http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/the-clintons-and-hollywood-a-tale-of-two-babylons/
February 26, 2016
Over the course of
two decades, Alexander Cockburn and I wrote dozens of articles on the
political corruption of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their cronies in DC and
Arkansas. In many ways, those years represented the golden age of
political journalism, with a fresh scandal ripening each month.
As Hillary cruises toward the Democratic nomination, if not the White
House, it’s time to dig into the Clinton Files and resurrect the stories
of sleaze, malfeasance and transgression from that feculent decade. — JSC
On September 12, 1996,
some 1,500 of Hollywood’s most beautiful people mustered at Greenacres, the old
Harold Lloyd estate in Beverly Hills, and listened to Barbra Streisand serenade
Bill Clinton. On hand were Tom Hanks, who received a jocular presidential
dispensation to play the Clinton role in Mike Nichols’s version of Primary
Colors; Clinton groupie and versifier Maya Angelou; New Age diva Shirley
MacLaine; diva Sharon Stone; and entire galaxies of starlets.
Gradations of access were
marked with a precision worthy of the Almanach de Gotha. A check for
$1,000 got a guest past the front gate. A mere $4000 purchased the right to
attend the outside concert and listen to Streisand, the Neville Brothers, and
the Eagles. A rather more substantial check for $12,500 bought entry to the
house itself and a seat at a banquet honoring the president. By the end of the
evening, some the guests had ponied up more than $4 million, duly remitted by
the hosts of the event–Steven Spielberg and David Geffen–to the Democratic
National Committee. As of April of this year, these two had accounted for
one-sixth of the cash in the Clinton-Gore campaign coffers for 1996.
The bash at Greenacres was the
third Democratic fundraiser organized by Geffen and Spielberg, two of the
biggest impresarios in Los Angeles. The first event, back in February, was for
a select 20 of Tinseltown’s top new moguls, raising $1.7 million. The second,
in March, featured actors and recording stars rather than studio heads and
brought in another $1.3 million. Clinton attended all their soirees.
There’s nothing new about the
Washington/ Hollywood funding link. Entertainment money has always been a
magnet for politicos. But the Clinton White House has been particularly
unrelenting in its focus on Hollywood, and the investment of time has been a
rewarding one. By July 1, 1996, the entertainment and communications industries
had sunk $7 million into the Democratic National Committee in the previous six
months, and this is only counting contributions of more than $10,000.
Of the top six largest
contributors to the Democratic Party, four are in the
entertainment/communications sector. From the top: Seagrams/MCA, Disney,
Dreamworks SKG, and MCI. MCA is no stranger to Democratic funding. Jules
Stein’s empire, which contains Universal, has seen Lew Wasserman and Sidney
Scheinberg collect enormous sums down the years for the Democrats. Seagrams, now
joined in corporate matrimony with MCA, has long been a Republican backer.
Disney is Hollywood’s biggest corporate contributor to the Democrats.
Dreamworks SKG stands for Spielberg (net worth $750 million), Jeffrey
Katzenberg (net worth $250 million), and Geffen (net worth $1.3 billion). The
other partners in Dreamworks SKG are Bill Gates, who’s battling it out with the
Sultan of Brunei for the title of world’s richest human being, and Gate’s
Microsoft partner Paul Allen, third or fourth richest human being in America.
Of course Hollywood plays it
both ways, though there are some contributors clearly identified with one or
other of the parties. Geffen and Katzenberg give only to the Democrats.
Spielberg lays off his bets, with $50,000 to Gov. Pete Wilson’s presidential
campaign, and is one of the Republican L.A. mayor Richard Riordan’s major
funders.
After Vice President Dan
Quayle set the terms of political rhetoric in 1996 with his 1992 attack on the
family values of Murphy Brown, Clinton got a late and crucial wad of Hollywood
money, drummed up by Los Angeles lawyer and subsequent Secretary of Commerce
Mickey Kantor, and by Clinton’s fellow Arkansan Mary Steenburgen–with whom the
governor dined in Little Rock the night Arkansas reintroduced the death penalty
at the level of practice.
Since Dan Quayle’s attack on
Tinseltown’s antinomian values, Streisand has given $143,000 to the Democrats,
Don Henley $108,000, Dustin Hoffman $97,000, with Paul Newman, Bonnie Raitt,
Gail Zappa (Frank’s widow), and jazzman Lionel Hampton all kicking in more than
$50,000. Still, the Republicans draw near equivalent amounts, over $6 million
since January. Time/Warner leads with $290,000 to the GOP, followed by
Ticketmaster, Disney, Tracinda Productions, Sony, and Viacom (Sumner Redstone’s
$2-billion-a-year cable and video retail enterprise).
Mickey Kantor was once
described by the ageless lobbyist for the entertainment industry Jack
Valenti–president of the Motion Picture Association of America–as “a heroic
battler for Hollywood,” and this raises the important question: What exactly is
this sluice of money buying by way of influence or favors? What is the quid
pro quo?
