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President Barack Obama’s notoriously caustic Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel resigned on Friday, receiving a dead-fish as a good-natured farewell gift. There is widespread speculation that Emanuel left the White House to run for Mayor of Chicago, and that he will be succeeded by Peter Rouse, a long-time adviser to the President. Emanuel’s departure is only the latest in a string of resignations from the President’s cabinet. Peter Orszag was the first cabinet member to resign. Orszag left his post as head of the Office of Management and Budget in late July. In early September he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he argued for a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts on incomes over $250,000 a year, a position at odds with the White House. This set off a small political firestorm. To replace Orszag, Obama chose Jacob Lew, a former Citigroup executive who, during his Senate confirmation hearing, said he didn’t think deregulation of Wall Street was a primary cause of the economic crash. In August Christina Romer, chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers announced her resignation amid rumors that she was dissatisfied with the President’s strategy for economic recovery. Romer had been a proponent of a larger stimulus package than was ultimately pushed by Larry Summers, the Director of the White House National Economic Council. She was replaced by Austan Goolsbee, already a member of the economic advisory panel and described by the New York Times as a “left-of-center economist”. Last month Larry Summers announced that he will leave the White House at the end of the year. Obama’s pick to replace Summers’ could be the biggest indication yet of what direction the President’s economic agenda will take.

GUEST: Nomi Prins, Author of “It takes a Pillage”, and senior fellow at Demos; Robert Scheer, Editor of TruthDig.com, author of the new book “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.”

Read Nomi Prins’ work at www.nomiprins.com, and Robert Scheer’s work at www.truthdig.com.