BILL MOYERS:
Let’s begin with the news of the week. For
me, the news of the week is that Congress passed a trillion dollar omnibus bill
this week that contains an obscure provision on page 1,599, that would enable
just one donor to contribute over $750,000 to the party committees each year.
What does that say to you, that they could get a provision like that sneaked
through a big bill like this that fundamentally further alters our political
dynamic?
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
The long and the short of it is that
the press is asleep. That’s one thing. But that it’s incumbency insurance. The
two parties are most interested in getting themselves and their members, their
regular members, re-elected, and this is a way to prevent competition.
The Republican Party notably is threatened by tea party challenges by Dave
Brat’s upset of Eric Cantor. They want to make it easier for incumbent
Republicans who are reliable, who will toe the party line to be able to beat
back challenges. And that means raising more money from people with interests in
Washington.
BILL MOYERS:
And the Democratic Party is threatened
by–
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
The Democratic Party is also very
interested in that, because they don’t want primary challenges any more than
Republicans do. You think that the Wall Street Democrats like Schumer and
Gillibrand want to be challenged by left wing or progressive Democrats who are
unhappy with their pro-business, pro-Wall Street votes and policies?
They’re– that’s terrible. It’s a matter of internal party control. You don’t
want competition. These are closed shops, the two parties. And when somebody
gets in like Elizabeth Warren, who for a long time did not have the official
backing of the official Democratic Party, and then she became too strong on her
own to stop. She’s a troublemaker. They don’t want troublemakers like Elizabeth
Warren in the caucus. And you see what’s happening–
BILL MOYERS:
And this is one way to keep the rich people
from–
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Right.
BILL MOYERS:
–donating to her.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Right. If you make it easier for rich
people to give to the incumbent, to give more money to the incumbent, it makes
it harder for a challenger or a primary challenger to challenge the incumbent.
And so it’s insurance. It’s insurance. And it’s also in keeping with Barack
Obama’s terrible, terrible decision to renounce public financing in the 2008
campaign.
His rival, John McCain who was the co-sponsor of McCain-Feingold, the only
decent public financing law we’ve ever had respected it. Obama said, I can raise
more money outside the public financing system from Goldman Sachs, from all the
big banks, from Morgan Stanley, from the corporations, from the PACs, and so on
and so forth. And he fundraised McCain to death. He out-fundraised him. And
McCain stuck to his principles and was drowned in a sea of money. Now, there
were other reasons Obama won.
BILL MOYERS:
Right.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
It’s not just money, obviously. The
country was in crisis, people were scared, they didn’t want another Republican.
But Obama helped kill public financing of campaigns. He set a very bad example
in 2008.
BILL MOYERS:
This provision would almost guarantee that a
relative handful of very wealthy people would be picking the candidates with
their money who would run in the primary and therefore determining the
candidates in the general election.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Yes, although I still believe that the
parties exercise tremendous power over what we call in Chicago slating.
BILL MOYERS:
Slating?
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Yeah, in Chicago you call it slating.
You slate people. And to be slated, you still need the support of the official
Democratic Party, the central committee as it were, or the central committee of
the Republican Party. And these people are not interested in reform. They’re
interested in things staying the same. And you see it again and again when an
incumbent or, I’m sorry, a more reform-minded independent gets into the Senate.
My favorite example, Jim Webb, got elected in 2006.
BILL MOYERS:
To the Senate for Virginia.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
To the Senate from Virginia as a
Democrat on a wave of anti-war sentiment and disgust with George Bush, with
President George Bush. This is a guy who went from right to left. It’s very
unusual in American politics, Webb’s story.
And Webb tried to introduce a windfall profits tax on corporations that had
borrowed money from the government in 2009. He was discouraged very clearly by
the Senate leadership, the Democratic leadership, not to do it, which was in the
majority. And he said, I’m going to do it anyway. He introduced the bill on the
Senate floor. And Kirsten Gillibrand, the Senator from New York, or you might
say, the Senator from Wall Street, the junior senator from Wall Street, ran
over–
BILL MOYERS:
Chuck Schumer being the–
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Chuck Schumer being the senior
senator, ran over to the desk and yelled at him, screamed at him. How dare you
do this. How dare you do this without getting the permission of the caucus. And
then the bill was snuffed by Senator Dodd, as chairman of the banking committee.
These people don’t want independent voices in the party. And they don’t want to
threaten their fundraising base. Dodd, Schumer, Gillibrand, these are people who
think every day about how to raise money for the Democratic Party and for the
incumbents who run it.
BILL MOYERS:
Bruce Bartlett wrote a cover story for
The American Conservative magazine not long ago in which he said Obama
is, and this a Republican writing, Obama a Republican, a moderate Republican, as
we used to judge them when President Eisenhower was in office. But here is a
Republican, conservative economist saying that Barack Obama governs as a
Republican.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
As a Republican, he’s not a
progressive or a liberal Republican in the old-fashioned sense.
The thing with Obama is he says the, occasionally will say, the right thing.
And then he immediately goes and does the wrong thing, like with public
financing of campaigns. But where I’m just astonished is things like
Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 with the help of Bill
Clinton, of course, and his economic advisors like Robert Rubin, and it led to
the collapse of the economy in 2008.
There’s been a bill introduced two sessions in a row by John McCain and Maria
Cantwell, bipartisan, to restore Glass-Steagall. Why doesn’t it get out of the
banking committee? Because the Democratic Party doesn’t want it to come out of
the banking committee. They don’t want to threaten their fundraising base, which
is Wall Street. Just as much as the Republicans have a fundraising base in Wall
Street, the Democrats are just as dependent on that money, just as interested in
protecting it.
