Change, I can believe in. This pick, I can't.

I try to look at things the Dems do and say, Well, if the R's had done that, we on the left would be really upset. And so we have this announcement today:

"January 6, 2011



Business Background Defines Chief of StaffBy ERIC LIPTON


WASHINGTON — He is a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where he is paid as much as $5 million a year and supervises the Washington lobbying efforts of the nation’s second-largest bank. He also serves on the board of directors at Boeing, the giant military contractor, and Abbott Laboratories, the global drug company, which has billions of dollars at stake in the overhaul of the health care system.

He has been a lawyer in private practice, a bank president, a telecommunications company executive, a political strategist, a fund-raiser and campaign chief, a lobbyist for foreign corporations (he advocated on tax matters for Nestlé and a Canadian petroleum company) and now William M. Daley, the son and brother of Chicago mayors and a behind-the-scenes political player himself, will hold one of the most powerful jobs in Washington: chief of staff in the White House, where he will help decide who gets into the Oval Office and what President Obama’s Capitol Hill agenda should be."

So he is connected to the Military Industrial complex, Big Pharma, lobbyists and opposed the creation of the Consumer Protection Bureau. But here's the sentence in the NYT story that I found most upsetting: "Mr. Daley started as chairman of Chase’s Midwest operations, but by 2007 he had expanded his portfolio, joining the bank’s senior leadership team as chief of its new Office of Corporate Social Responsibility, whose most important function was to oversee the company’s global lobbying efforts."


Chase Bank's Office of Corporate Social Responsibity's "most important function" is overseeing their lobbying efforts?! I can't think of any sentence that better describes how far off track corporate america has gone.

Anyway, back to my original point, which is that if GW Bush had appointed someone with his background we on the left would be stomping mad about it. Let it be known that since President Obama appointed him...I'm still pretty damn perturbed by it.