Rubin, R
AM PROSP 7 26
C STUDENTS WHO CHEAT AT TENNIS; CITIGROUP ---- ACT
try to explore via my own life odyssey is how could we
5:47
have had such a good deal for most working people and then how did we lose
5:53
it? What what did the Democratic Party do wrong? Beginning with um Carter and
6:00
Clinton and then Obama and the influence of the corporate Democrats, the Wall Street Democrats, Robert Rubin, and
6:07
really screwing it up and getting in bed with with Wall Street
6:12
um to the point where [clears throat] working families no longer saw the Democratic Party as their champion. And
6:19
that began the road to Trump. Uh what happened? How do we get that back? And
6:25
that's a lot of what I talk about and I'll I'll get to Senator Proxmire and the banking committee in a moment if you like....
44
know we had a 30-year uh Democratic majority in the house. Um we in the 50s
7:52
and 60s we had a 90% top tax uh rate for people making over approximately
7:58
$470,000 at that time maybe close to $3 million today. what how did it how did
8:04
we lose sight as a country of what was working because that was I mean
8:10
obviously we needed to emancipate women we needed to emancipate black people we needed to um uh uh move in uh you know
8:17
in terms of the social emancipation but how did we get how did we lose in that process
8:24
uh providing materially for our our our people so that's a lot of what the book talks
8:29
about and I I I was involved in this both as protagonist and as a journalist. So it's a tragedy in three acts, right?
8:36
So act one is Johnson and the war. So Johnson has a majority almost as big as
8:42
FDRs. And if you go back to 1964, Johnson wins in a landslide. uh he has
8:49
almost 2 to1 majorities in Congress and he is poised to launch the unfinished
8:55
business of the New Deal and the attempt
9:00
to extend American democracy to black people would have been a heavy lift in
9:06
any case. But he sets out on that road very heroically and then of course he
9:11
blows it all on Vietnam. And the tragedy of Vietnam is not just that it
9:18
distracted attention from the unfinished business of the New Deal, uh, but that it split the Democratic coalition both
9:26
politically and culturally, the hippies and the hard hats and, uh, lets Nixon
9:31
become president. And the Democratic coalition in a sense never really recovers from that catastrophe. So
9:38
that's that's act one of the tragedy. Then a miracle of miracles, Nixon blows
9:46
it all on Watergate. And um one of the things I did in my
9:51
journalistic life, I was part of the Watergate team at the Washington Post. I had a front row seat for that. And um
9:59
and miracle of miracles, not only does uh Nixon
10:05
get impeached and is forced to leave office, but uh 1976 we elect a
10:11
Democratic president. And Jimmy Carter, thanks to the Watergate Congress, has a
10:17
very big working majority. Oh boy, here we get a doover. When when does history ever give you a doover? But Carter turns
10:23
out to be the most conservative Democrat since Grover Cleveland. He's sort of a process liberal despite having a big
10:30
majority in Congress. Name any kind of landmark legislation you can credit to Jimmy Carter. Zip zero. Um labor law
10:39
reform. Nope. Not interested. U any of the any of the important pieces of
10:45
unfinished business that he might have enacted. That's not who he is. So you have another failed presidency and worse
10:54
uh Carter begins to turn to neoliberalism. He decides, hey, we need deregulation. We need privatization. Uh
11:01
we need supply side economics. The the first supply side bills, tax cuts for
11:07
the rich, are not passed under Reagan. They're passed under Jimmy Carter. So,
11:12
and then that begins a succession of neoliberal presidents of whom the worst
11:19
was was um Bill Clinton. And you know, Clinton, Clinton hires Bob Rubin and
11:26
Larry Summers. He hires Wall Street to run the economy by and for Wall Street.
11:33
He buys into the ideology of budget balance. And um even worse when after a
11:40
few years it all blows up in 2008 and Barack Obama who really hadn't quite
....
:47
expected to be the nominee realizes, "Oh my god, I'm going to be the nominee." And I wrote a book about this, the only
11:54
book I I ever wrote that ended up on the bestseller list called Obama's Challenge. And it's June of 2008. He's
12:02
got two people working for him, two and a half people. his entire economic team,
12:08
one of whom is a really good guy named Dan Terillo, a progressive. And um Obama
12:15
gives a speech at Cooper Union that March or April talking about all the things that are wrong with Wall Street
12:21
that need to be cleaned up. The speech is drafted by Terillo. And then in June
12:26
when he realizes uh that he's going to be the nominee, all the financial heavy
12:31
hitters in the party go to Obama and they say, "Hey, look, you got to bring in the A team." Well, who's the A team?
12:37
Well, the A team is Bob Rubin's proteges and Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel and
all of the people who bought the financial deregulation brought the financial deregulation that caused the
12:49
collapse of 2008. He brings them in to fix it. Um Summer's advice is uh we
12:56
don't need a big stimulus to deficit reduction. So the recession
13:03
drags on and on and on and that leads to directly uh to Trump. So you have three
13:10
Democrats who gratuitously embrace neoliberalism because that's where the big money is. I
13:16
mean Rubin starts out as a fundraiser. He ends up becoming an adviser. He ends up being an ideologue. And of course he
13:22
comes from Wall Street. He goes back to Wall Street. When they when they repeal the GlassSteagall Act so that you can
13:28
have an investment bank um merge with uh a commercial bank known in some circles
13:34
as the Cityroup Enabling Act. He becomes a top executive of Cityroup. So the whole thing is corrupt. It's a wasted
13:41
opportunity. Obama is a a magnificent human being. He's a person without a
13:48
whiff of scandal attached to him. He's eloquent, but he bungles like Johnson
...
