OBAMA IS PRESIDENT FOR THE 1%, HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS, AND ILLEGALS. HE IS ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT POLITICIANS IN HISTORY, AND NOTHING MORE THAN BUSH'S THIRD TERM!
It evidently never occurred to Obama, himself a multi-millionaire and long-time political asset of corporate interests, that such statements would arouse anger among the tens of millions struggling to survive in the midst of a campaign of layoffs, wage-cutting and austerity.
*
Obama's Regulatory Reform Sham
Continues
By Lurita Doan
5/30/2011
President Obama's
much-praised efforts at regulatory reform remain a sham. This past week, while
the President traveled overseas, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in
conjunction with rolled out its review of proposed changes
to government regulations.
The reform will
affect at least 30 federal agencies and is designed to "always consider
costs and ways to reduce burdens for American businesses when developing rules;
expand opportunities for public participation and public comment; and ensure
that regulations are driven by real science." An elegant White House web
page, accompanied by an online, explanatory video, supported by an in-person
appearances from OMB Director Jacob Lew and Cass Sunstein, and countless, premature
victory laps around Washington cannot disguise the emptiness of many of the
proposed reforms. For, what has been released is just the plan for the plan.
According to the
hype, after 120 days of effort, federal agencies have come forward with
"groundbreaking" ideas--not for ways to cut costs to taxpayers by
reducing regulations--but with ideas on how to generate ideas on how to
implement potential regulatory review and reform.
What a lot of
hullabaloo about something that hasn't happened, and which, if the timelines
identified in the 30 agency plans
are anything to go by, will not happen until 2012--long after the current debt
ceiling has exploded and too late to provide significant contributions to the
federal budget and deficit debate.
Any talk from
Sunstein about billions in savings is premature at best and possibly
constitutes a deliberate attempt at fraud since changes will be proposed to be
implemented in 2012 or later--so that it will be difficult to measure
accountability and results until long after the November 2012 presidential
election.
Reading some of the
agency plans housed on the White House website shows that much of what the
White House is calling an "unprecedented, government-wide review" is
little more than a rehash of policies, planning and strategies proposed during
the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Many of those actions, which were
identified by Obama's predecessors, have been left languishing during the Obama
Administration because they called for tough actions.
Every time it seems
is if the Obama Administration cannot sink any lower in its efforts to deceive
the American taxpayer, the limbo stick comes out, and Americans get to see, once
again, just how low the Obama Administration can go. Team Obama's Regulations
Review seems to be a colossal fraud, during the course of which, agencies are
actually increasing the regulations affecting individuals and businesses.
The Regulations Review
process is adding to the size of government by creating new review committees,
adding to the cost of government because none of these review bodies operate
free of cost, and Sunstein and his team seem to be banking on the fact that few
will read the hollow reports, so that the Obama Administration can present
their "savings" howsoever they choose.
Then there is the
issue of transparency. For example, the Department of Education's report along with 29 others
listed on the White House site can only be commented on by providing personal
Facebook information, thus eliminating commenter anonymity, which will
certainly affect the content of the feedback, and forcing non-Facebook users to
search for alternative means to provide comments to the Obama Administration.
In another example,
the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) report of regulatory reform
spends almost approximately 9 pages of its 12-page report discussing the plan
for the plan and spends less than three pages listing recommended regulations
considered for regulatory reform. Of the five reforms listed, three of the five
comprise regulation reforms were begun and completed during the Bush
Administration.
One of the recommendations
(#4, p.10) a review of the GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) pricing clause was
an idea conceived, a Blue ribbon commission formed and funded and with findings completed during the previous
Administration. These findings from the independent commission have been
waiting for the current GSA Administrator to act upon for the past two years.
Instead, at no small
expense to the American taxpayer, the current team at GSA seems to be saying:
let's just kick that can down the road because confronting the challenges of
this out-of-date, ineffective rule is just too scary. So, in this plan for the
plan, the current team at GSA promises to look at the pricing clause problem
with a date uncertain in 2012 for possible resolution. In the case of GSA's
blatant misrepresentation, claiming credit for proposing new and
"unprecedented" regulatory reform reviews based partly on a
recommendation that the Obama Team will launch the Pricing Clause review is
nothing other than a fraud, and an easily exposed one at that.
By contrast, the
Department of Education report and the Department of Homeland Security report
identify in their reports that much of the to-be-discussed regulatory reform
was initiated during the Bush Administration.
