Obama's Big Sellout

From Matt Taibbi at Obama’s Big Sellout“>Rolling Stone, not yet online:

Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and iexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout – to November 5th, 2008 the day after Obama’s election.

That was the day the jublilant Obama campaign announced its transition team…

Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama’s chief advisors during the campaign, didn’t make the cut…

Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring AIG executives should receive “a Nobel Prize – for evil.”…

Leading the search for the president’s new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama’s biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters – chief among them his mentor, Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.

As you painfully know, Paulson and Geithner are retained from BuschCo. On Rubin:

he has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having fucked up virtually every project he ever go his hands on.

On the appointment of Rubin protege, Jason Furman:

provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA…

A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal.

On appointing Rubinite Gary Gensler to head the CFTC:

Gensler had been instrumental in helping to pass the infamous Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which prevented deregulation of derivative instruments…

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.

On the heels of the unprecedented TARP:

a month after Gary Gensler came out in favor of reform, Geithner slapped him down by issuing a 115 page paper called “Improvements to Regulation of Over-the Counter Derivative Markets” that called for a series of exemptions for … almost all of the clients who buy derivatives…

Even more stunning, (Rep. Barney) Frank’s bill included a blanket exception to the rules for currency swaps traded on foreign exchanges – the very instrument that had triggered the Long Term Capital Management meltdown in the late 1990s…

By the time Frank’s committee was done with the bill, however, the SEC and the CFTC were left with no authority to do anything about abusive derivatives other than to send a report to Congress.

On the Consumer Finance Protection Agency:

Frank … agreed to exempt some 8,000 of the nation’s 8,200 banks from oversight…

On Franks’ committee and “resolution authority”:

A masterpiece of legislative chicanery, the measure would have given the White House permanent and unlimited authority over future bailouts…

it provoked a revolt among his own committee members… that restored congressional oversight…

The Senate bill is equally problematic:

If this passes, the very first thing these companies are going to do in the future is ask themselves, ‘How do we make sure that one of our executives becomes assistant Treasury Secretary?’

On the electorate:

These are the kinds of voters whom Obama’s gang of Wall Street advisers is counting on: idiots.

The money shot:

Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America’s racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads.