How to Stop the Looming Depression Without Lining Fat-Cat CEOs' Pockets

By Mike Davis, Tomdispatch.com. Posted November 19, 2008.

No one should be shocked to discover that, in his transition to the presidency, the "inexperienced" former senator from Chicago has turned to the last Democratic administration that had experience in Washington. It seems, however, that the Obama team is doing so big time. Looking at lists of early appointees for the transition period and the administration to come, from Rahm Emanuel on down, you might be forgiven for concluding that Hillary had been elected president in 2008. Clintonistas are just piling up in the prospective corridors of power.

You might also be forgiven for concluding that just about no one else in America had ever had any "experience." Late last week, the website Politico.com did some counting and came up with the following: "Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration, including all but one of the members of his 12-person Transition Advisory Board and both of his White House staff choices." More have been appointed since then, including, as White House Counsel, Gregory Craig, the lawyer who defended Bill Clinton in impeachment hearings. And, of course, everyone in America now knows that Hillary herself is evidently now being considered for a cabinet post.

What do Washington political and policy types do when their party is kicked out of office? If they want to stay in the Big Town, they tend to go to work for lobbyists, consultancy firms, or think tanks. They raise money. They do what's needed and make good livings until the tide turns. Now, that tide is again rushing in -- and the lobbying money is, of course, rushing in with it. As the Washington Post describes it, there is already a "mini-boom" for Democrats along that lobbying alley, K Street.

Here's how Laura Meckler and Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal described one set of 13 transition-team names released: "The group is filled with second-tier veterans of the Clinton administration and workers in the technology and financial sectors. It includes four former lobbyists, three top campaign fund-raisers and two former employees of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, with some overlap among them. Four people in the group have ties to the consultant McKinsey & Co…" (In 2004, by the way, McKinsey & Co. made $19,500 in executive contributions to President Bush, and $102,000 in soft money contributions to the Republican Party. That will undoubtedly now change.)

Obama himself, for those of you who watched him (and Michelle) on 60 Minutes Sunday, is nothing short of a breath of fresh air -- he actually explains things coherently -- after our last presidential "experience." But let's hope that, as the good times roll (even in bad times) for Democrats, he keeps his equilibrium amid the usual Washington consensual pressures. The President-elect spoke Sunday night of keeping people in their all-too-foreclosable homes. Right now, as far as we know, the best he can imagine is a 90-day foreclosure freeze on "some banks." The plans at the FDIC these days promise to save homeowners by turning 30-year mortgages into 40 years of paying the bank at lower interest rates. Is there no such thing in our world as the economics of kindness (except perhaps for bankers and insurance execs)? What about leaving people in their homes at least until the bad times end? Why is debt forgiveness an option for banks, but not for citizens?

Among all those experienced folks in the new Democratic Washington, will there be anyone who can truly think outside the box in desperate times? Mike Davis, TomDispatch regular and most recently the incandescent author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire, suggests some of the human choices that an Obama administration will face and what might be done about them. -- introduction by TomDispatch editor Tom Engelhardt

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Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.

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