http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout
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
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.
How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the
political big leagues, hoodwinked 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
taxpayer'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.
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