The new welfare queens.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye

It was priceless watching Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's stunned expression as he listened to questions from Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, about his ties to Goldman Sachs.

Waters wanted to get at the "linkages and the connections among a small group of Wall Street types that are making decisions," she explained. To that end, she asked Geithner, was it possible that Goldman Sachs could have been chosen to help run the new Public Private Investment Program?

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Yes, he allowed, it was possible.

And did Goldman Sachs receive money from failed insurance giant AIG?

Yes.

And did Goldman Sachs get a piece of the government's TARP program?

Yes.

And did former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spend a lot of his career at Goldman Sachs?

Yes.

"And your CEO that you hired to work for you is from Goldman Sachs also?"

Geithner looked nonplussed. "My CEO?"

"Well, whomever--whoever--works for you," Waters said impatiently. "I don't want to get the nuances to the point where we misunderstand each other.... Your chief of staff."

Yes, Geithner conceded (after Waters cut him off a couple of times, demanding that he answer more succinctly), his chief of staff used to work for Goldman Sachs.

Aha. "We believe," Waters said, "that Goldman Sachs will once again be one of those that will be the beneficiary" of the government's latest bailout plan.

Now the "we" Waters referred to may include people who are receiving their information on the bank bailout via tinfoil antennas. But the Congresswoman from California is channeling the skepticism of a whole lot of Americans.

Why are we funneling hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers' money to a bunch of hedge fund managers to buy "toxic" assets from banks for more than they are worth?

And for that matter, why is Geithner, the guy who was in charge of regulating Citigroup before and during that firm's collapse while he was chair of the New York Fed, the most qualified person to re-regulate the banks?

And why do his chief of staff and so many other Obama advisers charged with cleaning up Wall Street come from the ranks of big Wall Street firms whose attitudes toward things like who should lose money when risky deals go bust are significantly different from your average citizen's?

Even now, Citigroup doesn't seem to get it that there's anything wrong with using bailout money to pay dividends to shareholders. As John Kay writes in the Financial Times , "Vikram Pandit...