Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat
A flower pot and a hellish garage. The flower pot signals a desire to talk, the garage the location for their dangerous conversations. Hal Holbrook’s voice half-whispers like a wraith: “Follow the money.” He might have been referring to Hillary Clinton not Watergate.
I remember listening to Sidney Pollack talk about filming that scene, which he described as an attempt to capture the hellish corruption of money along with the very real danger that those who supply the money play for keeps. He particularly worried whether the lighting would convey this notion of Holbrook’s Deep Throat as a Fallen Angel.
In Pollack’s hands, the evils of campaign finance became a scene from a modern Dante’s Inferno, which, after all is appropriate since Dante used the Inferno to consign some of the most evil characters of the late Middle Ages to horrific fates with a palpable feeling of revenge. This was a final judgment in which the scales meted out their savage sentences based on justice and equity.
Hillary’s Donors
When you locate Hillary Clinton’s donors list, you find no Stevie Cohens, but instead names familiar to any American who reads the financial pages. Here is the list courtesy of opensecrets.org:
At first glance, this list seems like a veritable Gordian knot of entanglements. Unlike Chris Dodd and Stevie Cohen or Joe Biden’s team of longtime supporters, this list does not on the surface appear to add up to anything but a tangle of some of America’s richest and most powerful. DLA Piper is America’s largest law firm, with offices all over the world, over 3,000 attorneys and a client list it would take six posts like this to detail. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, J.P Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers together represent the major players in the banking and investment world. Patton Boggs is the country’s largest lobbying firm. National Amusements (Sumner Redstone’s media empire), Time Warner and Cablevision are some of the country’s major media conglomerates.
DLA Piper’s officers include two former House majority leaders, Dick Armey, senior policy advisor for DLA Piper, and Dick Gephardt, senior counsel at the firm as well as former Senator George Mitchell. When Piper held a panel on the 2008 election, guess whom they predicted would be the Democratic nominee? According to the web site of the Armenian National Committee of America, DLA Piper has a $1.2 million dollar lobbying contract with the government of Turkey:
Including a controversial – although not entirely surprising – provision that seeks to prevent even “debate” in the United States on legislation “that harms Turkey’s interests or image.”
It also has contracts with the governments of Afghanistan and Ethiopia and the Prime Minister of the UAE, plus lobbyists in place at the European Union.
Of more concern should be the political hot-buttons of these donors. Both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been major proponents of privatizing Social Security. If you watched the Las Vegas debate, you may have noticed how Hillary Clinton waffled noticeably on what she would do about Social Security. Along with most firms, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also have strongly urged further deregulation of the securities industry.
The number one lobbying firm Patton Boggs also has some interesting major clients. They include the drug companies Bristol Myers and Hoffman LaRoche, Kidney Care Partners (a dialysis conglomerate), and the Long Term Pharmacy Alliance. Given these clients, you can bet Patton Boggs will not sit still when a Hillary Clinton administration drafts a health care bill.
This leads to an interesting question about the names on the list: who else do they support? Checking their donations, you see some familiar names: George Bush, John Kerry, and Charles Schumer. On the other hand, they don’t support liberals, progressives, and long shots.
The sword that cuts this Gordian knot of impressive donors is probably one of the most overlooked aspects of what has been termed Clintonism. Most of the analysis of Clintonism has focused on the much-discussed concept of triangulation, a term coined by former Clinton campaign advisor Richard Morris, who likened his strategy to tacking a sailboat first right and then left. In getting the pundits to fix their often myopic vision on triangulation, the Clintons may have performed one of the most impressive tricks of prestidigitation in American history.
A magician friend once told me that the secret to all tricks, whether the old coin behind the ear routine or pulling a rabbit out of a hat is to divert attention from the mechanics of the trick. He once showed me the coin trick with and then without the elaborate theatrics. I got it right away, but I also learned it takes years of practice to learn how to manage those theatrics so they seem natural.
