I usually don't watch much television news. When I do, I realize why. I saw Andrea Mitchell tonight talking about who President Obama will turn to for help in dealing with the financial crisis. The first two names were at the top of the list of people who gave us the financial crisis: Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. This would be a bit like turning to Osama Bin Laden for aid in the war on terrorism. Rubin and Summers were both major advocates of the one-sided deregulation of the financial industry under which we maintained the security blanket of "too big to fail" for the Wall Street big boys, but gave them the green light to take whatever risks they wanted in order to enrich themselves. It would be difficult to imagine that President Obama would embrace people with such a dismal track record.
--Dean Baker