``The original sin of Obama's presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers....
Geithner, Summers and Bernanke should have known this. One can be fairly sure that they did know it. But Geithner and Bernanke had cast their lots, with continuity and coverup. And Summers, with his own record of deregulation, could hardly complain...'' JK Galbraith
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Nice article. It was short, concise, to the point. The other issues of the 2008 election putting Obama in office were the wars, War on Terror, and gross abuses of power in the whole national security apparatus. Obama carried over everyone of those from the Bush era symbolized and in fact with the retention of Robert Gates.
Obama's choice was change these systems or cover-up their failures, cover-up responsibility for those involved, and continue to hide the systems that produced them.
With the vast extensions of executive powers he inherited, he could have changed all of these policies and directions without consulting Congress---since most were installed without Congress in the first place. Instead he choose to cover-up all of them---and quietly extend their direction through AG Eric Holder.
Among Obama's cover-up techniques was to use Congress as a shield, claiming at every turn, he couldn't get a 2/3 vote for changing anything.
Then there is the corporate prison machine behind Arizona's 1070 where they intend to build public-private deportation processing centers for thousands of men, women and children of mixed citizenship status families in the US. This complements the National Guard and use of drones as spotting devices.
Eric Holder hinted at a federal lawsuit against Arizona---just like he hinted at a review of DoJ standards of witholding evidence on national security grounds. In other words, DoJ is part of the Obama cover-up machine.
Then there is the US CIA pursuit of wikileaks to cover-up the failures of the wars.
So much for Obama promises of greater government transparency.
CG