Obama Needs Our Prayers

I made this little "Prayer For Obama" clip for the Drunken Sufis "song"-- but with no joy, none at all-- and I planned to post it at the bottom of the 6AM Afghanistan post. But then I found the Eric Massa clip and the Dennis Kucinich document and I figured they were more important. It's just a couple seconds long so it doesn't stand on it's own as a music post... and then I found Matt Taibbi's new Rolling Stone story, Obama's Big Sellout. It's about Wall Street, not Afghanistan, but it's another side of a dreadful card many of us are finally contemplating. Taibbi walks us through it:

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, 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.

I suggest you read the rest of Matt's article. It's a lot better than my sad little clip up top.