Nice Guy Timothy Geithner Should Do the Right Thing: Quit

The angular patrician face conveys seriousness, not avarice. Yet the man Obama tapped for his Treasury Secretary owed the IRS $34,000 in FICA taxes he should have paid while he worked for the International Monetary Fund. The IMF is a sort of watchdog on world economic matters. It has both humanitarian and fiduciary goals. It is a large scale organization which employs about 2400 persons, most of whom are provided with earmarked payments for paying their taxes.

Barack Obama doesn't think this is a problem. He calls it an understandable mistake. He points out that Geithner paid his tax bill. The worshipful Obama media is bemused, characterizes it as the precocious mistake of a financial wunderkind. The Republicans like Geithner and are also willing to dismiss Geithner's tax evasion as a faux pas. The Wall Street Journal offers a somewhat bemused editorial entitled "A Geithner Tax Amnesty." The newspaper's suggestion is that everyone in America who owes similar amounts be given the same sort of tax forgiveness which we are about to give Geithner. I think that is a fair idea, but fairness is not the objective here, certainly, and it would be naive to think it is.

It now seems to follow that the economic bankruptcy which America faces was preceded by the same type of moral bankruptcy that we are asked to accept in the appointment of nice guy Timothy Geithner. Shelter your larcenous hearts and look the other way. Isn't that what they did at Fanny Mae? Isn't that what they did in the packaging and selling of derivatives? Isn't that what they did when they used scare tactics to "improve" a situation which becomes progressively worse with each dollor squandered in the hopes of creating false bottoms?

And worse, this type of wilful myopia is sanctioned by the man we have elected to the presidency. Isn't that proof that we are born fools? Isn't that proof that we have become willing slaves by allowing our money to be stripped away to pay bankers and power brokers who work in a conjoined fraternity of mutual enrichment?