My meeting with Bill Clinton: Wall Street vs Main Street

Posted by Deanna Zandt at 8:49 AM on September 23, 2008.

If you had an hour to spend with Bill Clinton, what would you say?

That's the question I spent most of the weekend pondering, as I prepared to take part in a small meeting of bloggers in advance of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting here in New York that begins on Wednesday. Turns out that Bill is keen on bloggers, and I was thrilled to have made the cut to take part. Others in the room were Jack Aponte from Feministe, Kim Pearson from Professor Kim's News Notes, Josh Levy from Change.org, Nancy Scola from TechPresident, Dana Goldstein from The American Prospect, Emily Douglas from RH Reality Check, Josh Orton from MyDD, Matthew Cordell from the UN Foundation, Solana Larsen of Global Voices and about 4 or 5 other folks.

Going into a meeting with a President does carry an air of, how to put it, "I'm clearly in another world which I have never before seen." We assembled in the lobby of the hotel in Midtown, and were soon whisked up to the "holding room" while Clinton finished his meeting with the newly elected president of Paraguay. Just hearing, "The president will be with you right after he's finished with the president of Paraguay" reinforces the aforementioned air. Aides and Secret Service buzzing in the hallways, we waited about 15 minutes for our turn.

We were guided swiftly into the meeting room, which had chairs and couches arranged in a large circle, as if this was the Other World's version of a dorm hall group meeting. As we arranged ourselves, Bill came over and started greeting each one of us. When a former president of the US shakes your hand and looks you directly in the eye while you tell him your name, your transition through this portal is complete. Then it's all just shootin' the breeze from there on out.

After talking about how leaders are selected to attend CGI ("mostly self-selected") and the interesting developments of South and Latin American countries shifting to the left (introducing Cisco Systems and Evo Morales to develop distance learning programs in indigenous languages-- more on this section from Jack), the hot topic of the day took over: the American Economy.

I've admittedly been following the developments of the downfall of Wall Street more as an average, outraged citizen than a political activist or blogger. I soon received probably the most succinct and yet thorough breakdown of what's going on that I could have asked for.

To preface this, though, I have to say: I was honestly expecting a lot more spin and a lot less substance-- this is the most charismatic guy on the planet, they say, and in my more radical and feminist sensibilities, I was not going to be fooled. While the charisma is certainly a factor, I was, quite frankly, blown away by the sheer amounts of knowledge -- not facts, tidbits, soundbites, but actual full-bodied knowledge -- that came out of the man. I'm reminded of an Esquire article from 2000 that always stuck with me about Clinton. Worthy reading and, uh, good prep if you're ever going to meet him.

Onto the meat of the economic conversation: I was pleased as punch to hear what could have been a soundbite from my employer in Texas, Jim Hightower, come out of Clinton's mouth at the outset: "We're all talking about Wall Street, but will there be a Main Street component to this?" He went on to give us his thorough breakdown of how this all happened, which I'll attempt to capture:

• The system itself is flawed because it rewards brokers with by the number of transactions they complete with very little oversight. Risky deals galore.
• Back in 2001, Greenspan put a bunch of money into the economy at the outset of the tech bubble bursting. That in of itself was not problematic; the fact that there were not that many places for the money to go was the larger problem. A healthy economy needs a new source of jobs every 5-8 years; we did not get this under Bush.
• Thus the "investment tunnel" was too narrow. It wasn't just that the bankers were overly greedy-- for them, the only good options for investing were in housing. The economy became overly weighted in that direction, with no other investment options. Imagine if Kyoto were still in place, and we had green jobs over the last 8 years as options to invest in? That would have made everything much more stable, viable.

As for the reaction and what to do going forward, Clinton used one of my favorite lines about this whole thing: "They want to socialize the risks, and privatize the profits." He talked about Hillary Clinton out in Kentucky last week, talking to folks about the economy. "They don't want to bail out Wall Street, or at least they don't see it as urgently as Washington does," she said. "They've been in trouble for years, and no one's come to help them."

Now, his ideas mostly keep the current system going, which I don't agree with in my own politics, but I was intrigued by the way he thinks we ought to work within the system as it stands:

• Put a moratorium on foreclosures for 60-90 days. Revive the Homeowners' Loan Corporation from the Great Depression to help viable people with stable incomes and the desire to stay in their homes do so. This is not an exercise in bleeding-heart-ism: it will save the US taxpayers money. Each foreclosed home costs taxpayers between $225,000 - $250,000 (due to decreased property values, lowered tax bases, etc.); the HOLC actually made a profit for the government.
• Don't just give the bailout money away at a high interest rate. Insist on sharing the future profits with the taxpayers to give incentive for these institutions to recover. Give enough time for the property values to stabilize.

Dana Goldstein from the Prospect got in a great question about all of this -- does Clinton regret the deregulation bills he signed while in office? "That's a fair question" is always a great response to get from a politician. He feels that the deregulation actually helped save taxpayers money via the Merrill/Bank of America deal, but feels they should have been "louder" on the Fannie & Freddie ends of the bill spectrum. "If it's too good to be true, it probably is."

From there we moved into drilling and the energy crisis. Clinton thinks we've already lost the "no drilling at all" battle and instead should be focused on ensuring environmental protections, educating consumers and most of all, getting something for it on the solar and wind end of things. He thinks Pickens' plan for fixing the grid is great -- "at least he wants to do it!" -- but that the transportation end of things needs a little work. His own answer to that would be to go directly to electric for cars, and use compressed natural gas for large and long-haul transport.

I poked my hand up on conceding the no-drilling already, though. Over at the Hightower Lowdown, I said, we just published a whole issue on the complete phoniness of the drill-baby-drill plan. After saying a few words about his admiration for Hightower (reasonably surprising considering Hightower's criticism of him over the years), he did reinforce that he thinks, "if it's going to happen anyway, we ought to get a better deal."

Thanking us each for our time, and allowing a couple of pics to be snapped, our meeting with the President concluded. It's not that one walks out of a meeting like that starstruck, though. I've had my fair share of feeling giddily conked over the head after meeting a famous person, and this was something entirely different. There's the dull ache of having your head loaded with enormous amounts of information, combined with the Charisma Factor, combined with the background noise of "this person was the leader of the free world for eight years." While some of the participants were able to blog about it right away, it's taken me a little more time to parse all of it.

After meeting one of them now in person, the strategy of the Clintons has become clearer to me in a way that I couldn't have pictured just knowing them from the news. They strongly believe that the best way to make the world a better place is through the brokerage of power and influence, through deal-making and bargaining, through leveraging a flawed system to their advantage, and eventually the advantage of the underserved worldwide. I was familiar with the tactics before, and have heartily disagreed with them at many points, but through this meeting with Bill Clinton, I have a newfound respect and strong belief in their desire to make the world work better for everyone.

[I'll be blogging all week from the Clinton Global Initiative.]

Tagged as: economy, bloggers, bill clinton, wall street, drilling, drill, clinton global initiative

Deanna Zandt is a contributing editor at AlterNet.