Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

"Maria Cantwell sat aghast in from of the TV in her Senate office last fall, watching Wall Street crash.  Not long after her arrival in D.C., Enron imploded, and energy speculators wielding complex derivatives had gouged her constituents in Washington state out of $1 billion.  The federal government she thought had done little since then to prevent fraud and manipulation so last September, after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed, Lehman Brothers went under and the stock market plummeted, she decided she'd had enough, 'I have seen this movie and I know how it turns out,' Cantwell said."

The financial deregulation during the Clinton administration had proven to be the economic disaster which triggered the economic meltdown.

The article continues:

"Finally in late March, Cantwell and her confederates -- Carl Levin of Michigan, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Dianne Feinstein of California, Jim Webb of Virginia and Vermont's Bernard Sanders met with members of Obama's economic team in the White House.  `I told the president I was concerned that the administration had people in charge who had missed all this before,' she says.  It was an awkward moment: two of the officials that Cantwell came to complain about -- Obama's Chief Economic Adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were sitting right there.

"Yet one by one, the other senators echoed Cantwell's concern that Obama's appointed officials and nominees were products of the system that had brought us this economic grief.  They would tinker, but in the end leave Wall Street mostly intact."

The overpaid bank executives won't have to worry with the Wall Street giants in charge.

Those who assisted Obama in running his vigorous campaign from coast to coast guided the candidate brilliantly.  The political message dramatically declared was, "The time has come for change."

What a colossal disappointment that some of the same people who were in charge when the U.S. economy collapsed were called upon by Obama to right the wrongs of the past that they had helped perpetrate.

Maria Cantwell, Carl Levin, Byron Dorgan, Dianne Feinstein, and Bernard Sanders are to be congratulated in arranging this meeting with Barack Obama and his Chief Economic Adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to let them know emphatically that the public wants change, not more of the same.

How can Obama justify some of his appointments in light of the political slogan "change" that swept him into White House residency?