The New Mark Hanna
While triangulation may well be the Clintons’ political philosophy–if it can be called that–what has given them extraordinary power lies in that flowerpot and subterranean garage–money. An article by Marc Ambinder in the new December Atlantic puts it succinctly:
Money is the mechanism by which the Clintons exert leverage over the party. Some Clinton supporters believed the couple’s sway over the party’s money machinery is even more important than their popularity with the Democratic base.
Karl Rove used to dream of taking his party and America back to the days of William McKinley–and by implication the Mark Hanna machine. Mark Hanna was a wealthy Cleveland coal and iron tycoon who might be termed the first “bundler,” a term for wealthy donors who “bundle” huge amounts of political contributions by using their network of business colleagues and sometimes a little extracurricular arm-twisting. Hanna was able to pull this off by scaring the business community with lurid pictures of what would happen should “Bryanism” take control of the White House.
Reviled even in his own times, Hanna did not care what people thought of him because by putting together his network of rich donors he controlled the purse strings of the Republican Party. Little did Rove or the pundits suspect that it would not be George Bush but the Clintons who would take America back to the days of Mark Hanna.
For much of the last century, the Democratic Party depended on a well-oiled grassroots machine fueled in part by old-fashioned patronage. Among William Jennings Bryan’s many overlooked contributions was his creation of a virtual army of supporters who could be mobilized by the first modern media operation centered around Bryan’s publication, The Commoner. Bryan’s “army” swung the Democratic nomination to Woodrow Wilson. Grassroots organizing would elect FDR and Harry Truman.
Then under Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and a Jimmy Carter who disdained patronage, what the Democrats had built up over most of the twentieth century rusted away like one of those now obsolete factories in Pittsburgh or Hanna’s hometown of Cleveland. The achievement of Bill Clinton was to borrow an idea from his idol John Kennedy, who used money to end run the Party establishment. In this sense the much-commented-on Kennedy Johnson feud covered a fundamental battle over campaign strategy and control of the Party.
Bill Clinton realized that in today’s media-driven campaigns money trumps everything. So like Mark Hanna he carefully cultivated a network of big donors–call it the Clinton Cash Machine. As a result, Hillary’s “list” has allowed her to lead all other candidates in fund-raising. Howard Dean almost threw a wrench into this system with his Internet campaign built on small donors, but he proved no match for the Clinton Cash Machine and its chosen candidate, John Kerry.
The question that voters need to ask is,”Does the Clinton Cash Machine have a Mark Hanna?” Who put this formidable operation together and who runs it? The web site White House for Sale lists an astounding 320 “bundlers” who pledged to raise at least $100,000 for the Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but these are but the officers in the Clinton Cash Machine army of fundraisers.
The general consensus is the man behind the Clinton cash machine is none other than long-time Clinton fundraiser Terry McAuliffe, who as chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2001-2005 enabled the Democratic Party to out raise the GOP for the first time in history. Bill Clinton credits McAuliffe as the major reason he won reelection in 1996. Al Gore has referred to him as:
The greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe.
McAuliffe is no Mark Hanna who leveraged his power with his fortune. Rather, he is a new breed of fundraiser who puts deals together. According to an investigative report by Jeffrey St. Clair:
The young fundraiser learned an early lesson. No enterprise was off-limits, no matter how tarnished the reputation of the company: weapons-makers, oil companies, chemical manufacturers, banks, sweatshop tycoons. Indeed, McAuliffe made his mark by targeting corporations with festering problems, ranging from liability suits to environmental and worker safety restraints to bothersome federal regulators. The more desperate these enterprises were for political intervention, the more money McAuliffe knew he could seduce into DNC coffers.
Triangulation, the backstabbing political playbook of Clintontime, originated as a fundraising gimmick. A very lucrative one.
