Here is a fine example of how, notwithstanding nominal changes in the particular person who occupies the U.S. White House (1600 Pennsylvania Av., NW, Washington DC), America’s aristocracy, the nation’s permanent government behind the scenes, actually controls the Executive branch of the U.S. federal government, in our ‘democracy’:

The same international-corporate lobbyist who in October 2008 arranged to fill the then Presidential candidate Obama’s future Presidential Administration with people whom (in October 2008, even prior to the Presidential election) Wall Street’s CEOs had already vetted and selected for Obama’s future Administration — that very same lobbyist is now, in October 2016, running Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and possibly feeding to her, as he did to Obama eight years earlier, similarly short lists of people whom those same megabank chiefs want to fill, this time, a future President Hillary Clinton’s cabinet and executive agencies.

He can be called America’s «Wizard of Oz», but the name he’s publicly known by is John Podesta. Though he’s unlikely to admit (as did the one in the fairy tale) that actually «I'm a very bad Wizard,» a small number of other «very bad» people — his paymasters and his political puppets — already know this, which is actually the reason why his paymasters hire him, and why his puppets follow his advice, to please those same paymasters.

Whereas Obama campaigned against Wall Street (against its domestic policies) and especially against neoconservatism (which is Wall Street’s foreign policies), Obama filled his Administration with Wall Street neoconservatives (not with progressives of any type), and virtually all of his appointees had been first secretly selected for him by Wall Street, even before Obama chose his governing team, from amongst Wall Street’s narrow lists of approved individuals. Though Obama had campaigned «from the left» (such as by espousing ‘a public option’ in his health-insurance proposal, which actually failed to include any such thing in the law he selected the conservative and strongly anti-public-option Democratic U.S. Senator Max Baucus to draft and which Obama then proudly signed into law), he secretly governed from and for the international-corporate right; and thus no matter how far to the right he governed, the Republicans in Congress needed to move even farther to the right in order not to lose their seats to Tea Partiers in the Republican primaries.

The Koch brothers’ Tea Party astroturf ‘movement’ was the other side of the U.S. aristocracy’s control-process, of which Obama’s operation constituted the ‘liberal’ half, moving the Republican Party (moving ‘the opposition’ Party and thus the center of all of American politics) farther to the right than it had ever been before, to where it is today: smack up to the very border of fascism («corporationism» as Mussolini sometimes referred to his ‘movement’ or artificial ideology — a fakery upon a fakery: fakery-squared, which is exactly what a ‘movement’ requires: more like a religion, actually, than like any authentic movement).

Today’s Presidential contest is thus picking up from where Obama and the Kochs’ Tea Party Republicans have brought things, and that’s the present moment.

Hillary Clinton, as just about everyone knows, is farther to the right than Obama, and she is sufficiently far to the (international-corporate) right on economic regulation and on foreign policy, so that congressional Republicans won’t be able to move any farther to the right without bumping into the ideological wall of outright fascism, which they well could do, if she wins the Presidency on November 8th, as expected.

The details of this Podesta operation, and of the 2008 lists, were, on October 14 th , described and documented in detail by the pro-Hillary investigative journalist David Dayen, at the neoconservative Democratic Party magazine and website, The New Republic, for which Dayen writes, and which magazine has championed every recent U.S. military invasion, including the invasions of Iraq and of Libya, the invasions that America’s aristocrats want U.S. taxpayers to fund, and U.S. and other countries’ soldiers and civilians to fight and maybe die in.

The New Republic is the main bastion of neoconservatism in the Democratic Party’s newsmedia, and it’s owned currently by a pro-mega-corporate far-right aristocratic family, which during the time of Adolf Hitler was famous for opposing America’s entering into the war against the fascists — they were ‘pacifists’ or ‘isolationists’ when the question was whether to go to war against fascism. The current owner of the magazine, Democrat Hamilton Fish V, is descended from Hamilton Fish III, a famous anti-FDR Republican. Thus, the magazine is strongly favorable to the Clintons and Obama, as the people who successfully destroyed the FDR Democratic Party and replaced it by today’s Republican-lite ‘Democratic Party’.

For example, the list of just two people whom Wall Street recommended (through the lobbyist Podesta) that Obama consider for Defense Secretary, consisted of the existing Republican U.S. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, and the West-Point-graduated Democratic U.S. Senator Jack Reed (both with solid credential as haters of Russia), and the more hard-nosed of the two, Gates, ended up being chosen by Obama. (Jack Reed was actually too progressive to suit Obama’s tastes.)

On 17 September 2016, CNN headlined «Robert Gates: Trump 'beyond repair’». Gates detests Trump. Wall Street wants Hillary Clinton to be America’s next President, and perhaps they have already provided to her their current picks, via, again, the lobbyist Podesta, just as they had done in 2008. The U.S. President who bombed Libya so that we’d get jihadists tearing that land apart, is to be followed by U.S. President Hillary Clinton, who wants to do the same thing to Syria — another oil-and-gas country (this one for oil and gas pipelines more than for those commodities themselves) that the Saudi and Qatari and Kuwaiti and UAE aristocracies have been wanting to control, via their Al Qaeda and other jihadist gangs, whom they all pay and the U.S. aristocracy protects. When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she requested these allied aristocracies please to cut their funding of the jihadist groups, but they didn’t, and she subsequently acknowledged that they didn’t, and yet the U.S. still calls them ‘allies’, simply because they’re all against Russia, which the U.S. aristocracy want to destroy.

As the former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has said (on 28 July 2015): the U.S. now is «just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president».

What David Dayen was discussing in his recent article is merely a few details of the way that this «oligarchy» functions.