OBAMA'S G.M. - the REALITY HE DOES NOT WANT US TO KNOW

The White House has set up a Presidential Task Force on Autos to oversee the restructuring of the industry, which will be led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, an architect of the multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailouts. Both Geithner and his co-chair—White House National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers—fought against any meaningful restrictions on executive pay for banks receiving federal handouts. When it comes to auto workers, however, they insist on near-poverty wages.

OBAMA has sold us out the bankers. Big bail outs, and no restriction to the banker’s refusal to hire AMERICAN BORN EMPLOYEES. Visit any Wells Fargo, or Bank of American in California and you won’t find any American born employees. All Chinese or Indians imported in to take our jobs! Senator Bernie Sanders is the only Senator to attempt to save our jobs.

Currently on the Obama agenda is to sabotage E-VERIFY. Despite the fact that 47% of those employed in Mexican occupied Los Angeles are illegals.

Following that it’s on to NO WALL WITH NARCO MEX, and amnesty.

Guess Obama understands the word “change” about as much as he demonstrated he understood the word “La Raza” when he visited San Diego.

Obama administration spearheads attack on auto workers

17 February 2009

General Motors and Chrysler are scheduled to submit restructuring plans to the White House today that include a drastic reduction of auto workers' wages and benefits and the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs.

The outgoing Bush administration and Democratic-controlled Congress last December mandated the auto companies to submit plans to restore profitability as a condition for $17.4 billion in emergency loans. Under the terms of the agreement, the wages of 90,000 hourly workers were to be reduced to the level of non-union auto workers, and GM was to be allowed to pay half of its $20 billion in retiree health obligations in vastly devalued stock.

The agreement includes a sweeping attack on the democratic rights of the workers. It stipulates that the government loans to the companies can be rescinded if any section of workers engages in a strike or work stoppage.

GM previously announced plans to cut at least 31,000 jobs, shut ten plants and close 25 percent of its dealerships by 2012. Given the steep decline in US auto sales—which have fallen to their lowest level in three decades—the company is expected to propose even deeper cuts. All told, the US auto industry is expected to sell less than 11 million vehicles this year, down from 16.2 million in 2007. To align capacity with current demand, it is estimated that the auto companies would need 24 fewer North American factories than their current total of 70 assembly plants.

According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, with or without additional loans GM is considering filing for bankruptcy in order to liquidate unprofitable assets and tear up existing agreements with the United Auto Workers union and creditors. It would then transfer profitable brands and assets to a new, much smaller company, which would be a lucrative source of investment for Wall Street.

Speaking on the Sunday talk shows, President Obama's senior advisor, David Axelrod, would not rule out throwing the 101-year-old industrial icon into bankruptcy. He reiterated the position that auto workers would have to accept "sacrifices."

The White House has set up a Presidential Task Force on Autos to oversee the restructuring of the industry, which will be led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, an architect of the multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailouts. Both Geithner and his co-chair—White House National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers—fought against any meaningful restrictions on executive pay for banks receiving federal handouts. When it comes to auto workers, however, they insist on near-poverty wages.

Geithner and Summers will seek to use the prospect of plant closures and layoffs to extract massive concessions from auto workers. There is a tentative deadline of March 31 for the United Auto Workers to accept sweeping concessions, or the Treasury Department can recall the federal loans, essentially throwing the companies into bankruptcy and possible liquidation.

The restructuring of the auto industry is being driven by the same considerations as the Wall Street bailout—that is, the enrichment of America's financial elite. This is to be achieved through a permanent reduction in the living standards of auto workers, the closure of unprofitable factories and the devastation of communities where they are located.

The economic crisis is being used to push through a fundamental change in the structure of class relations and eliminate, once and for all, the so-called "middle class" worker who enjoyed a modicum of economic security, including a home, pension, health care benefits and a college education for his children.

The assault on auto workers will be used to spearhead an attack on every section of the working class. The wages of manufacturing and other workers will be reduced to near poverty levels, with conditions of exploitation not seen since before the industrial unions were built in the 1930s.

