The Best Gov Money Can Buy – Bribery & Extortion

Or why Barack Obama doesn't have any greater chance to bring real "change" than William J. Clinton when he ran as "The Candidate of Change" in 1992 promising the same things now on offer from Barack Obama (such as health care, though now not nearly so universal as attempted by the Clintons in the 1990's).
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johnkarls
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:43 pm

The Best Gov Money Can Buy – Bribery & Extortion

Post by johnkarls »

Proposed 26 Dec 2007 – 102 views before selected at Jan 10th meeting as the Topic for February.

One of my two suggestions for Feb 14 is to focus on a book “The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity” by Robert Kuttner (Alfred E. Knopf – 2007). It describes how the Democratic Party is still controlled by "the financial elites" that caused President William Clinton’s Administration to adopt -

"the four pillars of neoliberalism: the preference for balanced budgets and modest-size government; free trade; economic austerity as a condition for development aid; and financial-market deregulation. In each case, the evidence suggests neoliberal policies were either irrelevant or downright disruptive.” (quoting from the NY Times Review that follows).

Campaign contributions are in fact bribes. Which is how universal health care was defeated by the insurance industry in the 1990’s when Hillary Clinton spear-headed the effort as First Lady. Indeed, an understanding of how campaign contributions determine public policy is essential to understanding, among other things, the current health-care debate. (And don't get BillV started on how "campaign contributions" determine U.S. immigration policy!!!)

Last evening (Dec. 25), the McNeil-Lehrer Report (aka The News Hour With Jim Lehrer) contained an in-depth segment narrated by News-Hour regular Susan Dentzer on a series of forums for the Presidential candidates on Health Care sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington DC (full disclosure – the Kaiser Family Foundation is one of the sponsors of the New Hour’s Health Unit and Susan Dentzer was one of the panel of questioners for the forums).

The only Democratic candidates who participated were Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Richardson and Kucinich!!! (Apparently there were no forums for the Republican candidates because only McCain accepted the Kaiser invitations.)

As we know from our discussion of Universal Health Care last August, only Kucinich proposes expanding Medicare to cover everyone in what is known as a "single-payer system" (that is, the government)!!! All of the candidates witnessed how the insurance industry steam-rollered the Clintons in the 1990’s with "campaign contributions" to key members of Congress (indeed, Michael Moore's documentary "Sicko" disclosed the amount of "campaign contributions" given recently to key members of Congress, including Hillary Clinton!!!). As a result, all of the Democratic candidates (other than Don Quixote Kucinich) limit their proposals to what should be called "multi-payer systems" (that is, finding ways for the insurance industry to cover the 47 million Americans currently without health insurance of any kind!!!)!!!

It is also interesting that Obama ducked the forums. He has been under constant attack from the other candidates for the failure of his proposal to require the 47 million uninsured Americans to purchase health insurance – the so-called issue of whether his proposal is in fact “universal.” He has tried to defend his proposal on the grounds that the proposals of the other candidates are NOT universal either because legal “mandates” to purchase AUTO INSURANCE have been notoriously ineffective, so he wonders why the other candidates think the 47 million uncovered Americans will act any differently to a legal requirement that they buy HEALTH INSURANCE!!!

AN INTERESTING POINT MADE BY “THE SQUANDERING OF AMERICA” IS THAT MANY CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS ARE BRIBES THAT HAVE BEEN EXTORTED BY THE POLITICIANS THEMSELVES!!! Indeed, the NY Times review that follows begins with the 2007 extortion of campaign contributions by the Democratic Party from hedge fund managers to permit their tax loophole to continue!!!


***************************************************************************
It’s the Politics, Stupid
By NOAM SCHEIBER
NY Times Book Review Published: December 16, 2007


THE SQUANDERING OF AMERICA
How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity.
By Robert Kuttner.
337 pp. Alfred A. Knopf.
(Ed. Note - available in your local library or for $17.79 + shipping from Amazon.com)


This July, when the Democrats John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all proposed closing a tax loophole that saves hedge fund managers hundreds of millions of dollars each year, it wasn’t immediately clear what to make of it. On the one hand, it was the sort of proposal you’d expect from the party of working people. On the other, these three presidential candidates had stayed silent on the issue for months — while raising gobs of money from wealthy financiers. Why would they turn on them now?

Only later did we get some hint of an explanation. The New York Times reported that Charles Schumer, the Senate’s third-ranking Democrat, had spent June assuring Wall Street donors that the loophole would remain intact. This made the pronouncements a victory for everyone involved. The Democratic candidates could take the high road publicly, while their contributors could rest easy knowing those tax breaks were safe.

