The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders
intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway
MATT TAIBBI
Rollingstone.com
Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
* * *
This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century --
solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and
those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing
meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves
not by their own identity but by that of others.
~ Elie Wiesel
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction,
is the first and only object of good government.
~ Thomas Jefferson
No comments:
Post a Comment