Ties that bind: Obama-ClintonWH, Obama-Harvard

Change implicitly requires risk — the risk of not sticking to the status quo. While the man alone embodies plenty of differences from his 43 predecessors, it looks like much of his nominees, appointees and supporting cast are 20th Century Clintonites or Ivy-Leaugue and Harvard-types:

As Mike Allen highlights Al Kamen’s analysis:

WHO’S WHO — WashPost’s Al Kamen: “Fully 42 percent of Team Obama’s picks for Senate-confirmed positions so far worked in the Clinton administration. And if they appear to come from elite, private schools, well, they do. In fact, about one-fourth of those named so far either attended or taught at Harvard, to name just one esteemed institution. On another front, men are outnumbering women by more than 2 to 1 in the top jobs.”

More alarming is the entrenched owning class interests of the financiers and financial titans that run the Treasury Dept, Fed Banks and White House by association. In a troubling and telling article on “Obama’s Collusive Capitalism“:

The Obama policy of collusive capitalism is most evident in the financial bailout. He has placed his economic program in the hands of a man — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — who can best be called, as analyst Susanne Trimbath puts it, a “lap dog of Wall Street.” A protégé of former Treasury Secretary and Citicorp board member Robert Rubin, Geithner played a pivotal role in the original Bush bailout of the Wall Street elite…. The Geithner plan, Stiglitz noted this week in a New York Times op-ed, represents “the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves: clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets.” The winners in the plan are the top guns of the financial industry, who would welcome further government-sponsored financial consolidation. For them, this would be vastly preferable to the more democratic alternative of selling the remaining assets of the failed large firms to dispersed, healthy, usually smaller, regional institutions. Perhaps one has to start with the very obvious fact that the president — despite occasional attacks on the greed of Wall Street — did not run against the financial markets but, rather, with their strong support. As early as the 2008 Democratic primaries, noted New York Times Wall Street maven Andrew Ross Sorkin, Obama had “nailed [down] the hedge fund vote.”

What more will it take for us to realize that we don’t share many/any political or social or economic interests with these fat wallets running the Obama administration.

On Larry Summers ‘08 income

Best diss from Felix Salmon and one more reasons (as if we needed more) to see how the owning class pervades the executives of Team America — err, TeamObama:

But Summers’s speeches are interesting too, especially the foreign ones: $67,500 from Tata Conultancy Services; $90,000 from the Asociation de Bancos de Mexico; $103,500 from the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Baja California; $112,500 from Centro de Liderazgo y Gestion in Colombia; the same amount from IESE Business School in Spain; $135,000 from the American Chamber of Commerce in Argentina; and a whopping $225,000 from Leaders and Company, the publishers of This Day newspaper in Nigeria.

Is Larry Summers the only person in history to reply to an email from Nigeria saying “we have hundreds of thousands of dollars we would like to give you; you need to do very little to receive it” — and actually get the money?

What’s more intriguing, and less funny, is how small the lines of influence are, as a $147K seat on a board of Dr Doom’s economic forecasting firm is a nice penny:

Of particular interest to me is the amount that Nouriel Roubini was paying Summers to sit on the advisory board of Roubini Global Economics, where I used to work: $147,500 a year. Somehow I doubt that fellow board member Marc Uzan was pulling down a similar amount.

If you don’t know Dr Doom, read this NYT profile of him here. And here’s his firm’s site.

ObamaDOJ + RIAAfolks = old web 1.0

Boring … and for proof that the Obama administration isn’t that down with the cutting edge of internet life and hacking despite the impressions given by his Crackberry addction:

Nearly two dozen public interest groups, trade pacts and library groups urged President Barack Obama on Thursday to quit filling his administration with insiders plucked from the Recording Industry Association of America. The demands came a week after the Justice Department, fresh with two RIAA attorneys in its No. 2 and No. 3 positions, announced the administration’s support of $150,000 in damages for each music track purloined on a peer-to-peer file sharing program.