What Happened To The Obama We Elected

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Judging from his campaign rhetoric we might have assumed that  Barack Obama would have stood up to the Corporatocracy not join it but as Robert Scheer points out join it is what he did.

What's up with Barack Obama? The candidate
for change once promised to take on the powerful banking interests but
is now doing their bidding. Finally, a leading Democrat, in this case
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, has a good idea for
monitoring the Wall Street fat cats who all but destroyed the American
economy, and the Obama administration condemns it. 

Dodd wants to take supervisory power from
the Federal Reserve, which is controlled by the banks it pretends to
monitor, and put it in the hands of a new independent agency. That
makes sense given the Fed's abject failure to properly monitor the
financial sector over the past decade as that industry got drunk on
greed. As Dodd's spokeswoman Kirstin Brost put it: "The Federal Reserve
flat out failed at supervising the largest, most complex firms." But
White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee frets that taking power
from the Fed would cause financial industry "nervousness." Isn't that
the whole point of government regulation-to make the bandits look over
their shoulders before they launch their next destructive scam?

Not so in the view of Deputy Treasury
Secretary Neal Wolin, who blithely insists that the Fed "is the best
agency equipped for the task of supervising the largest, most complex
firms," despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. There is some
irony in the fact that the largest of those complex firms got to be
"too big to fail" because of the radical deregulatory legislation that
Wolin drafted during his previous incarnation as the Treasury
Department's general counsel in the Clinton administration. Wolin is
now deputy to Timothy Geithner, who as head of the New York Fed in the
five years preceding the banking meltdown looked the other way as the
disaster began to unfold.

Of course we should not have been surprised when we saw his selections for his economic team - Clinton industry insiders who were responsible for the deregulation that resulted in the meltdown.

And my old friend Steve Soto breaks his sabbatical to take a swipe at Obama.

However, it�s also too easy to blame the problems facing Democrats
right now on their leadership and the Republicans. A healthy dose of
looking in the mirror would help the White House right about now, not
that they ever will. Barack Obama owns the paltry and misguided
stimulus package, and the fact that we will not get another shot at one
before 2010. Barack Obama owns the lack of financial reform to date,
and the fact that his own administration is conspiring to work against
real reform and continues to this day to be more interested in helping out Goldman Sachs than they are in holding Wall Street accountable.
And Barack Obama owns the blown health care debate and legislative
approach, which has evolved to a point where a necessary debate about
the morality of letting big insurance companies destroy the lives of
everyday Americans has been diverted into a debate about abortion,
which should have been foreseen months ago as a red state poison pill.

It�s
easy for me and others to second-guess the health care reform strategy
now, but it should not have been hard for the brains in the White House
to see that letting Congress have the keys to this car in the midst of
a bad economy and rising concerns about debt and bailouts would lead to
this. The White House has made it excessively easy for the GOP to
employ their typical tactics. Partly this is because of a flawed
strategy from overrated people at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Partly it
is because of the na� �new kind of politics� delusion from the
president himself, which reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of
the forces aligned against him from Day One. And partly it is because
you cannot ask Main Street to resist the usual right wing misdirection
attempts and ignore the fact that they have gotten nothing so far from
the bailouts except more debt, and are now being asked to take more on
faith. Once Obama let Tim Geithner and Larry Summers talk down the size
of the stimulus while holding no one accountable on Wall Street and
Washington for past misdeeds, the cake was baked for a Democratic
drubbing in 2010.

And then of course there is the mistake Obama is probably going to make in Afghanistan.