Nothing seems to rattle
Hillary Clinton quite so much as pointed questions about her personal finances.
How much she’s made. How she made it. Where it all came from. From her
miraculous adventures in the cattle futures market to the Whitewater real
estate scam, many of the most venal Clinton scandals down the decades have
involved Hillary’s financial entanglements and the serpentine measures she has
taken to conceal them from public scrutiny.
Hillary is both driven to
acquire money and emits a faint whiff of guilt about having hoarded so much of
it. One might be tempted to ascribe her squeamishness about wealth to her rigid
Methodism, but her friends say that Hillary’s covetousness derives from a deep
obsession with feeling secure, which makes a kind of sense given Bill’s
free-wheeling proclivities. She’s not, after all, a child of the Depression,
but a baby boomer. Hillary was raised in comfortable circumstances in the
Chicago suburbs and, unlike her husband, has never in her life felt the sting
of want.
Mrs. Clinton’s stubborn
refusal to disclose the text of her three speeches to Goldman Sachs executives
in the fall of 2013 fits this self-destructive pattern of greed and guilt. She
was fortunate that Bernie Sanders proved too feeble a candidate to seize the
advantage. Each time Sanders was asked to show a nexus between the $675,000 she
was paid and any political favors to the financial vultures at Goldman, the
senator froze, proving strangely incapable of driving a stake into the heart of
her campaign.
A less paranoid politician
would have simply released the tedious transcripts of the speeches on a Friday
evening to bore insomniac readers to sleep. The real question, of course, was
never about the content of the speeches, but about why Goldman was paying her
$225,000 an hour to give them. Goldman executives weren’t huddling around Mrs.
Clinton to listen to her recite the obscurantist mish-mash ghost-dictated by
her top economic advisor Alan Blinder. Blinder, a well-known Wall Street
commodity himself, is a former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve and co-founder
of Promontory Interfinancial Network, a regulatory arbitrage outfit whose top
executives pocket $30 million a year. Blinder has publicly assured his Wall
Street pals that Clinton will not under any circumstances break up the big
banks and neither will she seek to reanimate Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era
regulatory measure whose exsanguination by her husband enabled the financial
looting by firms like Goldman and Lehman Brothers that spurred the global
economic collapse of 2008.
The lavish fee from Goldman
for Hillary’s speeches was both a gratuity for past loyalty and a down payment
on future services. Goldman’s ties to the Clintons date back at least to 1985,
when Goldman executives began pumping money into the newly formed Democratic
Leadership Council, a kind of proto-SuperPac for the advancement of
neoliberalism. Behind its “third-way” politics smokescreen, the DLC was shaking
down corporations and Wall Street financiers to fund the campaigns of
business-friendly “New” Democrats such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton.
The DLC served as the
political launching pad for the Clintons, boosting them out of the obscurity of
the Arkansas dog-patch into the rarified orbit of the Georgetown cocktail
circuit and the Wall Street money movers. By the time Bill rambled through his
interminable keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta, the
Clintons’ Faustian pact with Goldman had already been inked, their political
souls cleansed of any vestiges of the primitive southern populism Clinton had
exploited so effortlessly during his first term as governor.
In 1991, the Clintons traveled
to Manhattan, where they tested the waters for Bill’s then rather improbable
presidential bid. At a dinner meeting with Goldman’s co-chair Robert Rubin,
Clinton made his case as a more pliant political vessel than George H.W. Bush,
who many of the younger Wall Street raiders had soured on. Rubin emerged from
the dinner so impressed that he agreed to serve as one of the campaign’s top
economic advisors. More crucially, Rubin soon began orchestrating a riptide of
Wall Street money into Clinton’s campaign war chest, not only from Goldman but
also from other banking and investment titans, such as Lehman Brothers and
Citibank, who were eager to see the loosening of federal financial regulations.
With Rubin priming the pump, Clinton’s campaign coffers soon dwarfed his rivals
and enabled him to survive the sex scandals that detonated on the eve of the
New Hampshire primary.
After his election, Clinton
swiftly returned the favor checking off one item after another on Rubin’s wish
list, often at the expense of the few morsels he’d tossed to the progressive
base of the party. In a rare fit of pique, Clinton erupted during one meeting
of his National Economic Council, which Rubin chaired, in the first fraught
year of his presidency by yelling: “You mean my entire agenda has been turned
over to the fucking bond market?” Surely, Bill meant this as a rhetorical
question.
When the time came to do the
serious business of deregulating the financial sector, Rubin migrated from the
shadows of the NEC to become Treasury Secretary, where he oversaw the
implementation of NAFTA, the immiseration of the Mexican economy, imposed shock
therapy on the struggling Russian economy, blocked the regulation of credit
derivatives and gutted Glass-Steagall. When Rubin left the Treasury to cash in
on his work at Citigroup, Clinton called him “the greatest secretary of the
Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.” Nine years later, following the greatest
upward transfer of wealth in history, the global economy was in ruins, with
Clinton, Rubin and Goldman Sachs’ fingerprints all over the carnage.
In mid-May, Hillary announced
her intention to make Bill the “economic czar” for her administration. This
served to quell any anxiety that she might have been infected during the
primary campaign by the Sanders virus. For Wall Street, the Clintons are still
as good as Goldman. Quid pro quo.
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.
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