In an April 13, 2009, interview on Democracy Now Amy Goodman asks for his views on Obama’s handling of the bail-out. Chomsky notes that Obama, as a centrist Democrat, is relying on exactly the same people who crashed our economy to fix it. He quotes an article from Bloomberg News in which they analyzed the past histories of Obama’s economic team and those he invited to his economic summit in December, 2008:
They just reviewed the record. I think there were a couple dozen of them. People on the—you know, people like, say, Stiglitz, Krugman, they were never even allowed close to it, let alone anyone from the left or labor and so on, given token representation. So they went through the records, and they concluded that these people should not be invited to fix up the economy. Most of them should be getting subpoenas because of their record of accounting fraud, malpractice and so on, and helping bring about the current crisis
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The people he is referring to are Geithner, Summers and Robert Rubin, all of whom participated in the push to abolish Glass-Steagall restrictions on banks and to otherwise deregulate the financial economy.