In “The Squandering of America,” Robert Kuttner says financial elites have too much sway over the Democratic Party — and, as a result, over public policy. Judging from the tax-loophole episode, it’s hard to disagree.

Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect and a columnist for The Boston Globe, won’t wow you with the novelty of his arguments. Liberals like him spent most of the 1990s groaning about Wall Street’s grip over the Clinton White House, and about the “neoliberal” agenda that resulted. (In his own book, Gene Sperling, once an economic adviser to Bill Clinton, recalls facing off against “the Three Bobs” — one of them Kuttner — during the bruising internecine fights of that decade.) The strength of Kuttner’s latest effort is that, with seven years’ distance from the Clinton era, his arguments now look emphatically right.

Kuttner takes on four pillars of neoliberalism: the preference for balanced budgets and modest-size government; free trade; economic austerity as a condition for development aid; and financial-market deregulation. In each case, the evidence suggests neoliberal policies were either irrelevant or downright disruptive.

Consider the budget. In 1993, Robert Rubin, then the president’s top economic adviser, helped persuade Clinton to pursue a huge deficit-reduction package. The theory was that the bond markets would reward him with lower interest rates. It seemed to work: the package passed, interest rates fell, and the economy boomed. But two hitches would become apparent. First, the productivity gains that underlay the boom had taken root years earlier. Second, interest rates didn’t actually fall much once you factored in a drop in inflation.

Kuttner doesn’t dispute the need for deficit reduction, given all the red ink Clinton inherited from his Republican predecessors. He just takes issue with what became a fetish for balanced budgets. It led Clinton to underinvest in areas like infrastructure and research and development, which some economists, including the Nobel laureate and former Clinton adviser Joseph Stiglitz, believe slowed growth. Meanwhile, the alarming rise in income inequality since 2000, coupled with European countries’ record of rapid, evenly distributed growth, suggests that a more activist government might be preferable on both social and economic grounds.

The story repeats itself over and over. The Clintonites spent the ’90s negotiating one trade deal after another. But once the dust had settled, the laissez-faire approach appeared to have accelerated the decline of American industry. What the Clintonites (and, to be fair, this commentator) missed was that clearing aside trade barriers can leave you dangerously exposed when many of your trading partners — especially in East Asia — don’t reciprocate.

Perhaps the most disturbing story involves financial markets. It’s no surprise that an administration staffed with Wall Street refugees would view New Deal-era restrictions on banking and investing as excessive. What’s surprising is that the Clinton White House would champion deregulation with so little regard for the consequences. One of the heroes of those years was Brooksley Born, an obscure bureaucrat who headed the equally obscure Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In 1998, Born wanted to scrutinize a financial instrument called a derivative, whose market she nominally oversaw. This earned her enormous helpings of scorn from Rubin and Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and she eventually backed down. Later that year, derivatives were at the center of one of the most spectacular financial meltdowns in history. They continue to threaten the economy to this day.

For all his insights into political economy, Kuttner sometimes goes astray on questions of crass politics. He says socially conservative working-class voters “would vote for progressive candidates if Democrats gave them more of a reason to vote” — by which he means greater “pocketbook benefits.” Kuttner is right that there are legions of blue-collar workers whose economic interests should make them Democrats. But he offers no hard evidence that they’d support the party if only it moved left on economics — as opposed to, say, right on issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Kuttner can be too hard on Democrats. In retrospect, Bill Clinton may not have had sound economic reasons to obsess over the deficit. But he had sound political reasons: namely, that the party’s association with liberal interest groups had made voters loath to trust Democrats with the federal purse strings. Kuttner also plays down many Democrats’ courageous opposition to the most egregious deregulatory efforts of the ’90s — including Clinton’s veto of a pernicious anti-shareholder measure in 1995.

For their part, the party’s presidential front-runners have learned a lot from the ’90s. All three have proposed ambitious health insurance programs and savings benefits while voicing doubts about the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Still, given the influence of wealthy investors on the Clinton and Obama campaigns in particular, Kuttner is right to be worried. In May, the legendary hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones II held a 300-person fund-raiser for Barack Obama at his Greenwich, Conn., mansion. If a future Obama administration were to consider, say, reining in derivatives, could the president resist pressure from the likes of Jones? It’s possible. But, like Kuttner, I’m skeptical.

Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic.

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