Selling Out America To Financial Elites

More of a passage of the day:

“Obama’s agenda, however, became less opaque in June 2008 when he chagrined labour supporters by appointing Jason Furman, the director of the Brookings-affiliated Hamilton Project, as the head of his economic policy unit. The Project, founded by ex-Treasury secretary Robert Rubin in 2006, has been part of the institutional network that elaborates the legacy of the Clinton Administration: in this case as a megaphone for centrist economic policies that meld fiscal conservatism and financial deregulation with smarter public investment. Furman’s appointment was followed by the arrival in the inner circle of Rubin’s successor in the Clinton Treasury, Lawrence Summers, a devotee of Milton Friedman (‘any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites’), who with Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm had dismantled the last New Deal firewall, the Glass–Steagall Act, between traditional banks and derivative Ponzi schemes. By making the Hamilton Project his economic shadow cabinet, and later elevating the radioactive Summers to the directorship of the National Economic Council, Obama restored to power the auteurs of the catastrophe, and willingly entangled himself in the seedy history of ‘Rubinomics’ and the notorious back door between the Clinton White House and big investment banks and money funds…

The new Administration, in fact, seems determined at all cost to prevent such an ideological polarization by bringing on board as many temperate defenders of the ‘established order’ as possible. With economic crisis-management firmly in the hands of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs alumni, foreign policy delegated to the sub-presidency of Hillary Clinton and her spouse, and the ‘surge’ doctrine of Gates and Petraeus preserved in the Pentagon, Obama has built a dream team that delights The Economist and Foreign Affairs to the same degree that it disconcerts The Nation. As in the Clinton era, labour and environment have been seated at a second table, with important but secondary posts that lack leverage over the Administration’s line of march.”

From Obama at Manassas by Mike Davis.

See Also: Limited, Guarding Your Interests, Keep the Wolf at the Door, Administration Seeking to Circumvent Restrictions Imposed on Bailout Recipients, Simon Johnson suggests a narrative, Tim Geithner Is Not a Tool of Wall Street, Ideas and interests, Larry Summers: Wrong Man for the Job, and The financial paper coup….

[tags]barack obama, economic policy, economic centrists, deregulators, deregulation, citigroup, goldman sachs alumni, milton friedman, democrats, stimulus, stimulus package, rubin, treasury secretary, lawrence summers[/tags]