Stoller reviews a recently published book by Tim Geithner entitled Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises; and in his review compares many of Geithner's claims with known facts to find many direct lies, lies of omission, and misleading statements. This lengthy review offers a rich source of information on Geithner as an example of what I often refer to as an Empire director.
However, Stoller in his myopic upper-middle class viewpoint clearly misses the significance of Geithner's rapid rise to power and the crucial role that inner layers of power in the US Empire play in selecting their directors. Stoller can only frame Geithner as a "con-artist" for the Democratic party. Still, he offers so many facts that provide a much broader view of how power is exercised in the US and its empire to serve a tiny elite located in Wall Street and the most powerful financial institutions.
Stoller can't seem to tie the facts together to see that Geithner's career was not accidentally facilitated by having intimate connections to powerful figures such as Henry Kissinger and billionaire Pete Peterson. Also, it's clear that his father's connections, like Obama's, with the powerful Ford Foundation allowed him to be seen as a loyal and trusted member of the inner-most layers of the ruling capitalist class. If Stoller could have seen this larger view, there wouldn't have been any mystery as to the rise of Geithner to the most powerful positions.
...there’s the mystery of how he managed to climb up the career ladder so quickly. He never really explains how this happens. He wasn’t a good student. He notes, as a grad student, that he mostly played pool. “During my orals, when one professor asked which economics journals I read, I replied that I had never read any. Seriously? Yes, seriously. But not long after we returned from our honeymoon in France, Henry Kissinger’s international consulting firm hired me as an Asia analyst; my dean at SAIS had recommended me to Brent Scowcroft, one of Kissinger’s partners.”
I’m sorry, but what? How does this just happen? And it goes on. One day, when Geithner was a junior Treasury civil servant, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen just called him out of the blue to ask his advice on a matter about which he knew nothing. Why? He doesn’t say—he’s just puzzled. Later on, he advances in Treasury without any real credentials in a department where a law degree or economics PhD is essential. Even Alan Greenspan eventually expressed surprise; he had just assumed Geithner had a doctorate. Power just always seemed to flow to Geithner, and he never says why. He knows why, of course—he’s an exceptional political climber. He just doesn’t say who was grooming him, why he ended up where he ended up, and what he paid to get there. It’s clear he had ideas about how the world should work, but he pretends otherwise.
