(Diarist’s Note: This is the first part of a two-part post. The second piece is linked here, “Part 2 of 2: Yves Smith On Why Hillary Shouldn't Let Bill Anywhere Near Our Economy.”)
Before getting into the headline-related details of author Thomas Frank’s takedown of Bill Clinton’s economic managerial history as President in The Guardian this past Friday (see: "Why Hillary Clinton's 90's nostalgia is so dangerous"), here’s a little background...
Earlier this month, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump appointed Wall Street Hedge Fund (Dune Capital) CEO Steve Mnuchin as his campaign finance chair. If ever there was a poster boy for the ruling party in Washington, DC—forget “the red party” and “the blue party,” as most are well aware, nowadays, when it comes to issues that have anything to do with money, there’s one-party rule in Washington, DC and it’s “the green party”—it’s Steve Mnuchin. Upon a quick read of the story linked earlier in this paragraph, you’ll learn that—like most obscenely rich Wall Street Masters of the Universe—Mnuchin is an equal opportunity political donor, perhaps with a more significant “drift to the left” than many of his ilk.
When this news first appeared, a couple of weeks ago, I noted the following about Mnuchin in the comments of a DKos post about this story…
So, Mnuchin became Goldman’s Chief Information Officer in 1999, just in time to cheerlead the passage of the Clinton administration’s Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (a/k/a Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.
Interestingly, Jake Siewert was Bill Clinton’s last press secretary, during 1999 and 2000 (at the same time Mnuchin was Goldman’s CIO). So, Siewart was the Clinton administration’s spinmeister-in-chief for the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. However, Siewert didn’t stop there. He was also the communications director for Tim Geithner’s U.S. Treasury Department ... Drumroll… Siewert segued from the Treasury Department gig into his big bucks payoff at Goldman-Sachs in March 2012, where he’s had Mnuchin’s job, to this day!
All I can say is: Luckily, we have two distinctly different political parties in America! What a country!
Early last week, just ten days after the Mnuchin announcement by Trump, 2016 Democratic Primary front-runner Hillary Clinton made the following announcement, essentially stating that her husband would be the economic czar in her White House…
Obviously, the implications of this announcement are just beginning to sink in among left-leaning political pundits, but as Thomas Frank noted it in Friday’s Guardian, since we’ve already been there and done that with Bill, voters’ memories are short…
Times were good in the last years of Bill Clinton’s
presidency. But to put the arch-deregulator in charge
of an economy wrecked by financial bubbles
is sheer folly
Thomas Frank
The Guardian
May 20th, 2016
Donald Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” is one big, flatulent exercise in delusional nostalgia, as so many have noted. Given the likely outcome of the American presidential contest, however, it is Hillary Clinton’s delusional nostalgia that may ultimately prove more harmful for the country…
...
….American columnists have already expressed their annoyance with Hillary for offloading her duties-to-come onto her husband and thus compromising the first female presidency before it’s even started. But what really lends distinction to her announcement is the perversity, the sheer incoherence of the kind of policies she seems to hope her husband will recommend.
Take her apparent belief that balancing the federal budget is a good way to “revitalize” an economy stuck in persistent hard times. Nostalgia might indeed suggest such a course, because that’s what Bill Clinton did in the golden 90s, and those were happy days. But more recent events have taught us a different lesson. Europe’s turn toward budget-balancing austerity after the financial crisis is what made their recession so much worse than ours. President Obama’s own quest for a budget-balancing “grand bargain” is what destroyed his presidency’s transformative potential. There is no plainer lesson from the events of recent years than the folly of austerity and the non-urgency of budget-balancing.
And deregulation! Before I watched the video of that Hillary Clinton campaign event, I had never heard someone denounce deregulation and hail the economic achievements of Bill Clinton in the same speech. That kind of mental combination, I’ve always assumed, puts you in danger of spontaneous combustion or something. After all, Bill Clinton is America’s all-time champion deregulator. He deregulated banks. He deregulated telecoms. He appointed arch deregulators Robert Rubin and Larry Summers to high office, and he re-upped Ronald Reagan’s pet Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan. He took some time out to dynamite the federal welfare system, then he came back and deregulated banks some more. And derivative securities, too…
…
...What is the power these bad ideas of yore have over otherwise intelligent leaders? Hillary Clinton is a capable person, and yet it is as though she has taken no notice of what is actually happening around her in the present day. Look at where we are now: soaring inequality, a recovery that never seems to come, a fraying middle class, a furious public, and improbable protest candidates drawing millions of votes. But all of it is as nothing, I suppose, when compared to the golden allure of the past.
There’s more to Frank’s criticism than just the excerpt, above. Again, HERE'S THE LINK to his full column in Friday’s Guardian.
The other part of this two-part post is linked here: “Part 2 of 2: Yves Smith On Why Hillary Shouldn't Let Bill Anywhere Near Our Economy.”
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