Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Candidate Obama Promised Change We Can Believe In
If one tallies up the members of President Obama’s cabinet who played a role in crashing a bank before coming to help him govern the country or worked for a major law firm serving Wall Street before being hand-picked by the President to head up the bodies charged with investigating Wall Street, the Executive Branch begins to feel a lot like Wall Street West. That might explain why so many fellow Americans feel like Wall Street is running (and ruining and rigging) the country.
Is the President naïve or being maneuvered by the invisible hand? We were asking the same kind of question on May 6, 2008 during the President’s first campaign for the Presidency:
“We are asked to believe that those kindly white executives at all the biggest Wall Street firms, which rank in the top 20 donors to the Obama presidential campaign, after failing to achieve more than 3.5 per cent black stockbrokers over 30 years, now want a black populist president because they crave a level playing field for the American people.
“The number one industry supporting the Obama presidential bid, by the start of February, — the crucial time in primary season — according to the widely respected, nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, was “lawyers/law firms” (most on Wall Street’s payroll), giving a total of $11,246,596.
“This presents three unique credibility problems for the yes-we-can-little-choo-choo-that-could campaign: (1) these are not just “lawyers/law firms;” the vast majority of these firms are also registered lobbyists at the Federal level; (2) Senator Obama has made it a core tenet of his campaign platform that the way he is going to bring the country hope and change is not taking money from federal lobbyists…”
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