[Peace-discuss] Whose fault is it?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/print>. 
  The whole article should be read by anyone ho wants to know what is going on 
in the US government.  --CGE]


...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...

So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail 
out Rubin's messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash 
and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally 
panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the 
deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had 
already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. 
But that's just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers 
for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those 
toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are 
replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It's the 
sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers 
on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. "If you had any 
doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street," former labor 
secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, "your doubts 
should be laid to rest."

It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin's former protégés from the Clinton years, 
the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, 
which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi 
losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, 
when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner 
is going to be Barack Obama's Treasury secretary!...

The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous 
millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system 
that made them rich in the first place. "You can't expect these people to do 
anything other than protect Wall Street," says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican 
from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama's first address to Congress, 
when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. 
"Credit is the lifeblood of the economy," he declared, pledging "the full force 
of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend 
on have enough confidence and enough money." A president elected on a platform 
of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing 
fundamental when it came to the economy. Rather than doing what FDR had done 
during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to curb financial 
abuses, Obama planned to institutionalize the policy, firmly established during 
the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else...

What's most troubling is that we don't know if Obama has changed, or if the 
influence of Wall Street is simply a fundamental and ineradicable element of our 
electoral system. What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch 
on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's our 
fault, for thinking he was different.

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