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.)

Maggie Thatcher is (finally) gone

Two famous women died yesterday.  I'll discuss the other one on my other blog.  On this one, though, I'll just share my memories of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  She made it to 87, but her intellect departed years ago.  Dementia did her in.  She lived too long.  (So did her partner in crime, Ronald Reagan.)

I think Thatcher might have had more native intelligence than Reagan, but they were equals when it came to working a crowd.  Both were heroes to the narrow minded, anal retentive types who resented anybody except themselves getting a hand up.

Along with Reagan, she was a major contributor to the deregulation boom that led to "too big to fail" financial entities.  It's conceivable that, fifty years from now, both Reagan and Thatcher will be remembered as the monumental failures they truly were.  I'm sorry I'll have to miss that.

He signed it, of course.

Amazing how far an attractive acronym can get you.

Today, Our President signed into law the duplicitously named JOBS (Jump-start Our Business Start-ups) act, which has absolutely nothing to do with creating jobs, and everything to do with deregulating the financial sector. If it had been called the SOBS (Stimulate Our Business Start-ups) act, at least it would have presented an accurate portrayal of the political weasels of both parties who pushed it through.

So now, IPOs for "small" businesses (up to one billion dollars of revenues per year) are no longer required to even tell investors what the hell the business is for five years. We're back to where we were during the internet bubble, when investors poured money into duds like pets.com. Hmmm... maybe somebody could bring back pets.com. "PETS" could stand for "Pickpocket Every Thick-brained Sucker."

Last month, I offered instructions for how you could use the provisions of the JOBS act to rip off random strangers on the internet. Wall Street firms don't need instructions from me. Now, in the case of "small" businesses, they can go back to having their analysts puff up a stock offering their finance arm is selling.

CRAP (Capitalists Rape the American People)!

To Barack Obama from an old white guy

A little while ago, I posted the video you can watch above to YouTube, as a response to a video from the Obama campaign which you can watch here. If you don't find my video in the "video responses" section, it means the Obama campaign didn't "accept" it -- that is, decided they'd rather not have it associated with their video.

If you didn't have the patience to listen to me go on for close to ten minutes, here's the gist of it -- I tell Obama that what I really want him to do is undo the Reagan Revolution. I tell him he should significantly raise taxation of the very rich, re-regulate a lot of what's been deregulated over the past quarter-century, and run a government that's actively pro-union. Beyond that, I want him to put government workers back on the payroll to do most of the work that's been contracted out, and I assert that the Iraq War was started specifically so the private sector could loot the Treasury.

Yes, it's one of my usual diatribes, and if it actually appears on YouTube as a response to Obama's video, I'll be flabbergasted -- but there's at least a chance that somebody in the Obama campaign will have looked at it.

The truth is that I don't expect Obama could accomplish what I think needs accomplishment even if he wanted to. The biggest problem I see with an Obama presidency has nothing to do with Obama. Rather, it has to do with the fractious nature of the Democratic Party. Will Democrats in Congress unite behind Obama if he wins? I'm guessing they'll give him all the stunning support they gave, say, Jimmy Carter. Thanks in part to Clinton pulling the party to the right, there are quite a few powerful Democrats who are quite conservative -- and the fact that Congress becomes more and more of a millionaire's club with each election cycle won't much help either.

By the way, I tried to make the video more visually interesting than just my talking head by adding a bunch of stills and animations, some of which are moderately amusing. If you haven't watched it yet, please give it a try.

On regulation of the financial sector

Imagine my delight to discover that the article I meant to write today already had been written by Al Meyerhoff and published in today's Los Angeles Times! It's a must-read, so stop wasting your time here and go straight to:
Financial forces run amok
Back already? Well, perhaps you'd like to know which Presidential candidates are, as Meyerhoff put it, "lining up at the Wall Street trough." A great way to do that is by trying out a new feature at the opensecrets.org website:
MoneyWeb