Another Jewel from Taibbi

I posted the video of him going over the basics of this article last week, and this week, Matt Taibbi's full article in Rolling Stone, Obama's Big Sellout, goes into more detail.

Taibbi is more charitable than I am, because he wonders, "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?"

Cynic that I am, I don't think that he's a wet behind the ears politico hoodwinked by Wall Street: Every action that he has taken has been about what makes things easier for Barack Obama, whether it be the banks, or torture, or gay rights, or the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

It's no surprise then that he goes for the bankers over the ordinary people: The bankers could bankroll someone like Sarah Palin, and the ordinary people have no where else to go.

Taibbi's article is a blistering indictment of what Barack Obama, and to a lesser extent Barney Frank have been doing, or more accurately not doing, about wall street.

To get a sense of the article, you need only read this paragraph:

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. "You can't expect these people to do anything other than protect Wall Street," says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama's first address to Congress, when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. "Credit is the lifeblood of the economy," he declared, pledging "the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money." A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy. Rather than doing what FDR had done during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to curb financial abuses, Obama planned to institutionalize the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.

Though I would say that I enjoyed this slam of "Eddie Haskell" too:

That probably won't happen anytime soon. But at a minimum, Obama should start on the road back to sanity by making a long-overdue move: firing Geithner. Not only are the mop-headed weenie of a Treasury secretary's fingerprints on virtually all the gross giveaways in the new reform legislation, he's a living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day. And while there are some who think Geithner is about to go — "he almost has to," says one Democratic strategist — at the moment, the president is still letting Wall Street do his talking.

If you think that eleventy dimensional chess is going on here, you have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie^®.

Now go read the article.