How soon before Barak Obama finds himself wanting to ‘do a Nixon’ and echo Richard’s famous claim: ‘I’m not a crook!’ which merely helped strengthen the possibility that he was one? Within weeks of his inauguration Obama voiced a ‘mea culpa’ for his review team’s faulty pick for a Cabinet post. "I screwed up!" he said, taking personal responsibility with a familiar Americanism that certainly resonated well with the public.

America’s most pressing problem today is also Obama’s: a booming national and global phantom economy, based on a rogue financial system designed by America’s neoconservatives after World War II to create money by pyramiding debt in pursuit of the US goal of ‘full spectrum dominance’, has just gone bust; it began collapsing in mid-2008 just as the first African-American in US history was racing toward the Oval Office.

The ‘revolving door’ phenomenon between government and industry is nowhere more evident than in the close nexus between Wall Street and successive US Administrations. [The ‘winds of change’ Barak harped on ad nauseam during the campaign, however, never did reach that sanctum sanctorum of world finance.]

Why? Because of Obama’s apparent belief that financial predators with notorious track records as prominent as a croc’s tail can still be trusted to guard the nation’s economic wealth, or what little’s left of it after the Bush gangsters had themselves an eight-year ball. The ones that come to mind are Larry Summers, the Prez’s pick for Chairman of the National Economic Council, Timothy Geithner, also the C-in-C’s choice for Treasury Sec, and Robert Rubin, that other consummate Wall Street ‘insider’ who’s officially an Administration ‘outsider’ but is, in fact, an integral part of Obama’s economic ‘inner circle’.

The electronic and print media have gone wild over their, er, well . . . fortuitous re-discovery of Wall Street’s endemic malaise, a.k.a. self-serving greed. Much has been made of the 165-million-dollar Bonus Package paid out by AIG to its employees, not from company profits but out of federal funds given by the Treasury as emergency life-support.

This, to be sure, is a deliberately orchestrated diversionary tactic, with the major economic players in the Administration who engineered the scam coming in as late-starters and adding their voices to the public chorus of outrage once it could no longer be ignored.

For example, even after Obama went on record denouncing the bonuses, Larry Summers felt bold enough to contradict his boss publicly. Speaking on ABC’s This Week, he claimed they could not block payment of the bonuses. "We are a country of law. There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts." [Imagine the roasting he’d have got had he said that to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.]

Of course, after seeing the intense public outcry, Summers soon began whistling a very different tune, prompting Arianna Huffington to make this pertinent observation on her blog: "Have you noticed how, whenever there is a serious effort to put an end to business-as-usual, we are warned by insiders like Paulson and Summers that the result will be the end of civilization?"

In truth, that $165 million on bonuses is peanuts; it amounts to less than 0.1 per cent, or one-thousandth, of the $180 BILLION given so far to AIG by the US Treasury. [The first tranche of $150 Billion was given in September 2008 by the Bush Administration, hours after Lehman Brothers dropped dead. That ‘giveaway’ too was fully supported by then Senator Obama.]

So whatever happened to the balance 99.99 per cent of that $180 Billion?

For over six months AIG’s standard response to the query was: Don’t ask, it’s confidential information. Repeated attempts by sections of the media, by Congressmen, and even a lawsuit met with a wall of silence. [This, mind you, despite AIG by now being 80% owned by the US Government!]

Finally, on March 15, the Obama government was forced to divulge the secret it [as well as the Bush Administration before it] had so jealously guarded, and for good reason.

The highly embarrassing secret was that the ultimate recipients of the AIG bailouts were none other than Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and many more – the very group that, independently, had received taxpayer funds under the same scheme! So the AIG bailout was a planned ‘inside job’ intended to loot the Treasury using AIG as a conduit for massive capital outflows under the guise of a national financial ‘rescue plan’. The largest recipient turned out to be just as rumour had it: Goldman Sachs, former Treasury Sec Paulson’s old firm, which got $13 Billion more. [A criminal scam if ever there was one.]

There’s also an intriguing whodunit-mystery: who ‘killed’ a provision in the stimulus package that would have curtailed bonuses at bailed out companies? After President Obama came out strongly against the AIG bonuses, Senator Ron Wyden and his Republican colleague, Senator Olympia Snowe, crafted a provision in the stimulus bill that would have forced bailout recipients to cap their bonuses at $100,000.

A clue of sorts was provided by Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who told CNN on March 18 that officials at the Treasury Department had insisted that he modify a clause he had inserted into the stimulus bill that prohibited bonuses from being issued by bailed-out companies.

Senator Wyden told Arianna Huffington he had "spent hours on the Senate floor" working to get the bipartisan amendment passed. He succeeded - not a single Senator voted against the provision. "But," said Wyden, "it died in conference."

So who killed it? Nobody knows.

"Think about that for a second," said Arianna. "We live in a country where one of the 100 most powerful people in government, the co-sponsor of the amendment in question, has no clue how it got removed in the Senate-House conference committee - or if it was taken out of the legislation even before it made it into conference."

Said Wyden: "I pulled out all the stops to convince the President’s economic team that this amendment was vital to the White House for two reasons: one, the President had spoken out against bonuses; and, two, fury about bonuses would kneecap confidence in the President’s entire economic policy." Wyden claimed that no one inside the President’s economic team had been in favor of it.

Would Jason Furman, Peter Orzack, Tim Geithner or Larry Summers have had the spunk to delete such an important amendment in the bill on their own initiative?

Commented Alexander Cockburn in CounterPunch Diary: "Since last September Barack Obama has been trying to pull off the tricky shot of backing bailout schemes at taxpayers’ expense for the Wall Street operators who have brought the economy to its knees, while simultaneously presenting himself as a populist crusader battling for economic justice and the regular folks on Main Street. Right now, for the first time since he was elected President, he’s perilously close to plummeting from this high wire act and ending up publicly derided as Mr Facing-Both-Ways, a toxic label for a man whose moral keynote has always been that he’ll play it straight with the American people. Obama is dancing on the edge of a volcano."

Can Obama honestly say he wasn’t aware, either of the amendment or it subsequent stealth deletion?

No, another "I screwed up!" would wrongly imply bona fide error.