President-elect Barack Obama’s $825 billion plan to jump-start the economy and create or save up to 4 million jobs includes twice as much money for spending as for tax cuts, setting up an early battle with Republicans in Congress who favor a different approach.

Obama declared that he would oversee regulatory reform to halt “reckless greed and risk-taking” by banks and financial institutions, while reassuring Wall Street that the public funding spigots would remain open to bail out the most powerful firms. “It means preventing the catastrophic failure of financial institutions whose collapse could endanger the entire economy,” he said.

He essentially whitewashed the pervasive fraud and criminality of the US financial elite and the collusion of the US government, saying, “No longer can we allow Wall Street wrongdoers to slip through regulatory cracks. No longer can we allow special interests to put their thumbs on the economic scales.”

As though the plundering of the US economy over the past thirty years was a matter of a few “wrongdoers” and “cracks” in the government regulatory machinery! In fact, parasitism and fraud on a colossal scale have become the mode of operation of the banks and the dominant feature of an economic system whose decay is expressed in the destruction of industry and the basic productive forces. Successive administrations, Democratic as well as Republican, have systematically dismantled regulatory oversight of the banks, and the role of government regulators has been to facilitate fraudulent practices and shield the most powerful and influential perpetrators.