How It Really Works

While millions upon millions of Americans continue to suffer greatly under the country's ongoing economic woes without any end in sight, the Obama years have, indeed, been very, very good to this tiny constituency of wealth he's now eagerly courting. And with a Chief of Staff like Bill Daley and a Treasury Secretary like Tim Geithner, it's hard to imagine this effort triggering anything other than ultimate success.

[...]

Last month, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama’s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.

[...]

The article also notes that one possible threat to Obama's plan would be a Romney candidacy, as Wall Street would love to back one of their own, and Romney -- who amassed a fortune by saddling companies with debt and then firing huge numbers of their employees -- is the very essence of what Wall Street loves. Thus, what we would very possibly have in 2012 are two presidential candidates who endlessly tout their populist credentials while doing everything in reality to compete with one another over who can best serve the nation's oligarchs. In other words, it would be a perfect microcosm for our political system -- just like Obama's expanding the Surveillance State while simultaneously trolling for Wall Street cash.

  Glenn Greenwald