NO ENTITY
HAS WORKED HARDER TO DESTROY AMERICA’S MIDDLE CLASS MORE THAN THE GLOBAIST
DEMOCRAT PARTY AND THEIR WELFARE SUCKING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES AND “CHEAP”
LABOR DEM VOTING ILLEGALS!
The Clinton White House
famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial
and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall
Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped
contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton
raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total
of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including
Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman
Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more
than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over
$500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of
the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was
alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it
generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of
economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken
up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on
behalf of the citizenry.
Berle
exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get
his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial
Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production,
which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix
Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis
Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into
New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a
somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust
did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major
role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then
turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New
Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen
and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding
for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman,
who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is
to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named
Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared
the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and
his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that
only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis
of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly
destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal
regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the
greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They
were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they
supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this
“principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on
irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and
share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To
Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more
active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best
part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking
and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize
about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to
racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable
level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of
citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit
neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was
intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he
writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations
that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning
democratic political economy.
Then came
the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level
as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and
proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged
population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole
businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile
takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And it
all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann
points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt
had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a
staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of
foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives imploded. Car
dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella for decades
were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents desperately
mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they were
struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway
government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the
book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible
rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have
largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of
esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street
maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of
blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for
instance, have grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire
online ad market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they
directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor
that the car industry once did.
In his final
chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious
system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It
refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than
concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a
peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is
full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who
knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private
profit. In
his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to
consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own
affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now
that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by
organized mob.”
If
concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a
poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the
social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill
and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace
on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the
entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And
even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out,
especially African Americans.
Lemann
writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress
welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation among
the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much
farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do
considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political
polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely,
for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of
vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently
calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,”
which is how far families are below the poverty line before government
transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.)
Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though
it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist
social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are
typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still,
Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive
history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written
illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives
of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a national
correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the
New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from
2012 to 2014.
THE GRIFTERS:
HILLARY CLINTON AND HER
SERIAL RAPIST HUSBAND
“The couple
parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes.
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes.
The basic components of the operation are lavishly paid
speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign
contributions, and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton
Foundation.”
"But what the
Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the
American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it
to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal.
Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to
every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy -
AMERICANTHINKER.com
Why Hillary and Her Wall Street
Donors Don’t Want Trump’s Wall…
NO BILLIONAIRE WANTS TO PAY LIVING WAGES
TO ANY LEGALS!
"Hillary and her party supporters desperately need illegal
immigrants: Hillary is bought and paid for." Michael Bargo, Jr.
"But what the
Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the
American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it
to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal.
Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to
every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy -
AMERICANTHINKER.com
THE GRIFTERS: HILLARY, BILLARY and CHELSEA… global
looters!
"But
there is no doubt in my mind that the Clintons, thoroughly practiced
grifters
that they are, as well as their increasingly shady daughter, will not
hesitate
to use such classified information as they may be able to access for
personal
and political enrichment. They've been doing it for decades,
and
they're
not about to stop now." RUSS VAUGHN
CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON,
OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House
famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial
and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall
Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped
contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton
raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial
firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from
speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill
Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
GEORGE SOROS AND
THE CLINTON GLOBALIST AGENDA FOR BANKSTERS AND WIDE-OPEN BORDERS
NEW YORK — Demand Justice, an
organization founded by former members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential
campaign and associated with a “social welfare organization” financed by
billionaire activist
George Soros, is raising money
for an eventual court fight against what the group describes as President
Trump’s proposed “racist, unnecessary wall.”
“Obama would
declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he
did for the entire Obama presidency.”
“Hillary was always small potatoes, a
placeholder as it were. Her health was always suspect. And do you think the
plotters would have let a doofus like Tim Kaine take office in the event that
Hillary became disabled?”
THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION CHARITY slush
fund
“There is no controlling Bill Clinton. He does whatever he wants and runs up incredible expenses with
foundation funds,” states a separate interview memo attached to the submission.
“Bill Clinton mixes and matches his personal
business with that of the foundation. Many people within the foundation have
tried to caution him about this but he does not listen, and there really is no
talking to him,” the memo added.
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome
of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well be true that
Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even
taking office: the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely
corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless
record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The
Obama's have created."
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