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FTA:

"If anything, the financiers are more solidly in charge now than they were during George W. Bush's presidency, when the New York Times declared that "Government Sachs" was a reality. Today, such figures as Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, and Steven Rattner are accelerating the Bush era's finance-favorable policies, piling bailout on top of bailout. Even nonfinancial policies are being drafted to serve Wall Street; the "cap-and-trade" greenhouse gas proposal, for example, would do more to boost the bottom line of neo-Enronesque pollution mongers than to reduce carbon dioxide.

How did this happen? As economist Simon Johnson observed recently, "A whole generation of policymakers has been mesmerized by Wall Street." And now Obama seems similarly ensorcelled. Johnson, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, writes in the Atlantic that America is descending into the financial vortex that Russia, Argentina, and Thailand plummeted into back in the '90s. How so? The same insiders and self-dealers who created the crisis "are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed." And yet, he adds, "The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them." That "quiet coup," Johnson warns, could turn America into a "banana republic.""

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