Hillary, Rachel, and WaPo are right: you can't prove $ influences politics because...President Obama

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

Nope, can't prove it and if you even so much as suggest it, you're impugning President Obama.

Yeah, well, some of us called bullshit on Obama in 2009 while the others only hold Republicans accountable.

So, if Hillary has spent 25 years in the Goldman/Clinton bubble, if these are the only people she knows and trusts, what's her team of economic advisors going to look like.

She's right, we can learn a lot from President Obama. From 2009:

"That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar - former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett - the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama's chief advisers during the campaign, didn't make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive "a Nobel Prize - for evil."

But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama's inner circle - and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president's new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama's biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters - chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).

Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama's economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin who happens to be Bob Rubin's son. At the time, Jamie's dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments.

Now here's where it gets really interesting. It's three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush - still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O'Doul's portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama's economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama's transition team that same month.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2009/12/13/obamas-big-sellout-president-has-packed-his-economic-team-wall-street-insiders

[Fast Walker 52]

1. I think the title is missing a sarcasm tag

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

7. Apparently so lol "because Obama" is her go to whenever Bernie

challenges the status quo.

[reformist2]

2. People still don't want to admit how much Obama ended up "playing the game".

He didn't turn out to be the transformative president we thought we were getting.

[RiverLover]

3. A solid centrist who punked us, & punked US good. But he ran as a progressive populist & won,

which shows the country WANTS to go left. We just need people who will actually stay true to their campaign messages.

Like Bernie.

[Mbrow]

6. +1 well put.

Bill Clinton did the same thing as well, as will HRC.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

5. My take on that is this, many Democrats bought what the GOP was selling: Wall Street

They we happy to trade in stipends - pensions and social security - for the GOP 401K lottery. Years before trickle down showed slow job growth (with stagnant wages), "Obama's stock market" had already doubled!

Woo hoo! Democrats have mastered the GOP casino economy!

This is why it's imperative that a successful Clinton 45 admin not rock the Wall Street boat.

[Hortensis]

8. Yet, imo, he is a far better president than

many people deserve.

The pretense that presidents can do what they want and that, if they don't satisfy they must be corrupt is, again imo, just that -- pretense. Everyone here, openly or secretly, knows that half the nation supported the GOP's determination to make sure Obama accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

They know that Big Money has infiltrated all levels of government and filled thousands of offices with people serving them. They all know, whether they admit it or not, that Big Money also organized to stop Obama from accomplishing anything at all. Over 700 plutocrats joined the Kochs alone for that specific purpose.

Yet many here constantly choose both to conveniently forget that and also to conveniently not know how much Obama has achieved in spite of everything. How much he has been able to hurt them.

Bizarrely but very characteristically, those people don't blame a GOP barely visible in their sights for their determined disappointment, they don't even blame the plutocrats they claim to loathe -- their hostility is directly squarely, and as usual, at liberal Democrats.

It's perfectly clear in watching them that those who insist on considering Obama a failure literally tailor their viewpoints to show only their preferred degree of imagined failure and betrayal. Yet again, right? All I can guess is that there must be some perverse but eternal satisfaction in always being proven "right" that Democrats are corrupt and unworthy, again and always.

[DemocracyDirect]

10. I love President Obama also.

But the staff he brought in was obviously Goldman Sachs and Citibank.

I frankly believe that somebody told him that he can have all the social issue victories he wanted...

But banking policy and foreign policy was none of his business.

[Hortensis]

12. Yes, high-leve financial experts have a way of having

backgrounds in high-level positions in the finance industry. And highly qualified people at the top have a way of intersecting in various places at various times. It will always be that way.

The job is to make corruption illegal again and prosecute it vigorously until people at those levels are genuinely afraid to cross us, especially those we elect to represent us.

To do that, we kick the party of business, the GOP, out of as many offices as possible so we can continue the work Obama's administration has started toward repealing corrupt laws, passing new ones, and rebuilding our regulatory agencies.

