"Bankers 'R Us" The Democratic Party Then and Now (from The American Prospect)

Democrats: Bankers 'R Us

Posted 08/11/2011

...... the Democrats’ growing subservience to finance.

The modern Democratic Party (dating from FDR) always went to Wall Street for key Cabinet positions and such, which is how the likes of Dean Acheson, John McCloy, C. Douglas Dillon, Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Tim Geithner ended up in positions of power. The Wall Streeters who served Democratic presidents, though, were either Democrats themselves or Rockefeller Republicans, whose ideological divergences from mainstream Democrats weren’t necessarily all that great.

But the post-Reagan movement of Wall Streeters into Democratic ranks is nonetheless a distinct phenomenon......

snip

Secondly, however, the financial sector that Acheson, Dillon and McCloy once personified may have been the pillar of the American establishment, but it was still an adjunct to an economy whose driving force was manufacturing.
By the time we get to Rubin and Geithner, finance has completely eclipsed manufacturing, and its priorities—free trade, tax reductions on the rich, financial deregulation, the repeal of Glass-Steagall—have almost completely eclipsed those of other economic sectors, not to mention the broad interests of the American people.
Wall Street in the age of Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama—all of whom received huge campaign funding from finance—is more powerful than it was in the age of Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, and its interests more diametrically opposed to those of the working-class base on which Democratic candidates rely.

Among the world’s political parties, the Democrats have always been most internally divided. Once, it was the party of northern workers and Southern segregationists. Today, with Republican idiocy and intransigence driving Wall Street from the GOP’s ranks, the Democrats are increasingly becoming the party of ascendant capital and diminished labor, of both the financial community and financial reform. Such a party mutes its clarion calls, if it issues them at all

snip

http://blog.prospect.org/harold_meyerson/2011/08/democrats-bankers-r-us.html

n/t

There are some potential wedge issues -- such as environmental regulations -- but I believe those are manageable within a big tent based on local control, grassroots activism, and encouragement of innovation and enterpreneurship.

The food movement and radical farmers would probably fit in there as well.

Like a trifecta: Hedge your bets, buy all the horses, or fix the game. My 2-cents on:

...the repeal of Glass-Steagall...

Thank you for the heads-up on an excellent article, amborin.

in elected Democrats' priorities and non-commitment to the people.

Thank you, amborin.

:kick: