How Much Change Does Robert Rubin Believe In?
by: Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
05 August 2008
"Foreclosure Phil" Gramm and nice guy Robert Rubin put two different faces on the power players who move so easily between Wall Street and Washington.
The personification of old-fashioned, dog-eat-dog capitalism, Gramm appears to find moral virtue in the survival of the fittest and policy guidance in Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake." In his long tenure as the Senate's top Republican on economic policy, he led the fight to roll back state and federal regulation of the economy, encouraging both the Enron scandal and the sub-prime lending frenzy. Gramm then left the Senate to find his reward as vice chairman of the Swiss-based UBS Investment Bank, for whom he continued to lobby Congress on housing and mortgage legislation. He also joined John McCain's presidential campaign as co-chair and senior economic adviser, until he was forced to resign last month for dismissing the chaos he did so much to create as merely "a mental recession" and the victims he left behind as "whiners."
Robert Rubin would never talk like that. The very model of a modern corporate liberal, he moved with ease from the top of Goldman Sachs to become President Bill Clinton's chief economic adviser and then secretary of the Treasury. Clinton had run as a populist on an economic platform created principally by Robert Reich, who became his labor secretary. But Rubin's Wall Street "realism" quickly trumped Reich's academic populism, and Clinton made the North American Free Trade Agreement his top priority over universal health care. He also eliminated the budget deficit left to him by the first Bush rather than rebuilding the nation's already crumbling infrastructure, and went along with the economic deregulation that Phil Gramm was pushing in the Republican-led Congress.
To Rubin's credit, eliminating the deficit helped fuel the prosperity of the Clinton years. To Rubin's shame, the Clinton free trade agreements provided no safety net for American workers whose jobs went abroad, while the newly unregulated financial markets helped create the speculative crap shoot that led directly to our current economic woes.
Dubbed by Clinton the "greatest secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton," Rubin left the administration and joined Citigroup, the nation's largest financial conglomerate, whose very existence was made legal by the deregulation measures he had convinced Clinton to accept. According to The Wall Street Journal, Citigroup has so far paid Rubin more than $100 million to serve as chairman of its executive committee, and leaves him free to serve as a key economic adviser to Barack Obama. Even more telling, Rubin's protégé, Jason Furman, now heads Obama's paid economic staff and is expected to join Obama in the White House should he win in November.
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http://www.truthout.org/article/how-much-change-does-robert-rubin-believe-in