Obama’s Pick for Chief of Staff

The first major appointment by President-elect Barack Obama tells us a lot about how much “change” we can expect from his administration. Obama has appointed Rep. Rahm Emanuel to be his White House Chief of Staff. The White House Chief of Staff is often referred to as the second most powerful person in Washington. The Chief of Staff runs the whole operation and decides who may, and who may not, have access to the President.

Emanuel has been portrayed in the mass media as just a Congressman from Illinois and a personal friend of Obama. But he is much more than that. Emanuel is a major operative for the ruling class. He was senior policy advisor to Bill Clinton in Clinton’s first term--Clinton’s Karl Rove. This is when Clinton set out to “end welfare as we know it,” pushed through NAFTA, and signed the Antiterroism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

Rahm Emanuel is aligned with the so-called “New Democrats,” epitomized by Bill Clinton, who have led the shift away from the traditional Democratic policies of the New Deal and the Great Society, toward more openly imperialist, business oriented, and free trade policies. Emanuel left politics for a few years and made millions as an investment banker but returned in 2002, winning a seat in the House of Representatives.

Emanuel is also a hard-core Zionist. His father was in the Irgun organization, an organization dedicated to terrorizing Palestinians and even to the “right’ of the mainstream Zionists of the day and during the 1991 Gulf war, Rahm Emanuel actually served as a civilian volunteer in the Israeli army. It was Emanuel who introduced Obama to the leaders of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to whom Obama later pledged his support for complete Israeli control of the Palestinian capital city Jerusalem. Emanuel supported the October 2002 joint Congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq War and has earned his Washington nickname “Rahm-bo.”

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