It Takes a Ruling-Class Village to Staff the White House

Clinton’s presidential transition team is what the liberal-left political commentator and activist Norman Solomon calls “a corporate presidency foretold.” Besides Podesta, the team’s chair is Salazar, a former U.S. senator who strongly supports the highly unpopular TPP and angered environmentalists and cheered Big Carbon by backing offshore drilling and fracking during his years as Obama’s secretary of the Interior. He’s a partner at WilmerHale, one of the world’s most politically powerful law firms, representing multinational capital at home and abroad—making him another example of the revolving-door phenomenon. Also on Clinton’s transition leadership team is Donilon, a member of the Bilderberg Group’s steering committee. After serving as Obama’s national security adviser from late 2010 through the spring of 2013, he became a distinguished fellow at the CFR and resumed his prior longstanding position as a partner in the leading multinational corporate law firm O’Melveny & Myers. Other senior Clinton transition officials are longstanding, Democratic Leadership Council-style operatives Neera Tanden (a Yale Law graduate and president of the CAP), Maggie Williams (partner in a leading Washington, D.C., management consulting firm and former director of a top mortgage lending firm that collapsed in late 2007) and Harvard Law graduate Jennifer Granholm (whose pro-Big Business record as a two-term Michigan governor helped score her lucrative positions on the boards of Universal Forest Products Inc. and Dow Chemical). According to William K. Black, who has held top federal regulatory positions, what we are seeing in this group “is complete domination by what used to be the Democratic Leadership Council. … Very, very right-wing foreign policy. What they call a muscular foreign policy … a euphemism for invading places. Very, very tough on crime … [and pro-] mass incarceration. And the economic side, all in favour of austerity. All in favour of privatization. Tried to do a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security. And of course, were all in favour of things like NAFTA.” It’s no small matter. “The transition team,” Black notes, “is the one that is both deciding what are we actually going to make our policy priorities in the magic—again a cliché—first 100 days? But more than that, who will the top people be?” There’s something of a false dichotomy in Black’s knowledgeable reflections. A longstanding and accurate Washington maxim reminds us that personnel is policy. And there’s a translation for what Black calls “our policy priorities.” The real meaning is their policy priorities, with “they” referring to the 0.1 percent. “It’s Just Politics” What about Clinton’s widely advertised, Bernie Sanders-influenced “shift to the left” during the recent primary campaign? A report published last year in the widely read insider Washington journal Politico was titled “Hillary’s Wall Street Backers: ‘We Get It.’ ” As Politico explained, “Populist rhetoric, many say, is good politics—but doesn’t portend an assault on the rich. … It’s ‘just politics,’ said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street.” A Democrat at a top Wall Street firm told Politico that Clinton’s outwardly populist rhetoric was “a Rorschach test for how politically sophisticated [rich] people are. … If someone is upset by this it’s because they have no idea how populist the mood of the country still is.” Hillary’s Wall Street bankrollers have always known populace-pleasing, egalitarian-sounding rhetoric is just part of the game. It goes with the populism-manipulating territory that lies at the longstanding, dark heart of American “capitalist democracy.” They reasonably expect a President Hillary Clinton to drop her current, nominal opposition to the TPP as soon as possible. The People Who Own the Country … It’s common to see all of this as discontinuous with, and even as a betrayal of, the U.S. founders. It’s a comforting but historically gullible sentiment. While Clinton is correct that the nation’s founding elites rejected monarchy, she failed to note that they led a national independence movement and wrote a Constitution to create a militantly undemocratic property-owners’ (including slave owners’) republic founded on the belief that—in the words of leading constitutional framer John Jay—“the people who own the country ought to govern it.” The New England clergyman Jeremy Belknap captured the fundamental idea behind the founders’ curious notion of what they liked to call popular government. “Let it stand as a principle,” Belknap wrote to an associate, “that government originates from the people, but let the people be taught … that they are unable to govern themselves.” There is a difference, however, one that actually reflects better on the aristo-republican founders than on today’s corporate and financial ruling class. Prior to the onset of the neoliberal era in the 1970s, Noam Chomsky has noted, the United States “had been, with ups and downs … a developing society, not always in pretty ways [quite an understatement—see this at once brilliant and horrifying history of U.S. cotton slavery], but with general progress toward industrialization, prosperity and expansion of rights.” Since the triumph of finance capital, however, it’s been about “de-development … a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise—producing things people need or could use—to financial manipulation.” It’s also been about obliterating decent American jobs through technical displacement and capital and jobs export and the ruination of livable ecology—the cancellation of a decent future and the economy and society “where all our children can dream, and those dreams are within reach.” The only reason that a dangerous, white-nationalist, uber-narcissist and Breitbart-wielding hatemonger like Donald Trump—with his bombastic promise to “make America great again” partly by restoring lost U.S. industrial supremacy—is even still in shouting distance of Clinton is that millions of working- and middle-class Americans know in their bones that she is part of that great dark cancellation, foreclosure and enclosure. 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