Yes, we mustn't expect too much. We all know it is the establishment that comes first in United States politics. Obama's presidency could easily be sabotaged by the powers that put him there.

Not one of the 23 Senators and 133 House Representatives who voted against the war in Iraq are on his transitional team or even on a short-list for an important post in his Cabinet. The only promise that might be kept is to close Guantanamo, though he could hardly do less. The entire US legal establishment seems to be pushing to end this outrage.

Yes, everyone in Washington is solidly Zionist, so Rahm Emanuel's devotion to Israel hardly changes much, as James Zogby argues. But, how is it he served with the Israeli Defence Forces - during a war - and yet never served with the US military? As an American, if he did this for any other country but Israel, he would have been arrested and his political career over at once. Instead, he is honoured with the key role of the president's chief of staff.

As Bloomberg notes, almost half the people on the Transition Economic Advisory Board "have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both." This includes, for example, Anne Mulcahy and Richard Parsons, both of whom were Fannie Mae directors when the company fudged accounting rules. Mulcahy and Parsons were executives of their respective companies, Xerox and Time Warner, and were charged with accounting fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Also on this team is Robert Rubin, who as Bloomberg notes, was "chairman of Citigroup's executive committee when the bank pushed bogus analyst research, helped Enron cook its books, and got caught baking its own. He was a director from 2000 to 2006 at Ford, which also committed accounting fouls and now is begging Uncle Sam for Citigroup-style bailout cash."

Larry Summers, who was Clinton's treasury secretary, will head the National Economic Council -- the president's senior economic adviser. This looks ominous. It was Summers who forced through the deregulation of financial markets in the 1990s and imposed disaster capitalism on Russia. Considering that he is a chief architect of the current financial meltdown, we should be wondering why Obama isn't preparing an arrest warrant for him, instead of offering him the most powerful economic role in the world.

As chief economist for the World Bank, Summers wrote a memo saying the WB should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly "under- polluted countries in Africa," since poor people in developing countries rarely live long enough to develop cancer, making him a particularly bizarre appointment for Obama. This contradiction will be interesting to watch unfold.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/924/in1.htm