Chris Arnade owes most of his Wall Street career to the Clintons; Not just Bill or Hillary -- they were, and remain, a 2 for 1 deal. Especially when it comes to making money. Not just for themselves, but for their friends on Wall Street.
Mr. Arnade was in that circle who benefited greatly from the Arkansas “New Democrats.” His insider’s view of what the Clinton’s did for Wall Street by fundamentally crippling the Democratic Party is a fascinating read.
Here are some choice excerpts:
The administration’s economic policy took shape as trickle down, Democratic style. They championed free trade, pushing Nafta. They reformed welfare, buying into the conservative view that poverty was about dependency, not about situation. They threw the old left a few bones, repealing prior tax cuts on the rich, but used the increased revenues mostly on Wall Street’s favorite issue: cutting the debt.
When people say that Hillary, and even Obama, is a neoliberal this is what we mean. Reagan and Thatcher were the first “great” neoliberals of our current age. The Clintons refined it to an art — transforming Voodoo Economics into a holy bipartisan sacrament that must never be changed.
Arnade then details the first great Democratic bailout in 1995. Nafta failed, Mexican bonds and deviratives were losing money, causing Wall Street to bleed.. so Mexico was bailed out to the tune of $50 billion dollars. And it worked out for the most important people involved: the banks.
The success encouraged the administration, which used it as an economic blueprint that emphasized Wall Street. It also emphasized bailouts, believing it was counterproductive to let banks fail, or to punish them with losses, or fines or, God forbid, charge them with crimes, and risk endangering the economy.
The use of bailouts should have also been a reason to heavily regulate Wall Street, to prevent behavior that would require a bailout. But the administration didn’t do that; instead they went the opposite direction and continued to deregulate it, culminating in the repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999.
And thus Democrats became welcome on Wall Street. Robert Rubin joined Arnade on the trading room floor. And everyone in the 1% lived happily ever after. Until the next manufactured crisis...
Wall Street now had both political parties working for them, and really nobody holding them accountable. Now, no trade was too aggressive, no risk too crazy,no behavior to unethical and no loss too painful. It unleashed a boom that produced plenty of smaller crisis (Russia, Dotcom), before culminating in the housing and financial crisis of 2008.
Miracles can happen as the self-styled Masters of the Universe learned to fail upward. Thanks the US Government’s treasury and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
I highly recommend you read the whole Guardian article as it is a succinct distillation of how the Democratic Party finds itself so far to the right of its New Deal roots.
Speaking of killing the New Deal, if you’d like to know more about Hillary’s membership in the Fellowship (a Jesus-based power-broker group founded to destroy the New Deal) check out this diary.