We're not as pristine as we need to be, Big Money is influencing the Democrats too, but NOTHING like the GOP. In this era we are unquestionably the good guys, and the GOP is the party of corruption.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

13. The point the article makes is Obama came to office at the fork in the road and, rather than a

"reset", he listened to WS tell him he had to save them "or else." This was against every bone in his body, just like letting Hillary make the call on Libya. Obama didn't want to do it. He's really taken bad advice on monumental decisions.

Now it's Hillary's turn.

[Hortensis]

14. And my point is that some people will

always insist on reaching that type of conclusion whatever the situation. The government-liberal-Democrat glass must always be seen as mostly empty, and who cares about whatever it might hold.

These are just my musings, but I've been watching for months now and the best I can figure is that for some people a sort of perverse need to be disappointed by Democrats requires them to focus on, and magnify as necessary, disappointments to satisfy it.

But if this doesn't fit you, I'm not talking about you.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

15. It comes down to priorities in the end. My background is economics and I take for granted

that EVERY Democrat is correct on civil and human rights. So I do discount those accomplishments. For instance, the Clintons were horrible on gay rights in the 90s and Obama was slow to come around, but now the Clintons and Obama are where Democrats were decades ago. So Obama and the Clintons get a sarcastic golf clap from me. It doesn't matter who the Democrat is on social issues.

The only ways to differentiate between them is on matters of economics and war. Economics will dictate who your advisors are, your trade deals, and your SCOTUS appointments. People who don't recognize this have an agenda that needs to be challenged.

[RiverLover]

4. Exactly (the article, not the OP title)

They say Dodd Frank proves the money didn't influence him.

BS.

.....Dodd-Frank addressed these sorts of abuses in broad strokes but left the most important decisions to regulatory agencies.

Since then, platoons of Wall Street lobbyists, lawyers and litigators have been watering down and delaying those regulations.

For example, Dodd-Frank instructed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to reduce certain risks, but the Street has sabotaged the process.

In its first major rule under Dodd-Frank, the CFTC considered 1,500 comments, largely generated by and from the Street. After several years the commission issued a proposed rule, including some of the loopholes and exceptions the Street sought.

Wall Street still wasn’t satisfied. So the CFTC agreed to delay enforcement of the rule, allowing the Street more time to voice its objections. Even this wasn’t enough for the big banks, whose lawyers then filed a lawsuit in the federal courts, arguing that the commission’s cost-benefit analysis wasn’t adequate.

As of now, only 249 of the 390 regulations required by Dodd-Frank have been finalized. And those final versions are shot through with loopholes big enough for Wall Street’s top brass to drive their Ferrari’s through.

The biggest banks still haven’t even come up with acceptable “living wills,” required under Dodd-Frank to show how they’d maintain important functions while going through bankruptcy.

Meanwhile they continue to gamble with depositor’s money. Many of their operations are global, making it even harder for U.S. regulators to rein them in – as evidenced by JPMorgan Chase’s $6.2 billion loss in its “London Whale” operation in 2012.

http://robertreich.org/post/142549234005

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

17. No wonder Frank filibustered Reich last week

Of course, Warren said it didn't go far enough because it didn't break up the banks.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

9. Carter's convinced she's accepting bribes, too

Carter has recently spoken out about the legal bribery that takes place in American elections, saying this to the BBC:

‘The erroneous ruling of the Supreme Court, where millionaires and billionaires can put in unlimited amounts of money in to the campaign, it gives legal bribery a chance to prevail, because almost all the candidates, whether they are honest or not, Democrat or Republican, rely on these massive amounts of money in order to campaign.’

http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/04/12/jimmy-carter-just-called-out-hillary-clinton-publicly-and-it-is-setting-the-internet-on-fire/

[Fairgo]

11. I got over my disappointment in Obama years ago

It really didn't take long to see that we had elected the very best republican available in a lovely shade of blue. I even voted for him the second time. Not with any hopes for more than half measures, and custodial care of the corporate mission creep of our shadow government. He was not actively vile, like Bill, and so he will be treated kindly by history...if we have one. But he's just a smooth front man for hire all the same.

[IamMab]

16. If money buys elections, how is Bernie raising and spending more and still losing? Huh?

DERP.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

18. ^Thread fail

🏆

[Duppers]

19. K & highly Recommended