The Clinton Conundrum

Hillary or Billary?

Hillary and Bill have been a political team from the start.  Remember Bill's "two for the price of one" comment?  We can't be sure how much impact Hillary had on Bill's presidency (except for the health insurance screw-up); similarly, we can't be sure how much influence Bill will have should Hillary become president.  Are they ideologically similar — even interchangeable?  Are they ideological at all, or just political?  Will another Clinton administration be, well, another Clinton administration?  Is there any way to know?

At the most recent Democratic debate, when Bernie questioned Hillary about her financial backing from Wall Street, her "9/11" response was laughable at best — but what would be her relationship to the financial industry?  Would it be Robert Rubin redux, or are her recent leftish gestures for real?

When Bill Clinton climbed into bed with Phil Gramm to create the deregulation that brought us the financial crisis of 2008, was Hillary keeping his feet warm?*  Can "today's" Hillary be trusted to represent the interests of the non-billionaire classes?

I think the best we can hope for is that she will opportunistically take some actions to mollify the liberal Democratic base while never going quite far enough to alienate her plutocratic backers.  While I'm doing my best to stay sworn off predictions, and also doing my best to believe in Bernie as hard as children are asked to believe in Tinkerbell, I'm not especially optimistic about post-Obama America.

*  (Phil's wife Wendy certainly was keeping his feet warm.  She is best remembered for deregulatory agitation from the Mercatus Institute at George Mason University, and as an Enron board member.)

So here it comes, I guess...

Along with other, more serious misdeeds, Phil Gramm can take credit for bringing the term "sequestration" into the Federal vocabulary.  It appeared in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation of 1985, and you can search that on your own.

The people most likely to be hurt by the current sequestration are employees of the federal government, employees of federal government contractors, state workers supported by federal funding, and local government employees tossed aside to offset the loss of federal/state funding.  The banks, of course, will be fine.  The Dow is back up over 14,000 today, despite sequestration, chaos in Italy, and a hell of a lot of international stupidity.  I guess everybody knows the genuine elite (a group a hell of  lot smaller than the top 1%) will be protected.

Jack Lew was approved today for Secretary of the Treasury.  Like Bernie Sanders, I wonder if we'll ever have a Treasury Secretary with no connection to Robert Rubin or Citibank.  Let's face it — both parties are in the pockets of big finance.  If they weren't, we'd have seen the revocation of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which was the Clinton Administration bill that ended Glass-Steagall.

Damn it, Phil and Wendy Gramm, you are evil!  Well, maybe stupid rather than evil, but I'm going with evil.  Unlike certain Republican members of the House, I'm pretty sure you knew what you were doing.  You made a hell of a lot of money on your advancement of right wing ideology, and I haven't heard a word about how you're using it to help "all boats rise."