WASHINGTON (VR) – Recent reports have grumbled over the fact that Hillary Clinton and her family has been able to raise over $2 billion in the last 20 years from companies, speeches, and powerful networks of influence on Wall Street.
Republican lobbyist Rick Hohlt told the Wall Street Journal that ‘”Clinton Inc. is going to be the most formidable fundraising operation for the Democrats in the history of the country. Period. Exclamation point.”’
However, according to Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power, the type of financial and political capital Clinton holds through connections on Wall Street is endemic throughout the whole American system and its patronage to Wall Street, Democrat and Republican.
“It’s important to recognize that there are relationships at work that have been at work for a very long time between the most powerful and financial political elites,” said Prins while speaking with VR. She explained that the relationships between America’s political elite, particularly presidents, and Wall Street titans, such as Robert Rubin (Secretary of Treasury under Bill Clinton) and Jamie Dimon (current president and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase) drive everything from economic and political policies to military ventures abroad. Prins’ book is a history of the genealogy of power and relationships between the past 19 presidents and key bankers.
The Clintons, Prins explained, “really rose through connections emanating from Wall Street. When Bill Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas he also began to establish relationships with some of the key players in the banking sector, particularly with Bank of America… as well as other individuals from Chase, at the time, and also received financial assistance as he was moving forward in his candidacy from Goldman Sachs members and other powerful financial players.”
The power of the patron-client connection became obvious once in office as president.
During his second year, he passed the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, which deregulated large institutions and allowed them to go across state lines to acquire localized state banks. This made the banks that had supported him during his campaign and during his time as governor become even bigger and more concentrated, explained Prins.
There was “lots of euphoria about how this was the first major pillar of Clinton’s deregulation of Wall Street,” she said. With new incentive and power, major banking institutions connected to the Clinton administration were then able to push, ultimately, for the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 through the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999. The justification for doing this was to enhance “American competitiveness,” explained Prins.
And after the repeal of Glass–Steagall, “the largest banks became more concentrated and more powerful,” Prins said, leading toward “the economic crisis of 2008 and how the big six banks today are bigger and more concentrated and more powerful in terms of capital and connections than they ever have been before.”
HILLARY
“Hillary, by virtue of the fact that she’s been a partner to Bill Clinton is very comfortable and conversant with the senior members of Wall Street,” said Prins. Her connections have become more formidable since her tenure as Secretary of State.
She has given talks to Goldman Sachs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Here’s one particular firm that really helped Bill Clinton become Bill Clinton and again those relationships, those synergies are very strong behind the scenes,” she said.
At one of her speeches to Goldman Sachs she said that she felt that “Wall Street had been unduly characterized as the culprit for the most recent financial crisis whereas she made the point that there’s a lot of different parties that should be held responsible.”
Goldman Sach has “donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation”, according to Mother Jones.
WHAT CAN PEOPLE DO?
The way forward for progressives and others that want change to the patron-client relationship between government and Wall Street is to “learn, and educate, and talk to people so that the numbers that push for reform” in terms of legislation, such as campaign finance reform, that benefits people rather than large banking institutions “are far larger than they are today,” advocates Prins.
The reality, she said, is that “there are not enough people doing this or who care about this.”
