http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout
Rollingstone.com
Obama’s Big Sellout
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM
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Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. “Rather than having a team of rivals, they’ve got a team of Rubins,” says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. “You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street.”
While Rubin’s allies and acolytes got all the important jobs in the Obama administration, the academics and progressives got banished to semi-meaningless, even comical roles. Kornbluh was rewarded for being the chief policy architect of Obama’s meteoric rise by being outfitted with a pith helmet and booted across the ocean to Paris, where she now serves as America’s never-again-to-be-seen-on-TV ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Goolsbee, meanwhile, was appointed as staff director of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel “Siberia.”
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The President, at least according to Regan as I remember, has a very limited scope of influence. (That’s always stunned me.) The agenda might have three items and be lucky to get two done. It’s the appointments — picking people — where he has the most impact.
Clearly, Rolling Stone points out how poorly that picking was done.
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