David Dayen starts off his new piece in The New Republic with a bang:
The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton.
You may not agree it’s true but you have to admit it grabbed your attention.
What Dayen is writing about will mainly be of interest to people who, like Dayen, prefer Elizabeth Warren’s kind of economic principles to those of Larry Summers and his ilk. The 8-year-old Podesta emails cited weren’t to, from, or about Hillary Clinton, but they’re highly relevant to her actions right now, and not just on economic policy.
We now know that Obama’s first cabinet was all but appointed, and policy guidelines thereby embedded, over a month before Election Day, 2008.
The same thing is likely happening again, without our knowledge, let alone our input.
Dayen’s suggestions for how to deal with this can be found in his timely article—here’s the link again in case you overlooked the one above: newrepublic.com/… Constructive criticism, influence, some friendly agitation (soon!) might help ensure we get the government we (like to think we) deserve.
The suggestions are worth reading, but rather than quoting from the article, which should be read as a coherent whole, let’s use the rest of our space here to review some aspects of the 2008 situation Dayen found so disturbing:
- Obama was getting input from John Podesta.
- John Podesta was getting input from a Citigroup exec, Michael Froman, now U.S. trade rep.
- Froman was soon to serve on the president-elect’s transition team (on the board of advisors), but his recommendations had already been delivered via Podesta to Candidate Obama in the heat of the campaign, when Hope and Change were burning bright.
- Those recommendations, says Dayen, proved to be a close match for the actual appointments.
- Froman’s recommendations were made while he was still working for Citigroup , where his official bio says he had “various roles”.
- Froman was not the only high-ranking Citigrouper involved in setting up the new administration’s personnel and policies.
- The Citigroupers’ preferences were made known (and mostly followed) starting in September and October 2008. Citigroup’s need for a massive bailout became known in mid-November 2008. Froman was advising the transition team as of early November.
What are Froman’s priorities? Here’s an extract from his Wikipedia article:
[Emphasis added. Links reproduced from original.]
On May 2, 2013, Froman was nominated to serve as U.S. Trade Representative. Financial documents provided to the Senate Finance Committee showed he had nearly $500,000 in an offshore fund at Ugland House on the Cayman Islands, which Obama had once described as “the biggest tax scam in the world.” [12] In 2013 congressional testimony, Rep. Kevin Brady, Republican from Texas, criticized the EU low carbon fuel standard, where oil from tar-sands is classified by itself due to its higher carbon polluting impact compared to regular oil as a "discriminatory, environmentally unjustified" trade barrier, to which Froman responded, "I share your concerns," followed by a description of his work to "press the Commission to take the views of . . . U.S. refiners under consideration." Froman's role as in the drafting of classified trade deals (made public by WikiLeaks) is under scrutiny by lawyers and politicians alike.[13] The U.S. Senate confirmed Froman in a 93-4 vote on June 19, 2013.[14] One of the four dissenting senators was Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who faulted Froman for "refusing to commit to [...] standards of transparency in trade talks set by the George W. Bush administration".[13] Environmental groups have criticized Froman for negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement in secret and that he "took care of his friends on Wall Street and in corporate board rooms at the expense of sound environmental and climate policy." [15]
And about Froman’s 2008 employer, a website called Wall Street on Parade tells us:
[Emphasis added.] In her book, Bull by the Horns, Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation during the financial crisis, wrote the following:
“By November [2008], the supposedly solvent Citi was back on the ropes, in need of another government handout. The market didn’t buy the OCC’s and NY Fed’s strategy of making it look as though Citi was as healthy as the other commercial banks. Citi had not had a profitable quarter since the second quarter of 2007. Its losses were not attributable to uncontrollable ‘market conditions’; they were attributable to weak management, high levels of leverage, and excessive risk taking. It had major losses driven by their exposures to a virtual hit list of high-risk lending; subprime mortgages, ‘Alt-A’ mortgages, ‘designer’ credit cards, leveraged loans, and poorly underwritten commercial real estate. It had loaded up on exotic CDOs and auction-rate securities. It was taking losses on credit default swaps entered into with weak counterparties, and it had relied on unstable volatile funding – a lot of short-term loans and foreign deposits. If you wanted to make a definitive list of all the bad practices that had led to the crisis, all you had to do was look at Citi’s financial strategies…What’s more, virtually no meaningful supervisory measures had been taken against the bank by either the OCC or the NY Fed…Instead, the OCC and the NY Fed stood by as that sick bank continued to pay major dividends and pretended that it was healthy.”
