"Perfect! Perfect!" exclaimed a woman looking around at the Four Freedoms Park on New York City's Roosevelt Island as a large crowd waited for Hillary Clinton to announce her presidential candidacy last weekend.
And so it was. Secretary Clinton had chosen an ideal setting to link her destiny to the founding father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the political giant whose famous proclamation in 1941 of the Four Freedoms - freedom of speech and worship, freedom from fear and want -- defined the essence of American ideals after a devastating economic disaster and as we prepared to enter a great world war.
"Perfect! Perfect!" Except for one thing -- something the exultant spectator packed in the crowd at ground level might not have been able to see. As the camera pushed in toward the horizon behind Clinton, there it was, beyond the island and across the water: the skyline of Wall Street, the embodiment of financial might and its moguls and barons - "the malefactors of great wealth," as his cousin Teddy called them - that FDR took on in his fight to save democracy from unbridled greed, and capitalism from itself.
As Clinton spoke -- "Prosperity can't be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers" and "Democracy can't be just for billionaires and corporations" -- you could imagine the juxtaposition to have been deliberate, staged by her managers to superimpose her rhetorical defiance of plutocracy against its glass and steel castles off in the distance. No doubt she had thrown around herself this cloak of populism because it is the current fashion - a superb and timely one - among many Democrats, especially progressives battling the oxymoronic Wall Street Democrats who in the past thirty years hijacked FDR's party and severed it from its working class roots.
So it was refreshing to see her sally forth to do battle with the hyenas of Wall Street (as one noted hedge fund manager candidly described his ilk) proclaiming that, "The financial industry and many multinational corporations have created huge wealth for a few by focusing too much on short-term profit and too little on long-term value, too much on complex trading schemes and stock buybacks, too little on investments in new businesses, jobs, and fair compensation."
Her loyalists were presenting her to us as the reincarnation of the young woman she was in the seventies and eighties, the student who wrote her senior thesis on the organizer Saul Alinsky, interned at a fearless and controversial civil rights law firm, worked as an attorney for the Children's Defense Fund, investigated the treatment of migrant workers and chaired the board of the Legal Services Corporation.
Yet you could also wonder if they had been unaware of another possible reading of the metaphor presented by the sight of Roosevelt Island against the skyline of Wall Street -- something her handlers didn't intend: a mockery of the words she was speaking at that very minute.
She is, after all, a favorite of the giant banks, the CEOs and hedge funds she now was castigating. Between 2009 and 2014, Clinton's list of top twenty donors starts out with Citigroup and includes JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, whose chief Lloyd Blankfein has invested in Clinton's son-in-law's boutique hedge fund. These donors are, as the website Truthout's William Rivers Pitt notes, "the ones who gamed the system by buying politicians like her and then proceeded to burn the economy down to dust and ash while making a financial killing in the process."
They're also among the deep-pocket outfits that paid for speeches and appearances by Hillary or Bill Clinton to the tune of more of more than $125 million since they left the White House in 2001. It could hardly escape some in that crowd on Roosevelt Island, catching a glimpse of the towers of power and might across the river: Can we really expect someone so deeply tethered to the financial and business class - who moves so often and so easily among its swells - to fight hard to check their predatory appetites, dismantle their control of Congress, and stand up for the working people who are their prey?
Consider the two Canadian banks with financial ties to the Keystone XL pipeline that fully or partially paid for eight speeches by Hillary Clinton. Or her $3.2 million in lecture fees from the tech sector. Or the more then $2.5 million in paid speeches for companies and groups lobbying for fast-track trade. According to TIME magazine and the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2014, "Almost half of the money from Hillary Clinton's speaking engagements came from corporations and advocacy groups that were lobbying Congress at the same time... In all, the corporations and trade groups that Clinton spoke to in 2014 spent $72.5 million lobbying Congress that same year."
Then look at David Sirota's
And so it was. Secretary Clinton had chosen an ideal setting to link her destiny to the founding father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the political giant whose famous proclamation in 1941 of the Four Freedoms - freedom of speech and worship, freedom from fear and want -- defined the essence of American ideals after a devastating economic disaster and as we prepared to enter a great world war.
"Perfect! Perfect!" Except for one thing -- something the exultant spectator packed in the crowd at ground level might not have been able to see. As the camera pushed in toward the horizon behind Clinton, there it was, beyond the island and across the water: the skyline of Wall Street, the embodiment of financial might and its moguls and barons - "the malefactors of great wealth," as his cousin Teddy called them - that FDR took on in his fight to save democracy from unbridled greed, and capitalism from itself.
As Clinton spoke -- "Prosperity can't be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers" and "Democracy can't be just for billionaires and corporations" -- you could imagine the juxtaposition to have been deliberate, staged by her managers to superimpose her rhetorical defiance of plutocracy against its glass and steel castles off in the distance. No doubt she had thrown around herself this cloak of populism because it is the current fashion - a superb and timely one - among many Democrats, especially progressives battling the oxymoronic Wall Street Democrats who in the past thirty years hijacked FDR's party and severed it from its working class roots.
So it was refreshing to see her sally forth to do battle with the hyenas of Wall Street (as one noted hedge fund manager candidly described his ilk) proclaiming that, "The financial industry and many multinational corporations have created huge wealth for a few by focusing too much on short-term profit and too little on long-term value, too much on complex trading schemes and stock buybacks, too little on investments in new businesses, jobs, and fair compensation."
Her loyalists were presenting her to us as the reincarnation of the young woman she was in the seventies and eighties, the student who wrote her senior thesis on the organizer Saul Alinsky, interned at a fearless and controversial civil rights law firm, worked as an attorney for the Children's Defense Fund, investigated the treatment of migrant workers and chaired the board of the Legal Services Corporation.
Yet you could also wonder if they had been unaware of another possible reading of the metaphor presented by the sight of Roosevelt Island against the skyline of Wall Street -- something her handlers didn't intend: a mockery of the words she was speaking at that very minute.
She is, after all, a favorite of the giant banks, the CEOs and hedge funds she now was castigating. Between 2009 and 2014, Clinton's list of top twenty donors starts out with Citigroup and includes JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, whose chief Lloyd Blankfein has invested in Clinton's son-in-law's boutique hedge fund. These donors are, as the website Truthout's William Rivers Pitt notes, "the ones who gamed the system by buying politicians like her and then proceeded to burn the economy down to dust and ash while making a financial killing in the process."
They're also among the deep-pocket outfits that paid for speeches and appearances by Hillary or Bill Clinton to the tune of more of more than $125 million since they left the White House in 2001. It could hardly escape some in that crowd on Roosevelt Island, catching a glimpse of the towers of power and might across the river: Can we really expect someone so deeply tethered to the financial and business class - who moves so often and so easily among its swells - to fight hard to check their predatory appetites, dismantle their control of Congress, and stand up for the working people who are their prey?
Consider the two Canadian banks with financial ties to the Keystone XL pipeline that fully or partially paid for eight speeches by Hillary Clinton. Or her $3.2 million in lecture fees from the tech sector. Or the more then $2.5 million in paid speeches for companies and groups lobbying for fast-track trade. According to TIME magazine and the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2014, "Almost half of the money from Hillary Clinton's speaking engagements came from corporations and advocacy groups that were lobbying Congress at the same time... In all, the corporations and trade groups that Clinton spoke to in 2014 spent $72.5 million lobbying Congress that same year."
Then look at David Sirota's