For many, many moons now, I've been saying that President Obama isn't copying FDR but Herbert Hoover.   His community organizing phase was but a momentary blip on the radar screen while his coziness with financial industry and other corporate gazliionaires belie his phony made for the masses rhetoric.

No where is this more obvious than with those he has chosen to fill high positions in his administration..

Robert Scheer at Truthdig echoes what I have been writing: 

"Why is Barack Obama allowing these retreads from the Clinton era who went on to great riches on Wall Street to set economic policy for his administration? The fatal hallmark of this president’s financial policy is that it is being designed by the very people whose previous legislative efforts created the mess that enriched them while impoverishing the nation, and they now want more of the same.

"[Senator Chris] Dodd wants to take supervisory power from the Federal Reserve, which is controlled by the banks it pretends to monitor, and put it in the hands of a new independent agency. That makes sense given the Fed’s abject failure to properly monitor the financial sector over the past decade as that industry got drunk on greed. As Dodd’s spokeswoman Kirstin Brost put it: 'The Federal Reserve flat out failed at supervising the largest, most complex firms.' But White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee frets that taking power from the Fed would cause financial industry “nervousness.” Isn’t that the whole point of government regulation—to make the bandits look over their shoulders before they launch their next destructive scam?

"Not so in the view of Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, who blithely insists that the Fed “is the best agency equipped for the task of supervising the largest, most complex firms,” despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. There is some irony in the fact that the largest of those complex firms got to be “too big to fail” because of the radical deregulatory legislation that Wolin drafted during his previous incarnation as the Treasury Department’s general counsel in the Clinton administration. Wolin is now deputy to Timothy Geithner, who as head of the New York Fed in the five years preceding the banking meltdown looked the other way as the disaster began to unfold.

"Wolin, Geithner and Summers were all protégés of Robert Rubin, who, as Clinton’s treasury secretary, was the grand author of the strategy of freeing Wall Street firms from their Depression-era constraints. It was Wolin who, at Rubin’s behest, became a key force in drafting the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which ended the barrier between investment and commercial banks and insurance companies, thus permitting the new financial behemoths to become too big to fail.

"It is depressing for a columnist who had great hopes for Obama to be forced by the facts to credit editors at the right-wing Washington Times for getting it right when they opined: “Revolving doors between industry and the administration and fat-cat political contributors getting bailed out at taxpayer expense sound like business as usual. This certainly isn’t change we can believe in.” Please, Mr. President, say it ain’t so."

It is the antithesis of change.  But it is so. 

Not only is the former short term community organizer a shill for the financial industry he is following Bush policy by picking foxes to guard hen houses,

For example, his recent choice of a pesticide trade association (CropLife) aka lobbying group executive for the biggies, Monsanto and Dow Chemical, to be chief agricultural negotiator at the US Trade Representative office.  He chose a pesticide pusher to be in charge of US agriculture negotiating, a VP for CropLife that was upset with Michelle Obama's White House organic garden and sent her a letter "expressing their deep concern that she was setting a bad example for the rest of the country by not using their chemical pesticides."

One scientist commented on this particular facet of the Obama adminstration thus: "...there’s a quite a contradiction here. You know, we get, on the one hand, Tom Vilsack as head of USDA, very fine personal qualities, but a very strong commitment, again, to genetically modified organisms and biotech as the latest shiny new technology that we can put on the rest of the world. Then we have Kathleen Merrigan, yes, who is well known for her interest and support of organic farming. So what we have is this very inconsistent policy. But underneath—and perhaps what’s most important is where the key people in the administration and in US agriculture are going. And so, putting Siddiqui in charge of the US Trade Office is very telling......It’s a bankrupt policy for this country and for the rest of the world."

But this is apparently Obama's MO.  Soaring rhetoric about the common good, but putting people in charge, Clintonites and Republicans, who are usually those who once created policies to destroy the common good, then getting rich by working for corporate behemoths and are now working in the Obama administration to solidify government of, by, and for the wealthy few, their corporate cronies, while continuing the diminution and ultimately the destruction of the common good.  And Obama picked them.