Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Community Organizer We Elected President?

[Octafish]

Robert Scheer asks an excellent question:

Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Community Organizer We Elected President?

By Robert Scheer
Posted on Nov 18, 2009
TruthDig

What’s up with Barack Obama? The candidate for change once promised to take on the powerful banking interests but is now doing their bidding. Finally, a leading Democrat, in this case Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, has a good idea for monitoring the Wall Street fat cats who all but destroyed the American economy, and the Obama administration condemns it.

Dodd wants to take supervisory power from the Federal Reserve, which is controlled by the banks it pretends to monitor, and put it in the hands of a new independent agency. That makes sense given the Fed’s abject failure to properly monitor the financial sector over the past decade as that industry got drunk on greed. As Dodd’s spokeswoman Kirstin Brost put it: “The Federal Reserve flat out failed at supervising the largest, most complex firms.” But White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee frets that taking power from the Fed would cause financial industry “nervousness.” Isn’t that the whole point of government regulation—to make the bandits look over their shoulders before they launch their next destructive scam?

Not so in the view of Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, who blithely insists that the Fed “is the best agency equipped for the task of supervising the largest, most complex firms,” despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. There is some irony in the fact that the largest of those complex firms got to be “too big to fail” because of the radical deregulatory legislation that Wolin drafted during his previous incarnation as the Treasury Department’s general counsel in the Clinton administration. Wolin is now deputy to Timothy Geithner, who as head of the New York Fed in the five years preceding the banking meltdown looked the other way as the disaster began to unfold.

Why is Barack Obama allowing these retreads from the Clinton era who went on to great riches on Wall Street to set economic policy for his administration? The fatal hallmark of this president’s financial policy is that it is being designed by the very people whose previous legislative efforts created the mess that enriched them while impoverishing the nation, and they now want more of the same.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/who_are_you_and_what_have_you_done_with_the_community_organizer_we_elected_/

You know, I don't recall this being on the candidate's website.

Edit: Removed AP credit and caption.

[GodlessBiker]

1. We elected Obama, not Kucinich. There was (and is) a difference.

[Demeter]

3. Yeah, the Difference Between Bought and Sold

[rudy23]

5. I'll settle for the Obama from the campaign, thank you.

The talking point from the DLC bashing Kucinich is only backfiring. How pitiful that as soon as Obama gets elected, he sends his minions online to try and bash the exact people who got him elected.

[GodlessBiker]

11. I would have preferred Kuninich. We got what we got.

[rudy23]

12. I would have preferred Howard Dean to both. nt

[Syntheto]

10. We also elected a President...

...in the American system, not a dictator, benevolent or otherwise, who can effect change by fiat. Even Mr. Kucinich would not be able to get as much done, and would face criticism and accusations of selling out, if he was the President.

[Skittles]

2. LOL

the man has not changed; the difference is, he is in office now

[juno jones]

4. There are bigger fish in the sea than mere presidents.

I'm sure Obama has found this out along the way.

His cabinet is probably the same one we would have gotten from Hillary, and I'm sure it was pretty much decided on ahead of time regardless of which 'D' won.

The presidency seems to shape people into it's mold rather than the other way 'round. The weight of history, inertia, money and all that. I've always wondered what kind of deals must be made with what devils to get to that office.

[Bluenorthwest]

6. He waved bye bye on election night

[democracy1st]

9. he was somber for a reason that night

[wuvuj]

7. 2-3 juggernaughts he can't handle?

The military and their wars....Wall St and finance sector.

Can't deal with the big messes?...........means NO CHANGE!

Wall St generals tell him what to do...military generals do the same....result? Same old shit.

Insurance and big pharma generals now doing the same....

See the pattern?????

[Dr.Phool]

8. The last paragraph says it all.

It is depressing for a columnist who had great hopes for Obama to be forced by the facts to credit editors at the right-wing Washington Times for getting it right when they opined: “Revolving doors between industry and the administration and fat-cat political contributors getting bailed out at taxpayer expense sound like business as usual. This certainly isn’t change we can believe in.” Please, Mr. President, say it ain’t so.