In the face of this assault, the United Auto Workers union has proven itself to be a docile instrument of the employers. Unswerving in its defense of the capitalist system, the UAW has collaborated in the destruction of 250,000 jobs at GM, Chrysler and Ford in the last decade alone. Since the late 1970s, in the name of making US automakers "more competitive," it has accepted one concession after another, culminating in the 2007 agreement which cut the wages of newly-hired auto workers in half.

In exchange for this betrayal, the UAW was given control of an $85 billion retiree health care trust fund—the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA)—from which the union bureaucracy hoped to derive millions in income to offset its loss in dues. While the union has offered no resistance to the destruction of jobs, wages and working conditions, it temporarily broke off negotiations last Friday over demands that it accept half of GM's payment into the VEBA in stock, whose value has fallen from $43 a share in 2007 to $2.50 today. Talks resumed Sunday night, however, with the UAW reportedly hoping to receive part of the government bailout money to prop up the trust fund.

The White House has appointed Ron Bloom, a former investment banker and special assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers union, as a senior advisor to the auto task force. During the 1990s, Bloom helped devise so-called employee stock ownership plans at distressed companies such as United Air Lines, where workers were conned into handing over their pensions and health care savings to keep their jobs. In the end, employees at these so-called "worker-owned companies" suffered huge losses.

Bloom was also instrumental in setting up VEBA plans at Goodyear, Dana and the Big Three auto companies, relieving the corporations of billions in retiree health care obligations and enabling the labor bureaucracy to go into profit-making businesses.

This only underscores the fact that the Obama administration is working with the UAW not to defend the interests of auto workers, but to employ the union bureaucracy's services in battering down the resistance of the rank-and-file. In its talks with the automakers, the UAW bureaucracy is negotiating to protect and expand its own privileges and income, hoping to get corporate and government positions and increase its financial stake in the companies.

If auto workers are to defend their jobs and living standards they must oppose the Obama administration, the auto companies and the UAW and mobilize their strength to resist any cuts in wages and jobs. Workers are not responsible for the crisis of the auto industry, which is bound up with the breakdown of the entire capitalist system.

Auto workers should defy the no-strike clause in the loan agreement and carry out an industry-wide walkout to defend their jobs and living standards. This struggle must be expanded to hundreds of thousands of parts workers and non-union workers at foreign-owned factories who are facing similar attacks.

For decades, the UAW has sought to divide US workers from workers in other countries through their "Buy American" nationalism. This only plays into the hands of the corporations, which have demanded never-ending concessions in the name of international competitiveness. The global economic crisis and the attacks by the transnational auto giants throughout the world pose the necessity of forging the unity of auto workers throughout North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe.

This struggle must be guided by a new political outlook and strategy. The capitalist system has failed. Economic life must be reorganized on the basis of a new principle—socialism—that begins with the social needs of the great masses of working people and aims to free mankind's productive resources from the grip of the financial aristocracy.

The auto industry—built up by the labor of generations of workers—must not be left in the hands of the corporate CEOs and big investors who have run it into the ground. It must be transformed into a public utility, owned and democratically controlled by the working class, in order to produce safe and affordable transportation for all. This must be carried out in conjunction with the nationalization of the banks under the control of working people, and the rational reorganization of the entire world economy to meet human need, not profit.

To carry out this struggle, workers must reject any illusions in the Obama administration, break with the Democrats and Republicans, and mount an independent political struggle for a workers' government.

Jerry White

REALITY CHECK:
Obama’s first 100 days and counting have been nothing but selling us out to WALL STREET, BIG BANKERS, SAUDIS, and now, ILLEGALS, just as we were victimized by 20 years of BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, BUSH!

NAME ONE PROMISE HE MADE THAT HE HASN’T ALREADY BROKEN!

OBAMA’S next agenda when he finishes KISSING BIG BUSH SAUDI CARLYLE GROUP ASS ENOUGH: AMNESTY!

He’s already backed-off E-VERIFY per orders from the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, LA RAZA, “THE RACE”  the political party of the Mexican occupation, and the WALL STREETERS HE REALLY WORKS FOR!

