By Jake Johnson - Common Dreams, Spetember 29, 2016
Just months after becoming president of the United States, Barack Obama met with some of the world's most powerful executives.
It was a time of crisis: The economy was wavering dangerously in the aftermath of the housing bubble's great burst, and many of the nation's largest financial institutions had just been yanked from the brink of collapse.
Though the effects of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression were disastrous for countless Americans, the executives with whom the president spoke on that day in March of 2009 were doing just fine. In fact, many were doing better than ever.
While millions faced the prospect of losing their homes, their jobs, and their life savings, the same CEOs that helped spark the crash were paying themselves and their employees lavish bonuses.
The executives reportedly "offered several explanations" for their salaries, but the president quickly reminded them, "The public isn't buying that."
"My administration," Obama famously added, "is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."
It was a striking, even prescient, remark. Having ascended to the White House on a wave of grassroots support, the president was expected to take a stand for the public—it was expected that those guilty of wrongdoing would be held to account, that those harmed by Wall Street's rampant fraud would receive the full support of the administration.
But such high hopes were quickly dashed.
Or perhaps they were, from the start, misplaced. While President Obama did indeed ride a wave of grassroots support into the White House, that wave, it must be remembered, was generously bolstered by Wall Street cash.
And while the hopes of the millions who voted for change they could believe in may have, in the last analysis, been ill-advised, Wall Street certainly got its money's worth.
"Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street," Matt Taibbi noted in 2009. "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."
The Obama administration quickly downplayed such concerns, attempting to foster a genial relationship between the winners and losers of the crisis.
"The President emphasized that Wall Street needs Main Street, and Main Street needs Wall Street," Robert Gibbs, Obama's press secretary, said after the high-profile meeting.
Thankfully, the public didn't buy that either.