Obama’s Big Sellout
The president has packed his economic team with
Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into
an all-out giveaway
MATT TAIBBI
Posted on Rollingstone 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 hard-
working 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 un-
checked 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.
How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the pol-
itical big leagues, hood-winked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the
vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing
on TV this fall who Obama really is?
Whatever the president’s real motives are, the extensive series of
loophole-rich financial “reforms” that the Democrats are currently
pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some
parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly
amplify Wall Street’s political power by institutionalizing the tax-
payer’s role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry.
At one point in the debate, Obama’s top economic advisers demanded
the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress
for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity
on the deals.
How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and
almost nobody noticed.
Read the full article here
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