Barack Obama ran on a platform of change. He talked a lot about “change you can believe in”.

Yesterday, Reuters cited unnamed sources in a story suggesting that Obama’s top advisers have “hinted the campaign promise to repeal tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 may be scrapped”.

It’s starting to look like Obama's change might not be as profound as voters might have anticipated.

That was clear when Obama named a strong supporter of Wall Street financiers, Rahm Emanuel, as his chief of staff. Emanuel is also a strong supporter of Israel.

Not long after Emanuel's appointment, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told Shalom TV that he was among those who convinced Obama not to allow former president Jimmy Carter to address  last summer's  Democratic National Convention.

"Barack Obama had to make a choice between his Jewish supporters and and his anti-Israel supporters like Jimmy Carter, and he did not choose Jimmy Carter," Dershowitz told Shalom TV.  "And that was an embarrassment for Jimmy Carter and a show of disrespect."

Meanwhile, news reports have hinted that the Clinton administration’s deputy attorney general, Eric Holder, will become Obama’s attorney general.

Holder, a supporter of the war on drugs,  has also been  an advocate of minimum sentences, which resulted in the United States incarcerating a huge number of its citizens. This has been a bonanza for the private-prison industry and for the food companies that feed inmates.

On the financial front, the New York Times reported today that all of Obama’s key economic advisers are protégés of former Clinton administration treasury secretary Robert Rubin, a strong advocate of financial deregulation, free trade, and balanced budgets.

Rubin is also a director of Citigroup, which is seeking a huge government bailout. According to news reports, Citigroup and the government have identified about $306 billion in toxic assets (in the banking world, loans are considered assets).

Citigroup will swallow the first $29 billion. After that, the bank will absorb 10 percent and the government will absorb 90 percent.

And Hillary Clinton, whose husband promoted the NATO attack on Yugoslavia without the authorization of the United Nations, will likely become the new secretary of state.

The mainstream media will give Obama his honeymoon. But anyone who was hoping for real change won’t be encouraged by recent revelations out of Washington.