As long ago as 1946, Hollywood
was successfully using its lobbying might to enlist the U.S. government in
efforts to batter down national quota systems protecting the British, French,
and Italian film industries. By the 1950s, this mostly successful campaign was
widening, in the effort to finish off international competition and to finance
domestic losers with overseas revenues. For its part, Washington heartily
applauded, subsidized Hollywood’s overseas marketing campaigns, and urged
film’s supportive of the American way.
The most graphic illustration
of this lobbying zeal was when President Ronald Reagan broke free of a
stultifying speech to the Canadian parliament in Ottawa on the merits of
international cooperation to thunder his indignation at Prime Minister Mulroney
on the possibility that there might be some form of quota on Hollywood’s
exports to Canada. Under the approving gaze of Valenti, Reagan decried this as
an appalling notion, contrary to all known democratic principles. A chastened
Mulroney said something would be done, and indeed it was. Baffled by the
presidential veer into entertainment matters, the international press corps
assembled in Ottawa failed to comment on the incident.
Today, the biggest quid for
the pro quo of campaign contributions is Hollywood’s desire for the
U.S. government to push for implementation of the GATT agreement, and kick down
the last barricades to total U.S. domination of global film production and
distribution.
Thus far Hollywood’s hopes
have not been entirely realized, since the European Economic Community, led by
the French, Italians, and Spanish, has maintained some quotas that, according
to the ever-vigilant Valenti, “represent an epidemic of European cinema
industry anti-Americanism…. All this fervor has one objective–to exile the
American film/TV industry from Europe and shrink the reach of American
audio-visual material which is hugely popular with citizens of the EC
countries.”
The sort of restriction
outraging Valenti is the EC stipulation, pressed by the French, that 60 percent
of airtime on all TV stations in the Community show products originating in
European studios. Valenti rages that “this amounts to a serious threat to the
future of American movies and TV programs”.
Another obsession of the
Hollywood studios is the subsidy system for moviemaking in EC countries, which
amounts to some $700 million a year for the entire Community, or roughly the
equivalent of seven Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. This comparatively paltry sum
has not prevented Hollywood from making subsidies a major issue in trade
negotiations, thus far unsuccessfully.
More recently these
trade matters have been outshone by the biggest prize in half a century:
telecommunications “reform,” which found its final, unlovely expression in the
Telecommunications Act signed by Clinton in February of this year. The stakes
were huge: the rules governing phone and cable company mergers, deregulation of
cable rates, the ending of restrictions on how many radio stations a company
might own in one market, the sale of public frequencies, and the V-chip.
Hollywood money flowed lavishly on both sides of the political aisle and when
the dust settled, the entertainment industry had achieved a splendid victory.
In the Clinton era there have
been some particularly interesting co-productions between the White House and
Hollywood, perhaps none more redolent of hypocrisy than the three hours per
week of prime-time children’s programming agreed upon by the major networks
last July, glowingly touted by Tipper Gore in the party convention in Chicago,
even though what is commonly regarded as the sine qua non of any
decent children’s TV programming–the absence of commercials–had been
effortlessly discarded in yet another “win-win” solution.
From the White House’s point
of view the biggest political plus, beyond dollars for the campaign chest, has
been the cachet of Hollywood support for the administration’s supposed triumphs
in the environmental sector.
In the old days, candidates
craved a manly whack on the shoulder from John Wayne or Charlton Heston, or the
more sensitive salutation of Gregory Peck or Paul Newman. These hopes still
prevail to a certain extent, but nowhere is New Hollywood more potent than in
giving a thumb’s up for a party’s or a candidate’s efforts on behalf of the
threatened habitat, recycling, endangered species, and the Amazon rain forest.
This year the Clinton team has belatedly realized that the enviro
vote–particularly from Republican women–is vital, and the Democrats have a huge
green edge in the public mind. Thus, endorsements from such supposed enviro
stars as Streisand, Robert Redford, Ted Danson, and Bonnie Raitt are regarded
as political gold.
Of course, talk of substantive
difference between Democrats and Republicans is mostly nonsense. As the Wall
Street Journal took pains to point out in a news article on September 9, “both
parties are likely to continue a trend begun in the late 1980s, toward more
flexible environmental regulation that is less intrusive for businesses than
individual.”
But the charade of Clintonian
green-ness has not only been very useful to the White House, but it also has
helped such major Hollywood enterprises as Dreamworks, whose reputation, like
that of the now tarnished Disney operation (following the failed effort to
build an entertainment center on Manassas Battlefield in Virginia), depends on
public identification of the corporate endeavor with respect for nature,
enhancement of the warmer virtues.
This article originally ran in
the October 1996 edition of CounterPunch.
Jeffrey St. Clair is
editor of CounterPunch. His new book is Killing
Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and
Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are
available from CounterPunch.
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