Obama’s big switch

Call it bait-and-switch. Obama ran on a platform that included stronger financial regulations and changes in the behavior that caused the economic collapse.

What has been the reality? Obama has filled the ranks of financial regulators and his economic advisors with Wall Street insiders. Matt Taibbi explicates:

Read the full details in Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone.  Excerpt:

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.

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history.

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