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Obama offers nothing to states, cities devastated by GM plant closures

By Tom Eley
3 June 2009

Plant closings resulting from Monday’s forced bankruptcy of General Motors will cause spiraling unemployment and deep cuts in social services in many cities and states across the country. The Obama administration, whose Auto Task Force dictated the terms of the bankruptcy, has offered no serious aid to the affected workers and their communities.

GM is carrying out at least 21,000 job cuts and the closure of 14 plants and warehouses in eight states. In addition, the company has announced its intention to dump franchise agreements with 2,300 dealerships by the end of next year. Many of these will be forced to close, eliminating as many as 100,000 jobs in all 50 states.

The gutting of GM, once the most powerful corporation in the world and a symbol of US industrial might, will send shock waves through the economy, cascading into more layoffs at parts suppliers and financial ruin for thousands of small businesses.

The bankruptcy will immediately result in state and local cuts in social services, health care and education, with city and state workers targeted for layoffs, wages cuts and other concessions. It will accelerate the foreclosure crisis and further drive down home prices, as tens of thousands of workers are no longer able to meet their mortgage payments.

The Obama administration is using the concessions and layoffs, agreed to by the United Auto Workers, to attack the wages and benefits of the entire working class. Corporations will take the concessions imposed on auto workers as a signal for similar measures against their own workers.

The state of Michigan, which already has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 12.9 percent, will bear the brunt of the closures, with 42 percent of all national GM layoffs taking place there. Nearly 9,000 jobs will be lost in Michigan from Monday’s announced plant closures. The shutdowns are concentrated in southeast Michigan. They will be carried out in Flint, Livonia, Orion Township, Pontiac and Ypsilanti Township. On Friday, 700 workers were laid off when GM shuttered a stamping plant in Grand Rapids, in southwest Michigan.

It is estimated that since 2000, Michigan has lost 17 percent of its jobs—about three quarters of a million in all—as a direct result of the crisis in the auto industry. Now the state anticipates 520,000 job losses this year and next.

The consequences for the state’s limited social welfare system will be disastrous. According to one estimate, Michigan could lose an additional $18.3 billion in income. It already faces a $3 billion two-year budget shortfall, and officials recently revised downward their revenue estimate for the 2010 fiscal year by $1.7 billion, calling for an across-the-board spending cut of 8 percent.

“It’s clearly going to impact the safety net,” Governor Jennifer Granholm warned. “People, who are hurting, need services more, and we have fewer dollars.” Michigan has already carried out $300 million in budget cuts for the current fiscal year.

Oakland County in suburban Detroit will lose three factories and 6,600 jobs, the most of any county. Oakland County was already in difficult financial straits due to declining property tax revenue, a result of layoffs and the foreclosure crisis. The loss of GM-related tax revenue will result in layoffs for county workers and sharp cuts in social programs, said Bob Daddow, Oakland County’s deputy executive. “I will be going to war,” Daddow told the Detroit News. “We will need to make cuts in all departments. We have been doing these cuts all along...but the worst is yet to come on governmental revenues.”

The closure of the GM Truck and Bus plant will deepen the social crisis in impoverished Pontiac, Michigan. About 1,100 workers will lose their jobs, and the city will lose 20 percent of its current tax base, or $10 million, said Fred Leeb, the city’s emergency financial manager. Leeb made clear that Pontiac’s working class would pay the price for the shutdown. “We fear that we are going to have to cut even more deeply,” he told the Detroit News. “And there will be concessions to ask from the (city) unions.”

Flint, Michigan has lost about 50,000 GM jobs in 30 years. One thousand more were added to the grim tally when GM said Monday it would close its Powertrain Flint North plant. Monday night, the Flint City Council met to enact a series of measures to bridge a $13 million budget deficit, including the layoff of about 90 firefighters and police and the shuttering of a fire station.

The city of Livonia, an inner-ring suburb of Detroit, will lose its GM engine plant, and with it $474,000 in annual tax revenue, about 1 percent of its total. City workers have already been asked to accept pay cuts. The Detroit-Livonia-Warren area had an unemployment rate of 14 percent as of May.

Ypsilanti’s Willow Run transmission plant laid off 600 workers on Monday, and 500 more jobs will be shed by December 2010. The township will lose 4.4 percent of its tax revenue, and Washtenaw County will see a loss of $3.8 million in tax receipts. The Ypsilanti Public Schools confront a $1.4 million deficit, which will be met primarily through teacher layoffs. The city faces a budget deficit of almost a half million dollars.