This has earned McAuliffe the long-time ire of liberals and progressives. He now serves as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. In fact, on the Democratic side, the battle is not so much between candidates as over the soul of the party. The issue at stake in this campaign is whether the new Mark Hannas of the Clinton Cash Machine shall rule the party or whether the party returns to the grassroots heritage begun by Bryan.
Hillary Plays with Cows
Now the Clinton Cash Machine has mobilized around the heiress-in-waiting, Hillary Clinton. But with Hillary the ties to the Cash Machine go deeper, to her very soul. That Clinton’s campaign contributors should consist of so many financial firms should come as no accident to those who know their history, for it was her husband who loosened the banking regulations that have produced the hedge fund and mortgage crisis (more on that in a future post).
Hillary Clinton is actually more comfortable with the high rollers and financial speculators than her husband. Her knowledge of the markets was drummed into her head as a girl when her father taught her to read financial reports. Later as Bill Clinton’s wife she would play the lucrative, but risky cattle futures market like an old pro. Then there was Whitewater.
Playing cattle futures and the commodities markets is not for the faint of heart or the small investor, for it is about as close to legalized gambling as you can get. Speaking of the pork belly market Kevin Pendley, an official at the Commodity Research Bureau in Chicago said:
Bellies are more of a gambler’s product, if someone doesn’t mind the risk of an illiquid contract, it really moves.
Like gamblers, some commodities traders build elaborate models and systems to beat the odds. Sometimes they work and sometime they don’t. But few get into the game without laying down cash for access to one of these systems. How Hillary Clinton managed to turn a $1,000 commodities investment into nearly $100,000 has been the subject of much speculation. Clearly, she would not have realized such spectacular gains without the aid of James Blair, an attorney for Arkansas-based Tyson Foods.
How much Hillary Clinton skirted the law depends on what you read, but everyone agrees Clinton was allowed more leeway than other clients. But the issue is not whether Hillary Clinton played by the rules, but that she played at all. The moral of this story is that financial services firms will not just have a friend in the White House in Hillary Clinton, but one of their own, someone who in the lingo of the Street is a “player.” There seems little question that this country’s runaway speculation needs to be reined in, but whether Hillary Clinton has either the will or the philosophical inclination to do so remains a major question. Would she wound a goose that has produced golden eggs?
Who Is Sumner Redstone?
Another questionable thread running through the tangle of Clinton donors involves the media. Here the name Sumner Redstone personifies Clinton’s media donors.. Like the more well-known Rupert Murdoch, Redstone has followed a similar philosophy of vertical integration in building his empire which according to the corporate web site consists of 1,500 movie theaters across the world, holding an equal partnership in MovieTickets.com plus serving as the parent company of CBS and Viacom (which also owns MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Paramount and the home of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, Comedy Central, among others). Viacom’s most recent appearance on the front pages was its billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube for using unauthorized film clips.
Redstone is close enough to the Clinton’s that he presented Bill with a bottle of the miracle elixir he is touting called Monavie. At $40 a bottle the stuff ain’t Pepsi. A web site selling the product manages to work the ex-president into its advertising:
Redstone is such a fan that he’s shared his super-juice with friends such as Bill Clinton, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, and Michael Milken.
Clinton herself has religiously avoided the topic of media regulation which along with her involvement with people like Redstone should serve as a red flag. Clinton’s response to media concentration has been much like her answer to the Social Security question in Las Vegas–she would form a commission. Currently she is a cosponsor of the 2007 Media Concentration Act which merely requires that the FCC must allow enough time for comment on the actual rule changes. Media concentration does not appear as an issue on her web site and she has not stated her current position on ownership.
What some fear is that as President she could also accomplish one of the GOP’s longtime goals, which has been to rid the FCC of Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, who are sworn enemies of media consolidation and big media.
