Henry Paulson
From Dickipedia - A Wiki of Dicks
Paulson’s greatest achievement in dickdom thus far is that after amassing a net worth of over $700 million while running an investment bank, he is now in charge of reforming the very system that made him so cartoonishly wealthy in the first place. It is very much like if Larry Flynt were charged with reforming the pornography industry or Carlos Mencia were hired to revamp the joke stealing industry.
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Early life
Henry Paulson was born in 1946 and shares a birthday with Bret Ratner and Vince Vaughn, both of whom also possess an inordinate amount of power over the lives of all Americans.
Young Henry’s father was a wholesale jeweler, which helped mold him into a future dick by teaching him that even something as simple as shiny rocks can trick people into handing over huge sums of money. Paulson also attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts, shaping him dickwise by instilling an insatiable hunger for merit badges. It also means he was likely molested in a pup tent and told that it was “our secret.”
As the old saying goes, all dicks must one day leave the nest, and Paulson did just that, attending Dartmouth College as an English major, meaning that the man who might single-handedly decide US economic policy for the next half-century earned his college degree by reading The Canterbury Tales and writing term papers on New Voices in American Poetry
Eventually realizing that the world is not run by English majors, Paulson enrolled in Post Graduate Dick Studies at Harvard Business School, earning an MBA. Harvard is also a better school to pretentiously name-drop than Dartmouth, making it a favorite amongst dicks.
Dick in training
After getting his dick in the government door as a Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense at The Pentagon, Paulson became the envy of dicks everywhere after scoring a plum job in the Nixon administration as assistant to John Ehrlichman. As creator of the legendary "Plumbers" group at the center of the Watergate scandal, Ehrlichman mentored young Paulson on the ins and outs of abusing government power for personal gain.
In 1974, with his mentor facing jail time for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury, Paulson moved on to the private sector to continue his on-the-job dick training at prestigious investment bank, Goldman Sachs. Twenty-four years of “working in a broken financial system” later, he climbed his way up to CEO. Paulson’s impressive staying power was rewarded with an executive compensation package reported to be worth $37 million in 2005 alone.
It should be noted that during his time at Goldman Sachs, Paulson built close relations with China, visiting the country over 70 times, likely learning a thing or two about communism in the process.
Dick in charge
In 2006, Paulson was nominated by George W. Bush to succeed John Snow as Secretary of the Treasury. President Bush, a former oilman now presiding over the largest gasoline price increase in American history, saw no conflict of interest in a former bank CEO controlling the country’s money supply, just like he saw no conflict of interest in making his longtime personal lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General or giving Dick Cheney’s Halliburton company a $7 billion no-bid contract in Iraq. Come to think of it, maybe he just doesn’t know what the phrase “conflict of interest” means.
Speaking of conflicts of interest, it should be noted that Paulson's three immediate predecessors as CEO of Goldman Sachs — Jon Corzine, Stephen Friedman, and Robert Rubin — each left the company to become a U.S. Senator, chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration, respectively. If there isn’t a conspiracy theory website about this, somebody should really buy www.goldmansachsisinfiltratingthegovernment.com.
Dick in trouble
In 2007, the sweeping late 1990s financial deregulations supported by dicks like ex-Goldman Sachs CEO and then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin came back to bite America in the ass. It seems that letting amoral, money-grubbing financial institutions do whatever they wanted for a decade was not as great an idea as government officials with close ties to those amoral, money-grubbing financial institutions would have us believe.
First, thousands of home owners began defaulting on the risky subprime mortgages they were sold by unscrupulous, used car salesmen-style bankers working on commission. When asked about the severity of this situation, Secretary Paulson took a glass-half-full approach, assuring Americans that "the subrime crisis is contained."
Then in 2008, greedy financial institutions that bought these bad mortgages packaged as Wall Street bonds no longer had enough money to cover their debts. But not to worry, they stayed afloat by laying off thousands of lower level employees. When asked about the severity of this situation, Secretary Paulson assured Americans that "the worst is behind us."
A few months later, some of the biggest financial institutions in the country were suddenly within inches of bankruptcy – Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG, even Goldman Sachs. Now that the crisis had moved beyond regular people and was threatening his former company in which he still held a $500 million stake, Treasury Secretary Paulson bravely comforted the nations by declaring, "We need to deal with this and deal with it quickly!"
As if deciding to intervene only when his own life was about to be impacted wasn’t dickish enough, Paulson also insisted the only way to save these companies was to take $700 billion in taxpayer money to bail them out. Plus, it had to be done by the end of the week! There was just no time for “thinking” or “making sure this is a good idea.”
Whether or not an observer agrees with “The Paulson Plan,” one has to admire the sheer balls of pawning off the responsibility for saving greedy companies who took ill-advised risks on the very people who were screwed over by these same companies in the first place. Not to mention the even bigger balls of introducing a clearly socialist concept to a country full of people whose favorite action movies have communist villains.
