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The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

by MATT TAIBBI, Rolling Stone Dec 09, 2009

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. .  . .

. . . . . . . It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.

“Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal,” says one leading Democratic consultant. “Just look at it. It’s fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it.”

Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama’s election. . . .   (more)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/2

[ Emphasis ours. F.C. says “Econ sellout, war sellout, Copenhagen sellout, jobs sellout… we’re tired o’ sellouts!” Fish gotta swim!” ]