Obama's First Appointment - An Ominous Portent

Barky's First Choices - No Seat At The
Table For Labor And The Third World
By Webster G. Tarpley
11-7-8

WASHINGTON DC -- Obama's first appointments have confirmed the grimmest suspicions about the new regime. The naming of the vicious thug Rahm Emanuel as the new Martin Bormann of the regime has caused much consternation, even among the netroots or nutroots crowd over at the Daily Kos. Rahm is a former member of the Israeli Defense Force whose ruling passion is that he is a warmonger. In 2006, when Rahm ran the Democratic congressional money machine, he made sure that only warmongers committed to the open-ended prosecution of the Afghan and Iraq wars could get any Democratic Party financing for their races. Many contests were lost as a result. A tragic case was that of grass-roots antiwar activist Christine Cegelis of Ohio, who was defeated in the Democratic primary by Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who advocated endless hostilities there. Duckworth lost to the Republican by several points. If the $300,000 Rahm gave Duckworth had been shared with anti-war candidate Bob Bowen in Florida, a Democratic seat could easily have been added. Rahm is also a product of the filthy and corrupt Illinois bipartisan Combine, which I have described in my books. A co-chair of the transition team is Valerie Jarrett, who served as Barky's travelling schoolmarm during the campaign. Jarrett also comes from the Daley wing of the Illinois combine. She has provided graft and related support for Michelle Obama's foundation-funded operations. Jarrett is also an integral part of the Chicago housing graft community, a region also inhabited by Barky's original godfather, the convicted felon and thief Tony Rezko. Jarrett is discussed in detail in my Obama biography. She is joined on the transition team by John Podesta, a Clinton-era retread who worked for Sen. Tom Daschle, the senator from Citibank, the biggest employer in South Dakota. Podesta also worked for Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a close personal friend of Weatherman terrorist bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Another Daschle-Citibank retread is transition co-chair Tom Rouse, who was the chief of staff for Daschle when he was the weakest Democratic majority leader in recent memory, surrendering to Bush on point after point. Chief strategist remains David Axelrod of the corrupt Illinois Combine, who was taught his mindbending skills in the infamous "1313" Rockefeller-funded think tank at the University of Chicago. BANKERS ONLY: NO VOICE FOR LABOR, RETIREES, SMALL BUSINESS, WOMEN Obama's transitional council of economic advisers is also notable. The dominant figures here are all Wall Street derivatives merchants and their quackademic apologists and politician clients. The key people here are plutocrat Warren Buffet, Obama moneybags and Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker, Goldman Sachs-Citibank alum Robert Rubin, woman-hating thug and failed Harvard president Larry Summers, Google spook Eric Schmidt, and Roger Ferguson, the former vice president of the Federal Reserve board. The most obscene is Trilateral Commission bigwig Paul Adolf Volcker, the bringer of the 22% prime rate of 1981 and the destroyer of the US indsutrial base. What is truly notable about this list is that there is not one single labor leader. No Sweeney of the AFL-CIO, no Hoffa of the Teamsters, no UAW, not even the unsavory Andy Stern of the SIEU, all big Obama backers. Note the difference to the New Deal, when labor reps were indispensable. With Barky, only derivatives monsters and their stooges need apply. Also notable by their absence are leaders of women's groups, small business associations, the congressional black caucus, retirees groups like the AARP ­ there is not even a token face representing any of these groups, all of which have a vital interest in economic policy. Read the ill omens if you have eyes to see. The Obama regime is shaping up as of the bankers, by the bankers, for the bankers. This is not the FDR New Deal ­ this is the Mussolini fascist corporate state. WASHINGTON ECONOMIC CONFERENCE: THE DERIVATIVES BLOC VS. THE ANTI- DERIVATIVES BLOC We are also told that Barky has been on the phone to foreign leaders about matters of economic. Let us read the tea leaves: whom did Barky call? Here is the list: Australia, the British, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, and South Korea. Notice now who is NOT on the list. Start with the great world powers who have been snubbed: Russia and China, both of whom are bigger holders of US Treasury bonds than most of those who are on the list. Saudi Arabia, who might have needed reassurance that Barky is not a commie, are also snubbed. Forget ideology, and behold the ineptitude. Most glaring of all is the lack of any phone call to a leading third world or developing sector country, other than Mexico, which is a branch of NAFTA. No calls were made to Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Nigeria, Algeria, India or a long list of other leading states. Nobody in Africa, nobody in south Asia, and nobody in South America got a call. Not even those who will be coming to the pseudo-Bretton Woods conference set for Washington later this month. The best we can hope for regarding that conference is that it end in a stalemate, dividing the world between a US-UK dominated derivatives bloc and a Brazil-India- Russia-China-South Africa anti-derivatives bloc interested in real physical commodity production, not fictitious capital. Obama, in summation, is acting just like the abject puppet of the Wall Street derivatives merchants and warmongers which we have argued him to be. Webster G. Tarpley is the author of Obama ­ The Postmodern Coup: The Making of a Manchurian Candidate, and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography, both available from amazon.com.