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.