Obama's Big Sellout - Matt Taibbi
Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
Thank goodness someone in the mainstream press is able to write this kind of stuff. Taibbi’s trademark sarcasm and snark are probably part of what makes it somewhat palatable, but nevertheless, considering how insistently bourgie and centrist most of the mainstream press is these days, it’s good to see this being published.
Yet I suppose the sarcastic tone is only possible when it’s clear that you aren’t setting the terms for discussion but rather reacting/responding to the way that they have already been set. And that, I suppose, is one of the hard parts of being on the left nowadays. Sometimes the sarcasm is symptomatic of a marginalization that we take more or less for granted when perhaps we ought to be working to establish alternative ways of being in the world.
