Obama's Big Sellout

[Crewleader]

The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

MATT TAIBBI
Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/

[tabatha]

1. Third time this has been posted.

Maybe you should check out this:

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=12&year=2009&base_name=oh_matt_taibbi

[girl gone mad]

2. why?

Fernholz got the most essential part of his criticism http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=433&topic_id=51550&mesg_id=51622">wrong.

[IrateCitizen]

4. Fernholz doesn't matter.

First, he does not dispel the main thrust of Taibbi's story -- that the Obama administration has largely catered to the desires of the banking sector, and has completely failed to provide any kind of meaningful reform to 1) prevent such collapses from happening again in the near future, and 2) to help out regular people who are hurting more and more, often as a direct result of the things the banks are still doing.

If you doubt me on this second point, just do a quick YouTube search for Marcy Kaptur's appearance on Bill Moyers' Journal, in which she discussed the way that JP Morgan Chase is STILL screwing over homeowners in her district at risk of foreclosure. Then, do a quick search for the NY Times article a couple of months back that discussed Tim Geithner's daily calendar -- the one that demonstrated how he spends almost ALL of his time meeting with the execs from the big banks, and NONE looking at the impact of his policies outside of Wall Street.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, hardly anybody will read Fernholz. His style may engage the wonkier members of the center and center-left (the audience of Tapped), but not much beyond that. Taibbi, OTOH, will reach a broad audience through Rolling Stone, and will help stir up popular outrage against the administration -- and deservedly so, IMHO.

[upi402]

3. All Hail the UNIPARTY!

There is no opposition party to corporatism. We're utterly hosed, as a nation state.

[Crewleader]

5. Matt Taibbi on Colbert Report

Matt Taibbi On "Colbert Report": Wall Street Is 'One Ponzi Scheme After Another' (VIDEO)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/11/matt-taibbi-on-colbert-re_n_388793.html?source=patrick.net