But as this Frankenbank tanked, the top advisors to Presidential Candidate Barack Obama were asking three of its executives for advice on personnel and strategy.
Froman is now crafting his secret trade deals for Obama. Jack Lew, after accepting a $940,000 bonus from insolvent Citigroup, was nominated by Obama to become U.S. Treasury Secretary and head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) – the entity created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to monitor the financial stability of the United States. Under Lew’s oversight, Citigroup now has more derivatives than 4,701 other U.S. banks combined.
Hillary Clinton has promised a third Obama term...
Personally, I still believe Hillary would be very happy leading a progressive (i.e., Warren-friendly, Sanders-neutral) administration, actually implementing the priorities she has lately been adopting as her own. But I’m not sure’ she’ll dare be true to her supposedly mildly leftish inclinations.
Her one public choice so far, our candidate for vice-president, doesn’t suggest she has much interest in rocking the boat. But have we, or she, learned anything at all from the past year or two of populist upheavals, from both left and right? The boat she apparently doesn’t want to rock is already listing, not yet capsized but far from stable.
Clinton and circle seem to be among the few Americans who haven’t grasped that long-term stability probably depends now on immediate, decisive, dynamic, original (maybe even radical) action. More of the same may invite distress, disorder, disintegration. Something akin to the madness Trump would promote proudly may sneak quietly in through the back door if a Clinton Administration is not equipped with the imagination and willpower for bold solutions.
Inequality guarantees instability.
The biggest threat to a business-as-usual presidency won’t come from stormtrumpers, berniebros, militias, mad cops, BLM, or rampaging wayward Moslems. It’s already coming from within — from the built-in contradictions of this particular, contemporary kind of “business-as-usual”. Finance-driven prosperity is a delusion. Finance means nothing without industry, agriculture and commerce. The “real economy” in turn depends on keeping natural systems (including human societies and human labor in particular) in robust good health. But their sickness is evident. Solutions and priorities very much like what Clinton has been recently advocating might be a good start towards a cure. But I think we all know those ideas will die on the vine with the wrong kind of cabinet (the usual kind of cabinet).
We don’t need WikiLeaks to tell us the nature of our core problem. If the boat Hillary doesn’t want to rock is already listing and just about to capsize, think about what’s going on inside it. (Numbers that follow are rough approximations from memory.)
If 1/100th of 1% of the passengers have 60% of the total weight of furnishings, baggage, cargo and other goodies stuffed in their own cabins, while half the other cabins are just about empty, this boat is going nowhere good. It’s tipping over and going down.
Well that metaphor was kind of awkward, so let’s flip it around, and make cabins themselves represent wealth.There would be thousands and thousands of cubic feet devoted to vast, magnificent first-class cabins (staterooms, suites) reserved for the enjoyment of just a couple of dozen passengers. Each cabin would have a great banquet laid out fresh morning, noon and night just in case anyone should happen to show up. Over on the other side of the ship, there are so many thousands of passengers in steerage, squeezed into ten or twelve tiny cabins, that they can’t fit, so they have to be not just squashed but compressed, distilled, concentrated, so that each hundred-pound body occupies just a cubic inch of scarce space.
And so forth and so on, the point being that a boat (or planet) with 600,000,000,000 lbs of poor human flesh crammed into 10% of the space, and about 10,000 lbs of rich human flesh floating lightly around 90% of the space (numbers random but you get the idea), ain’t likely to float upright for long even in a calm harbor, and sure as hell won’t come through any kind of storm intact.
So if Clinton appoints officers and crew who are unwilling to redistribute the weight around the boat, i.e., the wealth around the planet, we can probably expect big trouble. But if she’s on the same schedule Obama was, those appointments are probably already as good as made. It’s now or never to make your wishes known.
Hey— I never heard of David Dayen until I saw the above-linked article just tonight. But now I see he’s featured in the diary at the top of the front page, for a different piece he wrote. Such a popular, up-and-coming fellow deserves a cabinet position for sure.
Collage by Syupy Chelydra, attribution refers to background silhouette only.
(Does any know how to edit the attribution line?)