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The recent appointments of White House staff and advisors follow the pattern of appointments from the start of the Obama administration, favoring the corporate and financial corporations who payed for the election and who benefited from the bail-out. Major investment firms, banks and insurance companies made Obama's election possible. They also reflect his deep ties to the Daley machine politics in Chicago, replacing Rahm Emanuel with his mentor, and putting a son of the notorious former Mayor Richard Daley and brother of the current mayor in Chicago, which also explains the support for Obama by the Kennedy family. These political operatives and opportunists follow the corporate agenda of late-stage monopoly capitalism, where the corporations merge with the state, as Mussolini put it in his classic definition of fascism. Of course, those who control the vastly concentrated wealth and power of this waning democracy are not monolithic, and the interests of the Bush administration and its supporters are not identical to those of the Obama administration, but there is enough crossover to insure control of the financial situation to the benefit of the few, and to maintain a permanent war and debt economy at the cost of the country and the people. The collapse begun in the Bush years was handed to Obama. Presidents come and go. The real institutions that run society, the corporations, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies sit and grow. Who else would you expect him to appoint? To be surprised or outraged is like someone who plays piano at a brothel acting shocked at what goes on upstairs.