For the Obama
Administration to claim that the Regulatory Review chicanery comprises a
"defining moment" is an insult to the American taxpayer who has to
foot the bill, and the folks in government who have put their names on these
reports should be ashamed.
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/obama-his-bankster-thugs-running.html
*
OBAMA’S CRONY CAPITALISM, A LOVE STORY BETWEEN THE ACTOR
PRESIDENT, AND HIS BANKSTER DONORS!
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors
are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
*
Well, Obama’s got Bush’s war profiteer whore, Dianne
Feinstein, and the Saudis’ whore Hillary Clinton, why shouldn’t he have Bush’s
architect for BIG BANKERS’ WELFARE, Timmy?
Obama's Wall Street cabinet
6 April 2009
A
series of articles published over the weekend, based on financial disclosure
reports released by the Obama administration last Friday concerning top White
House officials, documents the extent to which the administration, in both its
personnel and policies, is a political instrument of Wall Street.
Policies
that are extraordinarily favorable to the financial elite that were put in
place over the past month by the Obama administration have fed a surge in share
values on Wall Street. These include the scheme to use hundreds of billions of
dollars in public funds to pay hedge funds to buy up the banks’ toxic assets at
inflated prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection of the recovery plans of
Chrysler and General Motors and its demand for even more brutal layoffs, wage
cuts and attacks on workers’ health benefits and pensions, and the decision by
the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to weaken “mark-to-market”
accounting rules and permit banks to inflate the value of their toxic assets.
At
the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on bonuses paid to
executives at insurance giant American International Group (AIG) and other
bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he will slash social
spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The
new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors directly involved in
setting these policies have received millions from Wall Street firms, including
those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The
case of Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council and Obama’s
top economic adviser, highlights the politically incestuous character of
relations between the Obama administration and the American financial elite.
Last
year, Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of
the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7 million for speeches
delivered to Wall Street firms that have received government bailout money.
This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each from JPMorgan Chase and
the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.
For
a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away with $135,000. This
is substantially more than double the earnings for an entire year of
high-seniority auto workers, who have been pilloried by the Obama
administration and the media for their supposedly exorbitant and
“unsustainable” wages.
Alluding
diplomatically to the flagrant conflict of interest revealed by these
disclosures, the New York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr. Summers, the
director of the National Economic Council, wields important influence over Mr.
Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled financial industry, including firms
from which he recently received payments.”
Summers
was a leading advocate of banking deregulation. As treasury secretary in the
second Clinton administration, he oversaw the lifting of basic financial
regulations dating from the 1930s. The Times article notes that among
his current responsibilities is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten regulation
of hedge funds.”
Summers
is not an exception. He is rather typical of the Wall Street insiders who
comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled with multi-millionaires,
presided over by a president who parlayed his own political career into a
multi-million-dollar fortune.
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.
The
presence of multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends to second- and
third-tier positions in the Obama administration as well. David Stevens, who
has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Housing Administration, is the
president and chief operating officer of Long and Foster Cos., a real estate
brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top executive for
Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was bailed out
and seized by federal regulators in September.
Neal
Wolin, Obama’s selection for deputy counsel to the president for economic
policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant Hartford Financial Services,
where his salary was $4.5 million.
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.
These
are the deeply reactionary political and class interests that are represented
by the Obama administration.
Friday’s
financial disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of American democracy. Elections
have no real effect on government policy, which is determined by the interests
of the financial aristocracy that dominates both political parties. The working
class can fight for its own interests—for jobs, decent living standards, health
care, education, housing and an end to war—only through a break with the two
parties of American capitalism and the development of a mass, independent
socialist movement.
Tom
Eley and Barry Grey
*
Obama’s Economic Advisers: International Socialists, Union Thugs, NBC Execs, Soros Scholars, Subprime Lenders, Amnesty Shills, and Campaign Cronies
Posted on February 24, 2011 by Ben Johnson
http://floydreports.com/obama%E2%80%99s-economic-advisers-international-socialists-union-thugs-nbc-execs-soros-scholars-subprime-lenders-amnesty-shills-and-campaign-cronies/
*
Obama’s Economic Advisers: International Socialists, Union
Thugs, NBC Execs, Soros Scholars, Subprime Lenders, Amnesty Shills, and
Campaign Cronies
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