Obama: Out With the Old Boys, In With the Old Boys

Change We Can Believe In.  And "believe" is exactly what so many did.  As in "make believe."

Obama's economic team is a case in point.  Here's William Greider in this week's "The Nation:" 

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Events have confronted Obama with a fearful symmetry between past and present, illustrated by his choice of economic advisers. On Friday, we learned that Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve, would become his new treasury secretary and Larry Summers, who held the same position in the Clinton administration, would be the White House overseer of economic policy. On Monday, Geithner was busy executing the government's massive rescue of Citicorp--the very banking behemoth that Geithner and Summers helped to create back in the Clinton years, along with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, Clinton's economics guru. Now Rubin is himself a Citicorp executive and his bank is now being saved by his old protégé (Geithner) with the taxpayers' money.

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And Naomi Klein on “Democracy Now!,” Tuesday, November 25, 2008: 

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Obama said again and again during the campaign that the crisis on Wall Street represented the culmination of an ideology of deregulation and laisse-faire trickle-down economics that had guided the country for the past eight years.

The truth is, it was not just eight years, they guided them under Reagan and also under Clinton.

That is where Larry Summers comes in because he was the last treasury secretary under Clinton. He along with Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin were the key architects of the policies of deregulation that created the crisis that we’re living now. And those key policies are the killing of Glass-Spiegel that allowed a series of very large but mergers that created these institutions that are too big and too intermingled to fail we’re told again and again.

The deliberate decision to keep the derivatives out of the reach of financial regulators- that was also a Summer’s decision. And also allowing the banks to carry these extraordinary levels of debt. 33 to 1 in the case of Bear Sterns.

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Then, there are those tax cuts Bush and the Congress have bestowed upon the nation’s wealthiest.  Obama pledged during the campaign to repeal them as soon as he took the reigns of power.  Now, we hear something quite different: 

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During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Obama economic adviser William Daley suggested that the incoming administration would reconsider whether to quickly increase taxes for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year.

Daly, who was commerce secretary under former President Bill Clinton and is the brother of Chicago Mayor Richard Daly, said it looks “more likely than not” that Obama would not seek legislation to repeal President George W. Bush’s cut in the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans before it is scheduled to expire after the 2010 tax year. Bush cut the top rate to 35% from 39.6% in 2001.

Obama had promised to restore the top tax rate to its earlier level, while cutting taxes for the middle class.

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The Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2008

When (and if) Obama gets around to the anticipated appointments of Robert Gates to remain at DoD, John Brennan to run the CIA (or move in as National Intelligence Director), and Susan Rice to serve as UN Ambassador, you’ll be hearing a lot more from me about Obama’s advocates of torture, unilateral aggression, and defunding of veterans benefits and after-care.

Change We Can believe In?  Yes, indeedy do.