In “Obama’s Big Sellout,” Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi says “the president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway” which could ultimately cost taxpayers $23.7 trillion. “And while the government continues to dole out big money to big banks, Obama and his team . . . have done almost nothing to reform the warped financial system responsible for imploding the global economy in the first place.” Indeed, they have promoted legislation to protect credit-default swaps from regulation and to give the White House “permanent and unlimited authority to execute future bailouts of megaconglomerates like Citigroup and Bear Stearns” without congressional approval or oversight. “A president elected on a platform of change” ended up “institutionaliz[ing] the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.” Such a result was predictable when the president appointed “an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes [with] absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich.”