“All the big players have been sheep-dipped in a world view that becomes a reflex. The twin seductions of money and Washington group think have led our Wise Men into one disaster after another in both domestic and foreign policy. In view of their lamentable record over the last decade and a half, their advice and counsel is probably no better than that of a snake-handling shaman in the remotest hollow of West Virginia, and certainly a good deal more expensive.”
Mike Lofgren
“After dinner, Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them.
Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say.
But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.
I had been warned.”
Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance
And he said to me, he said, “Neil, you’re a smart guy. You’re a young guy. You’re a talented guy. You got your whole future in front of you. You’ve got a young family that’s starting out. But you’re doing yourself real harm.” And the reason why you’re doing yourself real harm is the harsh tone that I had towards the government as well as to Wall Street, based on what I was seeing down in Washington. And he told me that if I wanted to get a job out on the Street afterwards, it was going to really be hard for me.
And I explained to him that I wasn’t really interested in that. And he said, “Well, maybe a judgeship. Maybe an appointment from the Obama administration for a federal judgeship.” And I said, “Well, again, that would be great. But I don’t really think that’s going to happen with my criticisms.” And he said it didn’t have to be that way. “If all you do is soften your tone, be a little bit more upbeat, all this stuff can happen for you.”
And I felt a real obligation and sense of duty to fulfill the oath that I took in Secretary Paulson’s office on December 15th, 2008 to do the job that I was sent down there to do. But I wasn’t really tempted with a big job on Wall Street. And frankly, if it meant getting a judgeship, compromising the job that I needed to do and was supposed to do, it just wasn’t interesting to me.
When I had my incident with the assistant secretary that my deputy, who had come down from– who’s another former federal prosecutor, who did narcotics work, said to me, Kevin Puvalowski. And he said to me, “Neil, you were just offered the bullet or the bribe, the gold or the lead.”
That’s kind of what happens in a society where the rewards and incentives are, again, nobody’s getting shot in the head thank goodness. But it’s a breakdown of the system.
And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they’re not. And what you’re going to see and what we are seeing is it’ll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you’ll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of — and I don’t want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent – to the detriment of everyone else.”
Neil Barofsky, Interview with Bill Moyers