It was Copps, after all, who engaged in the following exchange with Bill Moyers:
BILL MOYERS: When you talk to or listen to or hear from or watch these big titans, like Viacom and Time Warner, do they have any sympathy for the argument you make about democracy and journalism and serving the public interest?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, with regard to the big — I don’t see bad people. But I see people who are in a position where a lot of the policy choices they make lead— lead to bad policy.
All I’m saying is that in this environment we live in, they are less and less captains of their own fate and more and more captive to the unforgiving expectations of Wall Street and Madison Avenue.
Copps’ comment takes us full circle back to that list of donors, which mixes Wall Street, big media and big law firms. With people like these backing her, it is no wonder Hillary Clinton takes few controversial positions and seems to be triangulating her answers to every question with the same zeal as her husband.
Wall Street or Main Street?
Given her donors and the Clinton Cash Machine, the big question all Americans need to ask is will Hillary Clinton do a better job of representing Wall Street than Main Street?
To a small town Iowan, Hillary Clinton’s list represents some of their deepest fears of what this country is becoming, a place controlled by shadowy figures who inhabit tall buildings where they manipulate the world from penthouse-sized offices that look down on us from so high we become mere specks. This motif pervades the movies and television today, for the headquarters of the villain has a spooky parallel with Hitler’s infamous Eagle’s Lair. Both the opulence and the height of these quarters symbolize their Olympian control over the rest of us, as they manipulate the world the way Greek gods play with mortals as if they were chess pieces in Ray Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans.
In thrillers, spy dramas and cop shoot ‘em ups, at some point the hero must figure out a way to get up to that towering penthouse headquarters, the difficulty of his or her task reflecting America’s new mythology that such people are virtually untouchable and that the task of trying to take on their power requires superhuman powers. Spiderman, a superhero who was buried long ago in the trash bins and landfills where out-of-date comic books have their final resting place, has suddenly achieved a miraculous rebirth all because of the strength of this new myth of the Eagle’s Lair.
To look at Hillary Clinton’s donor list is to experience this vision of what America has become. To Americans of previous generations the word corporate America or corporate power evoked businesses that actually made something, like General Motors or General Electric, but that is a nineteenth or twentieth century image as obsolete as a Daguerreotype.
Hillary Clinton’s donors represent the new pullers of strings in this country–banks and investment companies that make it possible for the old-fashioned corporations to stay in business and most of all, the lawyers who help them skirt regulations, arm-twist Congress and the White House and when the shit hits the fan, keep them all out of jail.
The sheer size of these new power brokers would dwarf many an Iowa town, thousands of employees in offices located all over the world making murky deals and negotiating secret agreements that weave spidery strands of international intrigue worthy of a John le Carre thriller.
This truly is another America which few of us inhabit and even fewer of us understand. The employees of DLA Piper or Goldman Sachs have no more clues to how most Americans live than we have of their lives. For us they become a new aristocracy in their seventy-story castles, grist for fantasy and conspiracy. For them we exist as numbers and statistics that conveniently corral us like sheep waiting to be sheared then painted with some colored dye that sums us up in a paragraph: kids and cul-de-sacs, fast track families, new homesteaders.
The employees of the new power brokers do not do their own grocery shopping or laundry, have never tried to unclog a toilet that has dumped its foul soup all over the bathroom floor, looked into a half-empty refrigerator and wondered if any of it could make a dinner, had to decide which parent would miss a day of work to stay with a sick child, or juggled credit cards like a circus performer trying to keep a dozen plates spinning in the air.
The idealistic and the naive would say that Hillary Clinton owes these people nothing so they will have little impact on her decisions. We Americans may know little of the world of the Eagle’s Lair, but we know enough to know these people do not give away $300,000, nor are they people who can sit back and do nothing when a policy or piece of legislation impacts them or one of their clients.
If Stevie Cohen has financed Chris Dodd merely to throw a wrench into the Democratic Party, these people are playing for higher stakes. They are attempting to buy America and so far they seem to be succeeding.
God help us all.
Copyright: Ralph Brauer
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