In Livingston County, Michigan, the GM bankruptcy may lead to a number of parts suppliers shutting down. Already hundreds of auto parts workers have lost their jobs in recent months, according to the county’s Economic Development Council director, Fred Dillingham. Metaldyne, which employs 100 workers in the county, last week filed for bankruptcy protection. “We have a number of companies with as much as 90 percent of their business from GM. We have an awful lot of trickle-down effect from GM,” Dillingham told Livingston Community News.

The closure of GM Mansfield in Ontario, Ohio is likely to result in the elimination of city jobs and pay cuts for municipal employees. With revenues already down a quarter million dollars, the city is bracing for disaster.

Spring Hill, Tennessee, which has seen its Saturn plant idled, most likely to be closed permanently, was a single-industry town. When GM opened the plant in 1990, fewer than 1,500 people lived there. Now it has 24,000 inhabitants.

The collapse of the Big Three has brought with it a sharp decline in funding for the arts and culture. The General Motors Foundation, which contributed $31.4 million to the arts in 2007, has told many art and cultural organizations, “mostly in Detroit,” not to count on any contributions this year, the Financial Times reported last week. Toledo, Ohio, recently announced that its three-day jazz festival, the Art Tatum Jazz Heritage Festival, would be cancelled this year after Chrysler said it would no longer provide $100,000 in annual funding.

In the face of this mounting social crisis, President Barack Obama has offered little more than rhetorical palliatives, telling workers that their “sacrifices” will ensure the future for coming generations. But for the auto workers’ children, the future foretells poverty amidst a crumbling social safety net.

On Tuesday, Obama sent Edward Montgomery, his director of recovery for auto communities and workers, along with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, to tour a Romulus, Michigan GM plant that thus far has not been slated for closure. This was followed by Solis’ appearance at a “worker round table” at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, the ostensible purpose of which was to discuss the retraining of workers for new jobs in the “green economy.”

The meeting was little more than a media stunt organized by the Democratic Party and UAW executives to present the Obama administration as a defender of jobs and divert working class anger along nationalist lines.

In her remarks, Solis outlined a series of “job training” programs that will supposedly equip workers for new high-tech and environmentally-friendly industries. But as Solis and Obama well know, these token programs cannot possibly provide decent employment for the vast majority of the workers who are losing their jobs as a result of the administration’s auto industry policy.

In what is shaping up as the worst job market since the Great Depression, even college graduates—many with degrees in engineering, computer science, robotics and management—face the highest rate of unemployment for those with a four-year degree in decades.

Among the Obama administration initiatives Solis outlined was $49 million in assistance to Michigan workers who have lost jobs due to “international trade,” federal assistance for the weatherization of homes, and summer youth programs. These are already existing programs. She could not announce any new programs to deal with the social crisis created by the bankruptcy of GM because the Obama administration has no plans for such programs.

After Solis spoke, the panel discussion was turned over to a number of local Democratic Party politicians and union officials. Don Skidmore, the Willow Run UAW local president, set the “America first” tone, declaring, “We’ve got to stop the bleeding of American jobs south of the border!” Another speaker demanded to know why Toledo, Ohio was able to keep its GM engine plant open.

UAW official Donnie Enersen denounced immigrant workers. “They’re coming into America, not paying taxes, not paying into Social Security,” he said.

The union officials are seeking to divide workers along national and even regional lines, in order to deflect attention from their real enemies—the Obama administration and the Wall Street financiers who are behind the carve-up of GM.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with a small number of workers, most of whom were recently retired, who came to the meeting to demonstrate against the closure of the Willow Run plant. Corky, a GM worker with 12 years, said, “We thought we were going to stay open until 2010. On Friday when we walked out of work we thought we would be coming back in mid-July. I got a call from a fellow worker that night saying we were no longer going to work there.

“It’s unfair. We’ve made enough sacrifices. I’m tired of it. This was my seventh GM plant. For two-and-a-half years I was driving down to Toledo, Ohio to work, even when gas was $4 a gallon. I’ve made sacrifices. My dad is a retired GM worker and his benefits are being cut. I put my blood and sweat into every transmission that comes off the line.

