R George
Actually you, I, even RR and lots of others are thinking our Capitalist system
is going down
the toilet. Just don't think the Socialist system will work when it is the only
alternative the
way I think. These time from time manifestos are just too long for my old,
weary brain.
Stan the aging life long Socialist
-----Original Message-----
From: R George <xgeorge@xxxxxxx>
To: sparkscoffee <sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tue, Aug 30, 2016 6:14 pm
Subject: [sparkscoffee] Their findings are like something out of Karl Marx’s
and Frederick Engels’ notion of “the executive of the modern state
Long article, here is the bottom line: You and your family are going
down the toilet regardless.
RG
Excerpts
from:http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/it_takes_a_ruling-class_village_to_staff_the_white_house_20160828
That was all very stirring, but who actually comprises the “we” that
makes executive branch policy in the name of the common good when either
Democrats or Republicans hold the White House? Not the nation’s working-
and middle-class majority, that’s for sure. The Dutch political scientists
Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Nana de Graaff recently constructed a richly
detailed career profile of the U.S. presidency’s top “grand strategy makers”
(GSMs)—holders of key policymaking cabinet and senior advisory
positions—over the administrations of the 42nd, 43rd and 44th presidents:
Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Barack Obama
(2009-2017). Their findings are like something out of Karl Marx’s and
Frederick Engels’ notion of “the executive of the modern state” as
“nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.”
By van Apeldoorn and de Graaff’s calculations, 23 (more than 70 percent)
of Obama’s top 30 GSMs had “top-level corporate affiliations”—executive,
director, senior adviser or partner in a law firm—prior to their appointment
to the U.S. executive branch. These 23 were linked through a combination of
board memberships, executive positions and advisory roles to 111
corporations. These “affiliations in many cases display a revolving door
pattern, indicating that the actors are not just closely tied to but
actually themselves members of the corporate elite.”
Elite travelers in and out of top positions in the Obama White House
include Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew, Peter Orszag, Ken Salazar and Tom
Donilon. Geithner went from being Citigroup Chair Robert Rubin’s handpicked
head of the New York Federal Reserve Board to serving (Wall Street) as
Obama’s first Treasury secretary to his current position as CEO of the
leading Wall Street private equity firm, Warburg Pincus.
Before replacing Geithner atop Treasury, Lew was chief operating officer
at Citigroup’s alternative investment division, focused on risky and complex
proprietary trading schemes.
Orszag left his position as Obama’s Office of Budget Management director
to become vice chair of global banking and chair of financial strategy and
solutions at Citigroup and now serves as vice chairman of investment banking
and managing director at Lazard. (Salazar and Donilon will be discussed
later in this report.)
“Perhaps,” Robert Reich writes, “it was not entirely coincidental that
the Obama administration never put tough conditions on banks receiving
bailout money, never prosecuted a single top Wall Street executive for the
excesses that led to the financial meltdown and even refused to support a
small tax on financial transactions that would have generated tens of
billions of dollars in annual revenues and discouraged program trading.”
The ultimate ruling-class, revolving-door role model is Rubin himself,
mentor to both Geithner and Orszag. Before his positions at Citigroup and
his continuing place co-chairing “Wall Street’s Think Tank”—the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR)—Rubin chaired Goldman Sachs and then became Bill
Clinton’s top economic adviser and Treasury secretary, serving as the chief
architect of the financial deregulation that helped set the stage for the
epic financial crisis of 2007-2009. Citigroup was the leading immediate
beneficiary of that deregulation and would be the financial institution that
exposed the federal government to the greatest potential loss during the
great state-capitalist bailouts that followed the epic financial implosion
that Citi and other top banks caused.
This oligarchic composition of top White House personnel is hardly
unique to the age of Obama. Twenty-one (70 percent) of Bush II’s GSMs
(linked to 87 corporations) and 18 (60 percent) of Clinton’s GSMs (linked to
48 corporations) held such elite corporate stations.XX
The numbers get worse when you include GSMs who took such positions
after they served in those presidencies. Broadened that way, the numbers for
Clinton are 25 of 30 (83 percent) linked to 197 corporations and 27 of 30
(90 percent) linked to 157 companies for George W. Bush. By last year, seven
former Obama GSMs had rotated back into top corporate roles after their
White House stints.XX
Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that the last three
presidential administrations have overseen a significant loss of jobs and
opportunity for the working-class majority in an ever more globalized New
Gilded Age wherein the top 0.1 percent owns roughly as much wealth as the
bottom 90 percent—an age of neoliberal austerity for the many, and vast
governmental subsidy, protection and bailout for the wealthy few.XX
Will things be any different in the likely Clinton 45 White House? One
would have to be very naive to think so. It’s not for nothing that Hillary
Clinton is known on Wall Street as “Lady Klynton Kissinger Sachs.” The
consistently war-hawkish Clinton is the quintessential power-elite and
ruling-class insider. She was minted and socialized at such ruling-class
institutions as Oxford, Yale Law, Rose Law, the Wal-Mart board of directors,
the Democratic Leadership Council (dedicated to pushing the Democratic Party
further to the corporate-friendly right during the 1980s and 1990s), the
White House (eight years as a highly policy-empowered first lady), the
globalist Clinton Foundation, the CFR and the U.S. State Department. She and
her husband “operate in … a world awash in money and connections … [a] very
privileged place,” as The New York Times’ Carolyn Ryan recently said. She is
the candidate of campaign finance and of (exorbitant) speaking-fee choice
for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the CFR, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange,
Robert Rubin and the rest of the nation’s transnationally oriented corporate
and financial aristocracy—including a remarkable number of pinstripe
Republicans who do not trust the “unhinged” Trump. As New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd cleverly reflects:
All these woebegone Republicans whining that they can’t rally behind
their flawed candidate is crazy. The G.O.P. angst, the gnashing and
wailing and searching for last-minute substitutes and exit strategies, is
getting old. They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in
the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals
beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk
it up. … The Republicans have their candidate: It’s Hillary.
