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

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

The people our leaders surround themselves with say more about their policies than their rhetoric. This post originally appeared at Truthdig. A recurrent theme in major speeches in July at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia was that Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton look to “we the people” instead of rich, powerful, and purportedly great individuals like Donald Trump to guide the United States. Repeating a prominent refrain in Obama’s 2008 campaign, top Democrats said the operative words for Americans aren’t “I” and “me” but rather “we” and “us,” as in “si se Puede” (“yes we can”) — a chant repeated during Tim Kaine’s and Obama’s speeches. Here’s how Clinton worked this leitmotif in Philadelphia:

White House

Don’t let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We’re not. Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t have what it takes. We do. And most of all, don’t believe anyone who says: “I alone can fix it.” Those were Donald Trump’s words [at the Republican convention] in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us. Really? “I alone can fix it?” Isn’t he forgetting? … He forgets every last one of us. Americans don’t say: “I alone can fix it.” We say: “We’ll fix it together.” Remember: Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power. Americans [will “Stand Together” to build] a country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. You can get a good job and send your kids to a good school, no matter your ZIP code. A country where all our children can dream, and those dreams are within reach.

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The Revolving Door

That was all very stirring, but who comprises the “we” that makes executive branch policy in the name of the common good when 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 US president’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 (2001-09) and Barack Obama (2009-17). 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 — before their appointment to the US executive branch. These 23 were linked through board memberships, administrative 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 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 a chief operating officer at Citigroup’s alternative investment division, focused on risky and complex proprietary trading schemes.

Dennis Bailey

https://extraupdate.com

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