My meeting with Bill Clinton: Wall Street vs Main Street

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.
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