BILL MOYERS JOURNAL: Money and Politics (approx 30 mins)
December 18, 2009
Video and transcript
If you watch one online show this week, this has to be the one. Bill was an ardent supporter of Obama during the campaign and spent a lot of his personal capital (as did we all) to drive Obama's election. You get the sense from this show that Bill Moyers has now seen enough.
Guests: Economist Robert Kuttner (The American Prospect) and journalist Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) on Wall Street's power over the federal government.
This diary only has a few of the 'money' quotes. Go watch the entire show for discussion on many more topics. It's a real eye opener. Think about it then decide for yourself.
Kuttner on Rahmbo's strategy.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Rahm Emanuel, the President's Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton's Political Director. And Rahm Emanuel's take away from Bill Clinton's failure to get health insurance passed was 'don't get on the wrong side of the insurance companies.' So their strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies, the drug industry going in. And the deal was, we're not going to attack your customer base, we're going to subsidize a new customer base. And that script was pre-cooked so it's not surprising that this is what comes out the other side.
Taibbi thinks the HCR bill will create a stench that will stick to Dems for 10-20 years.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, and this was Howard Dean's point this week was that this individual mandate that's going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies, the Democrats are going to end up owning that policy and it's going to be extremely unpopular and it's going to be theirs for a generation. It's going to be an albatross around the neck of this party.
But that's just politics that the Dem politicians will have to deal with the spin. It's the people who end up forced by law to pay 20+% of their income to insurance companies that will suffer the consequences. And there will be anger. Lots of it.
Taibbi believes the collapse of real HC reform makes perfect sense.
MATT TAIBBI: And I think, you know, a lot of what the Democrats are doing, they don't make sense if you look at it from an objective point of view, but if you look at it as a business strategy- if you look at the Democratic Party as a business, and their job is basically to raise campaign funds and to stay in power, what they do makes a lot of sense. They have a consistent strategy which involves negotiating a fine line between sentiment on the left and the interests of the industries that they're out there to protect. And they've always, kind of, taken that fork in the road and gone right down the middle of the line. And they're doing that with this health care bill and that's- it's consistent.
Taibbi explains that Obama could have forced congress to give him a real reform bill. But he remained aloof from the process.
MATT TAIBBI: I mean, that's what George Bush did when he wanted to get something unpopular passed or something that was iffy. I mean, he just took, you know, if there were any recalcitrant members, he just took him in the back room and beat him with a rubber hose until they changed their minds. I mean, he could've taken Joe Lieberman back there and said, look, if Connecticut ever wants a dime of highway money again, you're going to have to play ball on this thing.
That's what the president does. I mean, the president has an enormous amount of power. The leaders, the majority leaders have an enormous amount of power. And if they want to pass something, they can do it. And especially when there's a tremendous public mandate to get something like this passed. I just- the idea that they couldn't do this was- is a fallacy.
Kuttner is hopeful that the Dems can fix the party shortcomings. But admits there are just enough Dems beholding to big money to spoil any legislation that has teeth.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Just the pity of it is there are probably 40 Democrats in the Senate who are not corporate Democrats. And there are probably 200 Democrats in the House who are not corporate Democrats. If we could push a little harder, we can take back our political system and have a democratically elected set of officials who are the kind of counterweight to big money that we need in order to get reform.
BILL MOYERS: So Democrats have their own obstructionists?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Yeah. You have Republican wall-to-wall obstructionism, which is partisan. And with a few exceptions, Republicans are totally in bed with big business. And you have just enough Democrats who are in bed with big business that it makes it much harder for progressive Democrats to follow the agenda that the country needs.
On the 60 minutes Obama interview and 'Taking the Bankers to the woodshed' photo op ...
BILL MOYERS: Then on Monday afternoon, he had this photo opportunity in which he scolded the bankers and then they took it politely and graciously, which they could've done because the Hill at that very moment was swarming with banking lobbyists making sure that what the President wants doesn't happen. I mean, what did you think as you watched him on 60 MINUTES or watched that press conference?
ROBERT KUTTNER: I was appalled. I was just appalled because think of the timing. On Thursday and Friday of last week, the same week when the president finally gives this tough talk on "60 Minutes," a very feeble bill (on Bank Reform and Regulation) is working its way through the House of Representatives and crucial decisions are being made. And where is the President? I mean, there was an amendment to put some teeth back in the provision on credit default swaps and other kinds of derivatives. And that went down by a handful of votes. And to the extent that the Treasury and the White House was working that bill, at all, they were working the wrong side. There was a there was a provision to exempt foreign exchange derivatives from the teeth in the bill.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Yeah. And, Treasury was lobbying in favor of that. There was a provision in the bill to exempt small corporations, not so small, I believe at $75 million and under, from a lot of the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requiring honest accounting. Rahm Emanuel personally was lobbying in favor of that.
BILL MOYERS: So you had the Treasury and the White House chief of staff arguing on behalf of the banking industry?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Right. Right. And so here's the president two days later giving a tough speech. Why wasn't he working the phones to toughen up that bill and, you know, walk the talk?
While Kuttner is somewhat hopeful that Obama may yet decide to salvage his presidency, Taibbi is not betting on it.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah. I mean, obviously, it's too early to completely abandon hope that he's going to turn things around. But I think that's a belief that's not really based on evidence. If you look at the evidence of how he's behaved so far, and who he's got, you know, working in the White House, and who he's getting his money from, and how the party has behaved over the last couple of decades. You're really basically relying upon the impression that he gives as a kind, decent, warm-hearted intellectual guy. That's what the basis of that faith that there's going to be this turnaround. It's really not anything that's actually concretely happened that would give you reason to think that.