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Now, back to your vote for both the PATRIOT Act reauthorization in 2006 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendment in 2008. These and other rollbacks in domestic civil liberties under Bush are inexcusable and must be addressed. We'll be waiting for you to do that.
5. Choose Main Street (not Wall Street)
Just this month you promised Americans that they can "turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street."
Yet, as Bloomberg notes, "almost half the people" on your Transition Economic Advisory Board "have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both."
This includes, for example, Anne Mulcahy and Richard Parsons, both of whom
were Fannie Mae directors when the company fudged accounting rules. Ditto for another of your team members, William Daley.
Mulcahy and Parsons additionally held executive posts when their companies (Xerox Corp. and Time Warner Inc., respectively) got busted for accounting fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Also on your team is Robert Rubin, who as Bloomberg notes, was "chairman of
Citigroup Inc.'s executive committee when the bank pushed bogus analyst
research, helped Enron Corp. cook its books, and got caught baking its own. He
was a director from 2000 to 2006 at Ford Motor Co., which also committed
accounting fouls and now is begging Uncle Sam for Citigroup-style bailout
cash."
The list of questionable appointees to your Transitional Economic Advisory
Board goes on and on, begging the question: Is this really the best you could
come up with? How about Joseph Stiglitz, Sheila Bair, Nouriel Roubini or James
K. Galbraith, for starters? Someone who represents labor?
Meanwhile, we're stuck with this nasty bailout bill – which you voted for.
Others, such as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), realized the bill's problems and voted against it. Feingold said that the Wall Street bailout legislation, "fails to reform the flawed regulatory structure that permitted this crisis to arise in the first place. And it doesn't do enough to address the root cause of the credit market collapse, namely the housing crisis. Taxpayers deserve a plan that puts their concerns ahead of those who got us into this mess."
Feingold was right.
In short, Mr. President-elect, you promised "Change we can believe in," but across the board it's looking a lot more like "Business as usual."
