Robert Scheer: "Chelsea Clinton's marriage to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler"

Married to the Clinton Mob
By Robert Scheer
August 3, 2010

Out of respect for privacy, even concerning famous people, I wasn’t going to write about the marriage of Chelsea Clinton to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler with the resources to buy a $4 million loft so soon after graduating from Stanford. Hopefully Marc Mezvinsky won’t follow in the footsteps of his financier father, “Fast-Talkin’ Eddie,” as they called him back in Iowa, a former Democratic House member who just completed a five-year federal sentence for dozens of fraud felonies.

Anyway, Chelsea also worked at a hedge fund, her mother dabbled in banking shenanigans in her Whitewater days and father Bill’s radical deregulation made it a lot easier for financial plunderers to stay on the right side of the law. So the Clintons and the Mezvinskys have a lot in common. I hope their children will do better, and I was going to simply wish them well until I read Tina Brown’s paean to power, “Why America Needed Chelsea’s Wedding,” in the trend-chasing Daily Beast, which she edits.

In what I assume was not self-parody, Brown stated that “the Clintons are enjoying political rosy-glow syndrome. In the light of what’s happened since—two grueling wars, the implosion of debt, 14 million unemployed … Chelsea’s wedding allowed us to remember all that prosperity, those continuous Clinton surpluses.” But not, as I the party pooper must add, the Financial Services Modernization Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which enabled the financial bubble that caused those 14 million to be unemployed.

But don’t dare tag Hillary with anything her husband brought about or even for what Brown calls the “two grueling wars” which Obama inherited and which Hillary voted for and now pushes as energetically as do the top hawks in the Pentagon. “No sticky wars then,” Brown writes, referring to the good old days of the reign of Bill. “Meanwhile, Hillary, pummeled and reviled during the campaign year of Obama worship, is now the popular member of Bam’s administration.”

OK, so I have gone on too long about a column by one preening society writer, but it is irritating that the Clinton parents are getting off the hook while Obama, who is guilty of relying too heavily on Clintonista alums for policy direction, is somehow scorned. Without President Clinton turning the economy over to Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers, there would have been no financial meltdown. Obama’s cardinal error was bringing Summers and another Clinton acolyte, Timothy Geithner, back into power.

Clinton nostalgia is dangerous nonsense, and for Democrats to go down that road is to avoid serious assessment of their own party’s role in the economic debacle that haunts the nation.

Read the full article at:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/married_to_the_clin... /