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.
When it comes to understanding influence in Washington, following the people is almost as important as following the money. (Sometimes they're the same thing.)
==
==
Robert Rubin, the co-chairman of the influential, non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations, says the price of inaction could be the U.S. economy itself.
Writing in the Washington Post, Rubin, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary, argues: “When it comes to the economy, much of the debate about climate change—and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling it—is framed as a trade-off between environmental protection and economic prosperity,
“But from an economic perspective, that’s precisely the wrong way to look at it. The real question should be: ‘What is the cost of inaction?’”
Widespread Disruption
He backed the Risky Business Project, a research initiative chaired by a bi-partisan panel and supported by him and several other former Treasury Secretaries. It reported in June that the American economy could face significant and widespread disruption from climate change unless U.S. businesses and policymakers take immediate action. 8/14
http://ecowatch.com/2014/08/03/ignoring-climate-risks-sink-u-s-economy/
Launched in October, 2013, the Risky Business Project focuses on quantifying and publicizing the economic risks from the impacts of a changing climate.
Risky Business Project co-chairs Michael R. Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Tom Steyer tasked the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm that specializes in analyzing disruptive global trends, with an independent assessment of the economic risks posed by a changing climate in the U.S. Rhodium convened a research team co-led by climate scientist Dr. Robert Kopp of Rutgers University and economist Dr. Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley. Rhodium also partnered with Risk Management Solutions (RMS), the world’s largest catastrophe-modeling company for insurance, reinsurance, and investment-management companies around the world. The team’s complete assessment, along with technical appendices, is available at Rhodium’s website, climateprospectus.rhg.com.
The Risky Business Project is a joint partnership of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Paulson Institute, and TomKat Charitable Trust. Additional support for the project has been provided by theSkoll Global Threats Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the McKnight Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation. Staff support for the Risky Business Project is provided byNext Generation, an independent 501c3 organization.
this town: 126mill$ 1999-09
==
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Robert_E._Rubin
Robert E. Rubin served as a high level executive at Goldman Sachs from 1966 to 1992. He served as Secretary of the Treasury under William Jefferson Clinton. Following his term as treasury Secretary Rubin joined Citigroup in 1999 as an adviser to the bank’s senior executives and from November to December 2007 he served temporarily as Chairman.[1]
Rubin pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the depression era law that separated commercial banks from investment banks so that bankers could not with depositor savings. After Citibankand Travelers Group merged making one of the largest banking insurance conglomerates in the world, Rubin went to work for Citi, making over $17,000,000 in compensation from Citigroup and a further $33,000,000 in stock options as of 2008. Rubin also supported deregulation and internationalization of the derivatives market, and was a key player in negotiating the Uruguay Round which resulted in the creation of the WTO and binding deregulatory rules in at the WTO in the FS sector.[citation ^needed]
- Member, Africa Progress Panel ^[2]^
Contents
Role in the financial crisis
 | The Real Economy Project needs your help filling this section out. Here's how. |
Record and controversies
Felix Salmon, writing in Blaming Rubin at his Reuters blog[3], outlined the following criticisms of Rubin's record:
- He epitomized the way in which traders ousted investment bankers and turned investment banks into systemically-dangerous institutions by making them much larger than they had ever been in the past.
- For all his vocal bellyaching about tail risk, he ultimately made his money as an arbitrageur, making leveraged bets that something with a 95% chance of happening was, indeed, going to happen. That’s a strategy which works until it doesn’t — but by the time it failed, Rubin had moved on to greater things.
- He was one of those senior men at investment banks who encouraged risk-taking without understanding the risks which were being taken.
- He was perfectly happy to see Larry Summers cheer on the single most disastrous deregulation of derivatives ever, the CFMA.
- He allowed the illegal creation of Citigroup with a nod and a wink, knowing that Gramm-Leach-Bliley was just around the corner and would make Citigroup legal in retrospect.
- He then collected his just rewards in the form of $126 million in pay from Citi, for a job which even Weisberg admits involved no managerial responsibility.
- He turned the job of Treasury secretary into a job where the first priority was to make Wall Street happy, asking for nothing but cheap debt in return.
- He institutionalized and epitomized the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington and back again.
- He set himself up as a wise expert on risk, even as he had no idea what risks his own company was running.
- He took on a job with significant power, but ducked any responsibility which might normally go with such power.
- He specifically refused to take any responsibility for his recommendations to Weill and Prince on the subject of risk-taking.
- He failed to push Prince to put in place any kind of succession plan, thereby creating a horrible vacuum at the top of Citigroup just as strong leadership was desperately needed.
- He’s slippery and unapologetic in hindsight.
Articles & resources
Related Sourcewatch articles
References
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Eric Dash and Louise Story, Rubin Leaving Citigroup; Smith Barney for Sale, NY Times, January 9, 2009.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ About, Africa Progress Panel, accessed January 13, 2011.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Felix SOlomon, Blaming Rubin, Reuters, May 1, 2010
External resources
- Sold Out - How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America , Consumer Education Foundation, March, 2009.
==