who President Barack Obama had picked to be the third-ranking official at the Treasury Department, has asked that the president not resend his nomination to the Senate following a major backlash from progressive Democrats who questioned his ties to the financial industry, POLITICO has learned.
Obama accepted the decision, which Weiss conveyed in a letter to the president over the weekend. But the Lazard banker will still join the administration in the position of counselor to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, which does not require Senate confirmation.
Of course, Weiss will still ends up in the mix of the people who influence Treasury policy since he is going to be a counselor to Lew.
The opposition to Lew was focused specifically on his work at Lazard that reportedly included corporate tax inversions such as the one undertaken by Burger King (I've written about the Burger King tax inversion here, among other posts on the topic).
However, it's still important that the larger point was made: the government has plenty of people influencing economic policy who come from the very institutions that have caused the economic crisis...not just the recent Depression but the crisis facing workers that has been building and escalating over decades.
The credit for this has to go to Elizabeth Warren who spearheaded the opposition. Here she talks about that opposition in the context of the general revolving door between Wall Street executives and the Treasury Department:
Bernie Sanders on this:
“I have no personal animosity toward Mr. Weiss but I am very glad he withdrew his nomination. The president needs economic advisors who do not come from Wall Street. In fact, he needs advisors prepared to stand up to Wall Street. We need economic policies in this country which ask the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share of taxes and which create millions of good-paying jobs.”
3:25 PM PT: I updated the title to recognize the central role played by Elizabeth Warren in this fight.
Tue Jan 13, 2015 at 4:57 AM PT: I thought I'd post here in the update section a comment, roughly, I made below: some people defend Weiss a la why was he picked on and isn't this punishing someone who dared bring his private sector experience to government.
This meme repeats itself on and off. IMHO, experience in the private sector should not be the "Pass go, collect your $200" entry into government. I can give you a long list of people who were in the private sector who are complete incompetents/fools/bad managers/dishonest/immoral--and actually because, at the higher levels of the glorified private sector, there is never accountability for performance, beyond the rhetoric, the glorified private sector churns out bad manager after bad manager. What people in the private sector do excel at is touting what they do as some magic or alchemy that no one else can understand, and everyone else should just stand in awe and thanks that someone in the great private sector would climb down from Mt Olympus to give us the benefit of experience...please...
That said, in my opinion, Weiss wasn't the worst human being who has been on the edge of creeping into government--especially when *Dick Cheney* is used as a yardstick. I think what Warren did--correctly in my view--was use him to make a point about the influence of Wall Street in government.
It's kind of ironic--Republicans tried to use Warren as an example of the big-bad people who want to shackle the vaunted "private sector" on Wall Street (which had just fleeced millions of Americans) via the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, making it clear that they would block her appointment...so they got her as a Senator instead. Maybe Weiss can now run for the Senate--though I think once his little gig is over at Treasury he'll probably prefer to go back to Lazard or somewhere similar to rake in more fees to buy that 3rd or 4th house, or upgrade his wine cellar, or maybe afford a Gulfstream.