When Did Obama Sellout To Wall Street?

Today’s must read MSM article comes to us via Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi’s takedown of how the Obama White House has been corrupted by Wall Street insiders — Obama’s Big Sellout.

I have been calling the President “Barack W. Obama” for some time; Obama’s Big Sellout squares up with my views of his economic team as more of the same economic policies of the 43rd president.

Here is Taibbi:

“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.”

The full article is today’s must reading . . .

Coincidentally, the Matson cartoon above is not part of the Rolling Stone article, but rather, is from the Roll Call. I am a fan of his work, and he has a stinging political cartoon in Bailout Nation.

Barack W. Obama, indeed . . .

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Source:
Obama’s Big Sellout
MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone, Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout