Michael Froman -- the missing link.

This thread was inspired by Robert Reich's statement quoted on DU at the link below:

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich

<snip>
Why has President Obama been willing to spend so much political capital on the Trans Pacific Partnership? I have a guess. It begins with Michael Froman, the United States Trade Representative who’s been in charge of this debacle. Froman went to Harvard Law School with Obama, but that’s not the only important connection. In the Clinton Administration, Froman was chief of staff to Bob Rubin when Rubin was Secretary of the Treasury. Rubin, you may recall, had convinced Clinton to pass NAFTA, kill the Glass-Steagall Act, and not regulate financial derivatives. Immediately after the Clinton Administration, Froman accompanied Rubin to Citigroup, where Rubin ran the bank’s executive committee while Froman became President and Chief Executive Officer of CitiInsurance and head of Emerging Markets Strategy. Froman remained at Citigroup until Obama tapped him to be U.S. Trade Representative. (Froman did well at the bank, receiving more than $7.4 million from January 2008 to 2009 alone.) Not incidentally, Froman was the person who first introduced Obama to Rubin.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026834360

Thanks and credit to Kentuck who began the thread I link to on DU.

Friendship, networking and being "inside." Obama, Bill, Hillary, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Rahm Emmanuel, etc. That's the clique of the Obama administration and the Clintons. The various Republican cliques have their own insiders, their own loyalties --Bush, Cheney, Greenspan, Cruz, Rubio, etc.

The clique, working with and pleasing their clique, the insiders. That is all that ilk of politicians care about really.

They would not admit it, cannot even admit it to themselves. But that is the way these people work. That is how they get what THEY want, what the clique wants.

We, the rest of us, who call ourselves Democrats, mostly not so rich and not so powerful, are thrown the crumbs, packaged nicely, of course, but crumbs nevertheless, often just empty promises forgotten or sidelined once our function as voters, i.e. official endorsers of the will of the clique, has been filled.

The insiders like Hillary and Bill and Obama or on the Republican side, the Bushes and Walkers, Rubios and Cruzes, would never, could never admit that, but it is the truth.

We saw it clearly in the Bush administration because it was a Republican clique rather than a Democratic clique, and our side, our views, our ideals were outside. Our leaders were the outsiders.

The Republican cliques use different language from the Democratic ones. But as we see with the TPP votes, the ultimate purpose these cliques serve is one and the same: feeding the corporate wolves, the wealthiest and the greediest.

If we elect Hillary, she will just naturally be good to her friends. She will be loyal to the people who put her where she is, the clique in which she is an insider. It's human nature. It's tribal. It's deep within us. It is the desire to belong. To feel safe, embraced within a group that will protect us provided we pay our dues.

It isn't a Hillary fault. It isn't anybody's fault. It takes an unusual personality, a Theodore Roosevelt, an Abraham Lincoln, a George Washington or a Bernie Sanders, to control the inner urge to belong and do what is right in spite of social pressure from the insiders.

(Even those exceptionally strong individuals made mistakes, but they were not deaf to all but their inside clique. They stood for ideals, and our country made moral progress under their presidencies and influence.)

Elizabeth Warren explained how the pressure of the insiders is applied in her book, A Fighting Chance:

"It was a long dinner . . . .

Late in the evening, Larry (Summers) leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. By now, I'd lost count of Larry's Diet cokes, and our table was strewn with bits of food and spilled sauces. Larry's tone was in the friendly-advice category. He teed it up this way. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of aces and a chance to push their ideas. People -- powerful people -- listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule. They don't criticize other insiders.

I had been warned."

Warren, Elizabeth, A Fighting Chance, (Metropolitan Books, 2014) p. 106.

In my view, this is what is so dangerous about Hillary's potential election (or Jeb's or any of the Republicans). Hillary and the rest of them are "insiders." And they have to stay inside to get re-elected. They don't know how to get compromises or work done unless they work within and with their clique.

That's called friendship. Some Germans call it Freunderlwirtschaft. It's a system, a socio-economic matrix to get advantages by doing favors for your friends, your extended political"family" in which what counts most is keeping the money in the family. Another word for it is corruption. Keeping the money within the family, the clique, the insider group is corrupt because the "family" is taking money and advantages that do not belong to it. It's kind of the modern-day Boss Tweed situation.

Those, like the Clintons and Rubin and Obama, etc. (most politicians) who get things done by working within these cliques don't know how and don't want to learn how to work with movement or grass-roots politics -- with the rest of us -- with the People. They make a show of working with us in the grass-roots, but that is not, once they are in office, how they get things done.

Hillary's speech yesterday was interesting to me because her view on the president's job was clearly what I am describing. Volunteer for my campaign. Elect me. And then I will work with Congress, etc.

Contrast that with Bernie Sanders' approach: he says he can only win and govern if we out here, we nonentity, little people, we who are essentially outsiders to the Clinton and Republican insider groups, we form a movement and press Congress and all of the insiders to govern as we need and want.

That is the essential issue in this 2016 Democratic Primary. Which approach to government do we want?

Bernie is a Democrat in terms of his values and his proposals as well as his voting history. But he is an outsider in terms of the insider cliques of D.C. He is appealing to us as fellow outsiders to gather ourselves together, organize and express our political will.

The question you will answer when you fill out your ballot and put it in the envelope and vote in the 2016 primary is: which vision of government do you want for your life, your children and your grandchildren? Government by clique, or government by the People. Are you willing to do the work, the organizing, the study, the letter or e-mail writing, the discussion, etc.required of those who govern, or do you want to let the cliques with their hordes of paid consultants, paid lobbyists and professional influence-peddlers do all that for you?

This is THE CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE between the visions on governance and democracy between the two candidates.

I think that in this age of the internet, we are ready for a step forward toward a more participatory democracy.

And Bernie, with his experience in the Vermont town hall meetings and discussions that involve citizen participation, is the person, with technical assistance, to put us on the road to a true democracy. (Internet developers, especially you in Silicon Valley, this is your chance. Put your money where your dreams are.)

To me that is even more important than the precise program proposals that Bernie is making (although I like those too).

Here is the decision that confronts us in the 2016 primary.

Do we want to continue to have a government of insiders which is easily dominated by the wealthy, socially adept, clever and unscrupulous? If so, Hillary is our candidate.

Or do we want a democracy in which our voices can at least be heard as part of groups that discuss and ultimately have input on the decisions, a democracy in which WE HAVE ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION WE NEED TO GOVERN OURSELVES AND INSURE OUR OWN DEFENSE? If so, Bernie is our candidate.

Because at this time, as we see with Obama and the TPP, we, our views, our opinions, our needs, our interests, are not getting much attention. It's government by the insiders rather than government by the people.

Hillary is an insider. She virtually admitted it yesterday. That's why the insiders' club gives to her and to Bill the big bucks.

Bernie is the outsider. He will rely on you and me to pressure Congress and D.C. insiders to govern according to the will of the people. It won't always be what I want. It will be what most Americans want. But it definitely won't be the kind of government we have been getting with the Clintons, the Bushes and their cliques of insiders.

When people refer to Hillary as the "inevitable" Democratic candidate, what they really mean is that s h e h a s b e e n c h o s e n b y t h e i n s i d e r s and, therefore, if the past can predict the future, will be elected.

That is what DUers are saying when they admit that they agree with Bernie on the issues and they really like him, but they are going to vote for Hillary because she is the only one who is "electable" (the insider term for it -- they choose an "electable" candidate, think Reagan in 1980 -- knowing they and their machine will govern once the election is over) in 2016. These DUers are giving in to the insiders. They are supporting the status quo of this gentle corruption, this corruption that we only notice when we face a real big, nasty insider grab of our rights, of our livelihoods, of our futures, a grab like the TPP.

But, hey, just this once, we have a candidate who is not an insider and doesn't really want to be. We have a candidate who wants to hear from us.

Whether your top issue is economics or race or gender identification or being a woman in what is still a man's world, or animals, or children, or free enterprise, or not-so-free-enterprise, your views, your favorite cause, the change you want to see happen, it has a chance with Bernie because Bernie stands for opening up our government to pressure from the people.

To borrow from Abraham Lincoln, Bernie wants to return the government to us, the People.

This is your chance and my chance.

Please join me in supporting Bernie Sanders for 2016.