“Yesterday when they announced the bankruptcy and plant closing I was all tears and emotions. Now I’m angry.”

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Obama prepares sweeping cuts in social programs

8 January 2009

Barack Obama took the occasion of his first press appearance in Washington as president-elect to declare his determination to impose policies of budgetary austerity, including the elimination of entire federal programs and cost-cutting in the entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that are of vital importance to tens of millions of elderly and poor people.

Obama announced his appointment of Nancy Killefer, a director at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., to a new White House post of chief performance officer. Killefer, a Treasury official in the Clinton administration, will be in charge of setting performance standards for federal agencies and enforcing them on agency officials. Those programs that fail to meet these standards will be targeted for reorganization or elimination.

The president-elect made the statement on the eve of a speech Thursday in which he will make the case for a proposed stimulus package. It was a clear effort to appease both congressional Republicans and the sizeable faction of fiscal conservatives among the congressional Democrats, reassuring them that while unlimited funds are to be provided to bail out big business, there will be a tight rein on spending for programs that support the needs of working people.

Obama's remarks on Wednesday shed light on the basic character of his stimulus plan, which is tailored to the demands of the financial and corporate elite and will provide hundreds of billions in additional public funds to prop up corporate profits, while doing little to provide relief for tens of millions of working people facing the deepest slump since the Great Depression.

Obama noted the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate released Wednesday that the federal deficit for the current fiscal year will top $1.2 trillion, without counting any additional spending for the economic stimulus plan that the Obama administration and Congress will enact after his inauguration. "Trillion dollar deficits will be a reality for years to come," he warned, declaring that containing the deficit and putting the lid on federal spending must become "fundamental principles of government."

When a reporter from the Wall Street Journal asked about Medicare and Social Security, noting that these were among the largest federal expenditures, Obama replied, "We are beginning consultations with members of Congress around how we expect to approach the deficit. We expect that discussion around entitlements will be a part, a central part, of those plans." He added that once the stimulus package was adopted, by mid-February, "we will have more to say about how we're going to approach entitlement spending."

These remarks and comments by Democratic congressional leaders are a warning of what is to come: a frontal assault on the most important components of what remains of a social safety net in the United States—the programs that provide at least minimal retirement benefits and medical coverage for tens of millions of elderly people, as well as medical coverage for millions of low-income families.

While both Social Security and Medicare are solvent, currently taking in more tax revenues than they pay out, the Social Security Trust Fund, which represents the accumulated contributions of three generations of working people, has been effectively plundered to pay for the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy, two wars and the immense US military establishment.

Out of $10.7 trillion in total federal debt, about 40 percent, or $4.3 trillion, is borrowed from Social Security. The Trust Fund is the largest holder of federal debt, followed by US private investors, who hold $3.4 trillion, and foreign investors, many of them governments, who hold $3 trillion.

The CBO figure of $1.2 trillion likely underestimates the current year's deficit by a significant amount. It includes nothing for the stimulus package which has yet to be spelled out in detail by the incoming administration, and assumes no emergency spending to finance Obama's promised buildup of US military forces in Afghanistan. Reuters reported Wednesday that Obama's secretary of defense, Robert Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, is requesting an additional $70 billion for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not counting the additional cost of a doubling of US forces to some 60,000 in Afghanistan.

The CBO estimates that the US unemployment rate, at 6.7 percent in November, will rise to 9 percent by the end of this year, although many economists project a rate of 10 percent or more. Double-digit unemployment would drive up spending on jobless benefits, food stamps and Medicaid, among other programs, swelling the deficit even further.

The CBO also placed the cost of the Treasury bailout of Wall Street at $180 billion in 2009, although Congress is expected to authorize an additional $350 billion on top of the $350 billion already expended since October. The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored mortgage finance companies brought down by the subprime mortgage crisis, will add another $240 billion to the deficit.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, Democrat from North Dakota, echoed Obama's warning of trillion-dollar deficits for several years, as well as his pledge to tackle long-term problems in the financing of Social Security and Medicare. He told the press, "It would send a very healthy message to the markets and the American people if President-elect Obama were to simultaneously announce an economic recovery package and the beginning of a bipartisan process to deal with our long-term imbalances."

