Obama's Wall Street cabinet

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/pers-a06.shtml

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1. Some names that we might not be familiar with (but who have

joined the Obama administration after they figured that the Obama administration was the next stop on the greed-o-rama:

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Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama administration this year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed him this past January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration.

Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.

David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s top strategist and now senior adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million last year from two consulting firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that will garner him another $3 million over the next five years. His disclosure claims personal assets of between $7 and $10 million.


Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.

Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made $227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under federal receivership.

-MORE-

[biopowertoday]

2. "he was from the first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of powerful

financiers in Chicago".

I for one did not pay enough attention to this.


.............Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its top advisers two investment bankers with a long resume in corporate downsizing and asset-stripping.

It is not new for leading figures from finance to be named to high posts in a US administration. However, there has traditionally been an effort to demonstrate a degree of independence from Wall Street in the selection of cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential aides, often through the appointment of figures from academia or the public sector. In previous decades, moreover, representatives of the corporate elite were more likely to come from industry than from finance.

In the Obama administration such considerations have largely been abandoned.

This will not come as a surprise to those who critically followed Obama’s election campaign. While he postured before the electorate as a critic of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force for “change,” he was from the first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of powerful financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms lavishly backed his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.

Alongside Wall Street, the Obama cabinet is dominated by the military, including three recently retired four-star military officers: former Marine General James Jones as national security adviser; Admiral Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence, and former Army Chief of Staff Erik Shinseki as secretary of veterans’ affairs.