Yet another installment in the decades-long white flag of surrender to the corporate elite took place in a relatively unnoticed vote — what, with the more important, front-page, relentless coverage of the passing of what’s-his-name Gandolfini. The country has a new trade representative…well, that’s not really accurate — Citibank has a new trade representative.

By a vote of 93-4, the Senate confirmed Michael Froman as the US trade representative. All you need to know about Froman is this:

Mr. Froman worked as Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin’s chief of staff during the Clinton administration,

He was a managing partner at Citigroup and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations before joining the Obama administration.

So, first, the overwhelming vote shows that no one stops to think for a moment whether having an alum of Citibank — and the mentality he would bring — representing the country’s trade interests makes sense. Because they don’t care — not in the Administration, nor apparently in the Senate.

By the country’s interests, I mean PEOPLE, not Citibank, or the long list of corporate thieves who have used trade agreements to rob workers for two decades — either by shipping away jobs or driving down wages here, using the fear of losing jobs to low-wage countries, so that now some jobs are coming back to the US because wages are LOW ENOUGH to be competitive. Nice.

As for being a disciple of Robert Rubin, now, there you have a shining example of moral corruption, and maybe even illegality, never being punished. I wrote more than two years ago that there was a good case to be made that Rubin lied about his role in the financial crisis when he occupied an exalted position at Citibank. What lessons do you think a disciple like Froman would learn from the spectacle of his mentor skating away from any culpability?