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who has close ties to the right-wing faction of House Democrats, the so-called Blue Dogs, added his voice to the chorus calling for long-term deficit-reduction measures, going so far as to suggest that the Obama administration might have to follow the example of the Republican administrations of the 1980s, when White House budget officials engaged in across-the-board budget cuts by executive order, a process called "sequestering."

Congressional Democrats opposed sequestering 20 years ago, pointing out that there was no constitutional authority for such executive action without congressional authorization. It is a measure of how far to the right the Democratic Party has moved that one of its top leaders now embraces such a policy.

Robert Bixby, director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates fiscal austerity, provided an indication of what is being contemplated, saying, "I would analogize it to what the government is doing with the auto companies. Congress said, we'll give you the money but you have to show us a plan for sustainability." In return for emergency loans to the US auto companies, Congress demanded tens of thousands of layoffs, the closure of dozens of plants and draconian cuts in auto workers' wages and benefits.

Four years ago, George W. Bush began his second term as president by proposing a sweeping privatization of Social Security, a measure which was never formally introduced in Congress due to overwhelming popular opposition. The plan was quietly shelved after the debacle of Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the Bush administration's gross incompetence and utter indifference to the plight of poor and working class Americans. It has thus been left to Obama, who occasionally postures as the heir of Franklin Roosevelt, to take responsibility for dismantling the last legacy of the New Deal.

Patrick Martin

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WHO IS DOING OBAMA’S WELFARE PLAN FOR BIG BANKERS AND WALL ST? BUSH’S VERY OWN ARCHITECT FOR BANKERS’ WELFARE TIMMY GEITHNER.

CHANGE? RIGHT! JUST THE KIND WALL STREET BOUGHT IN OBAMA!

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April 27, 2009

Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club

By JO BECKER and GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Last June, with a financial hurricane gathering force, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. convened the nation’s economic stewards for a brainstorming session. What emergency powers might the government want at its disposal to confront the crisis? he asked.

Timothy F. Geithner, who as president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank oversaw many of the nation’s most powerful financial institutions, stunned the group with the audacity of his answer. He proposed asking Congress to give the president broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system, according to two participants, including Michele Davis, then an assistant Treasury secretary.

The proposal quickly died amid protests that it was politically untenable because it could put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars.

“People thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of out there,’ ” said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, who heard about the idea afterward. Mr. Geithner says, “I don’t remember a serious discussion on that proposal then.”

But in the 10 months since then, the government has in many ways embraced his blue-sky prescription. Step by step, through an array of new programs, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have assumed an unprecedented role in the banking system, using unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money, to try to save the nation’s financiers from their own mistakes.

And more often than not, Mr. Geithner has been a leading architect of those bailouts, the activist at the head of the pack. He was the federal regulator most willing to “push the envelope,” said H. Rodgin Cohen, a prominent Wall Street lawyer who spoke frequently with Mr. Geithner.

Today, Mr. Geithner is Treasury secretary, and as he seeks to rebuild the nation’s fractured financial system with more taxpayer assistance and a regulatory overhaul, he finds himself a locus of discontent.

Even as banks complain that the government has attached too many intrusive strings to its financial assistance, a range of critics — lawmakers, economists and even former Federal Reserve colleagues — say that the bailout Mr. Geithner has played such a central role in fashioning is overly generous to the financial industry at taxpayer expense.

An examination of Mr. Geithner’s five years as president of the New York Fed, an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the financial industry, shows that he forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street’s giant financial institutions.

His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry’s interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records.

In a pair of recent interviews and an exchange of e-mail messages, Mr. Geithner defended his record, saying that from very early on, he was “a consistently dark voice about the potential risks ahead, and a principal source of initiatives designed to make the system stronger” before the markets started to collapse.

Mr. Geithner said his actions in the bailout were motivated solely by a desire to help businesses and consumers. But in a financial crisis, he added, “the government has to take risk, and we are going to be doing things which ultimately — in order to get the credit flowing again — are going to benefit the institutions that are at the core of the problem.”