No doubt, the prospect of a Clinton-Bush rematch is distasteful. But the real problem goes deeper than any family name.
Published by New Internationalist.
On Wednesday, March 19, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. “I am the only one who can make America truly great again,” he said.
Now, I think anyone would have trouble delivering that line without generating some guffaws. But coming from a maniac who still believes that Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born invader, and who also peddles a personalized fragrance called “Success,” the statement brimmed with comic hubris.
And yet, I have to grant that Trump has made at least one sage observation amid his campaign-trail lunacy: “The last thing we need right now,” he argued recently, “is another Bush.”
That is certainly true. To it I would add, “or another Clinton.”
Currently, Jeb Bush is a favorite to win the Republican nomination. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has virtually locked up the contest among Democrats. Given this state of affairs, it has become common to hear the complaint that there is something patently un-American about having family dynasties rule over the nation.
No doubt, the prospect of a Clinton-Bush rematch is distasteful. But the real problem goes deeper than any family name.
I have long argued that there are important differences between the hard-power-oriented “imperial globalization” of the George W. Bush years and Bill Clinton’s softer, more seductive “corporate globalization.” Put crudely, one represents the regime of Halliburton and ExxonMobile, while the other reflects the preferred world order of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Wall Street.
One is rule by oil. The other is rule by finance.
The differences matter: Oil barons, for example, might push for wars that Wall Street’s tycoons would rather avoid.
But that doesn’t mean that either is a good option—or that we shouldn’t demand something better.
Whatever the points of divergence between the Clintons and the Bushes, there is plenty of distressing overlap.
George W. Bush may have led the charge to war in Iraq, but Hillary Clinton, as a U.S. Senator, voted for it. In late March the CIA declassified the National Intelligence Estimate that Clinton and other hawkish Democrats used to justify their votes. Their implicit argument back then was: If only you could see the secret intelligence that we do, you too would support an invasion.
As it turns out, that contention was no less disingenuous than the rest of the Iraq War lies.
The newly public intelligence document does little to back up alarmist claims about Saddam’s weaponry or his putative ties to al Qaeda. University of San Francisco professor and foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes remarked bluntly, “I can now say definitely that anybody who actually found this document to be a sufficient casus belli… is a complete idiot and is unqualified to be president.”
On the finance front, Politico published a story in March entitled “The Goldman Sachs Primary.” It reported on how Jeb Bush “hopes to go head to head for Goldman money and support with Hillary Clinton, who also has strong ties to the bank and is expected to raise large sums from its executives[.]”
Charles Geisst, a historian of Wall Street at Manhattan College, explained, “Goldman likes to play both sides of the fence and that’s especially true of a race like this where either of these two candidates… could ultimately be helpful to them.”
Helpful indeed. Their wooing of the investment houses means that both candidates can be relied upon to tamp down any populist calls from within their parties for controls on big banks that might avert another economic meltdown.
Apologists for Clinton and Bush can point out that most other presidential contenders are no less beholden to the corporate paymasters. Of course, that’s not much of a defense.
It is true that the notion of dynasty contradicts the ideals of American democracy.
Yet another good reason to end the dynasty of finance—and to topple the dynasty of oil.
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Photo Credit: United States Department of State, Wikimedia Commons; “Governor of Florida Jeb Bush.”
