Today's quote ...

All this money makes Obama's top financial advisors veritable poster boys for the Wall Street culture that the president in his speeches has publicly decried as a "house of cards" and a "Ponzi scheme" in which "a relatively few do spectacularly well while the middle class loses ground".

I'm not doubting the smarts of Obama's financial team -- but I do feel that the vast majority of people who take the kind of money we're talking about here can't help but be warped by it, and that in choosing to cash in, they essentially disqualified themselves from public service.

Unless they are willing to assertively act in ways that redeem themselves and show that their allegiances have not been purchased, they should step down and make way for people who see the people's side of things a little more clearly.

-- Bankers Vs. The People: Which Side Is The White House On? by Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post

"Why is the Chamber of Commerce refusing to stand up for small business?" ...

Simon Johnson asks the question in title above.

There is a long tradition in the United States of big business trampling on independent entrepreneurs, and of those entrepreneurs fighting back through the ballot box. This time around, big banks captured their regulators, badly damaged small firms, and look set to do it again.

Why is the Chamber of Commerce refusing to stand up for small business?

The question is, I think, not exactly on the up and up. When was the national C of C ever about small business? As far as I can see they've always been about protecting the most selfish interests of very large corporations while claiming, quite disingenuously, that they are about protecting small business. Local C of C vary. They tend to represent medium to large businesses. Their business is to protect themselves. Creating an environment for new entries is NOT their goal.

Today's quote ...

... That is so very, very unexpected: that policies designed by former Goldman CEO Hank Paulson, ultimate Wall Street servant Tim Geithner, and the banking-owned United States Congress would redound to the personal benefit of investment banking executives but not the general public. ...

-- Another Goldman executive named to key government post as its profits skyrocket by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com