In fact, McCain and Cantwell now have other co-sponsors. They have Elizabeth
Warren. And they have Angus King, the independent senator from Maine. It’s going
nowhere. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next session. But I don’t
expect to see Barack Obama encouraging bipartisan cooperation on the restoration
of Glass-Steagall.
BILL MOYERS:
You chided The New York Times
recently for promoting the inevitability of Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the
next democratic candidate for president. Do you think she’s inevitable?
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
I hope not. I would, just as a
citizen, not just, forget about my political opinions, I’m opposed to stasis in
politics.
BILL MOYERS:
Stasis?
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
You know, the absolute freezing of
political discourse, where you have the same people running for office over and
over again. I mean, we’re talking, really, right now about a Clinton-Bush
rematch, Hilary Clinton against Jeb Bush. So just as a civic matter, you would
want there to be some competition in the primaries. But people saying that she’s
inevitable becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. If you keep saying it,
well, I guess it does become inevitable.
And then you’ve got Clintonism redux. You’ve got Clintonism. You’ve got free
trade. You’ve got Wall-Street-friendly Democrats. You’ve got this unholy
alliance between the Chicago Democratic machine and the eastern banking crowd,
which has been funding these campaigns. You got all these people pushing them up
and rewarding them for their bad behavior. I still, I cannot believe that Obama
would appoint Larry Summers to his cabinet, that he would ask his advice about
anything.
BILL MOYERS:
He probably would’ve appointed him Fed
chairman.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
And he would’ve if he could’ve. He
tried, he tried.
BILL MOYERS:
That was one time that progressives–
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Yeah, yeah. Stopped him.
BILL MOYERS:
Stopped him, right.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
I interviewed Larry Summers for my
NAFTA book. And he said to me, there is one free trade element to NAFTA which we
don’t talk about. Americans can now dump, American factory farms can dump corn
on the Mexican market with no tariffs. This has driven hundreds of thousands of
little Mexican corn farmers off the land, driven them north, where they can work
in the maquiladoras assembling things that used to be assembled in the United
States. And I asked Summers, “What– is that a good thing?”
And he goes, “How can it be a bad thing? I’m giving workers, we’re giving
workers a choice.” They can, in other words, they can starve on the farm in
Mexico, or they can work in a maquiladora for $1, $1.80 an hour and in Mexico.
They have the same attitude towards American workers. They’re not worried about
their pain. And they say, “Well, he has a choice. He can go to work in a fast
food restaurant. He can work at Wal-Mart. He can work in a prison.” For a
considerably lower wage, that’s true. But he thinks that just fine in the long
run.
You see that they view these things as successful. We see them, or at least I
see them, as bad for the country. But they want to, they want to build on their
success and continue with the same horses, the same politicians. The most
hopeful thing I’ve seen in the last year in politics is the upset of Eric Cantor
by Dave Brat.
BILL MOYERS:
Eric Cantor was the Republican leader in the
House.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
In the House. The Republican leader in
the House who had a well-financed incumbent’s dream of a campaign war chest. And
here comes Brat with no money, I think with a couple hundred thousand dollars,
and an idea. It’s not my idea, but it’s an idea. And he wins. He can beat the
big money. And why the Democrats don’t do this, why disaffected liberal or
leftwing or progressive Democrats, whatever you want to call them, don’t do
this, I cannot understand.
I ask people, rhetorically, what’s the worst Supreme Court decision over the
last 10 years? Probably most people would say Citizen’s United, which
has just absolutely unleashed the power of money and plutocracy in this country.
Who’s the engineer behind this decision? Chief Justice Roberts. Who let Roberts
through the gate? Senator Pat Leahy, when he was on the judiciary committee. One
day he was leading–
BILL MOYERS:
Democrat from Vermont–
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Democrat from Vermont. He was leading
the charge against Roberts, and all of a sudden one day he says, “Well, I’ve
decided that Roberts is a man of integrity and I’m going to vote for him.” And
that let it out of the committee. It was a majority con– it was
Republican-controlled at that point, but if Leahy had really fought it, he
could’ve stopped it, I think.
He lets it go through. Roberts makes one of the, pushes one of, or engineers,
one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in our lifetimes. And what happens to
Leahy? Nothing. Nobody challenges him in the primary. Nobody tries to punish
him. Believe me, in Chicago, in my hometown, when Richard M. Daley, who was so
angry that the city council forced this big-box minimum wage increase, bill, on
him, vetoes it. He doesn’t just veto it, right? He waits and he waits, and the
next time there are alderman elections, most of the people who voted for the
big-box minimum wage suddenly found themselves with well-financed and sometimes
quite articulate opponents for the first times in their political careers.
That’s Daley. That’s the way politics works in Chicago. I don’t understand why
people don’t learn that in the rest of the country. You punish these people, or
at least you challenge them for bad decisions.
BILL MOYERS:
But, so what was behind that other bold
cover story where you have Adolph Reed, the political scientist writing about,
quote, “Nothing Left: The long, slow, surrender of American liberals?” You’re
taking liberals and progressives to task for not standing up and fighting–
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Yeah. Well, this is–
BILL MOYERS:
The way Daley does?
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
This is my– yeah, the way you’re
supposed to fight in politics. You’ve got to fight in politics if you want to
win. Everybody in politics knows that, but in the liberal world that I live in
people think, “Oh, my goodness. How can we oppose Barack Obama? He’s the first
black president. He’s the first president who sounds like me, who talks like me,
who went to the same sort of schools that I went to,” in some respects.
“Sociologically, he’s much closer to me than any working-class person or
left-wing person, and we just can’t undermine him. We can’t undermine him.” This
was the problem with the black caucus. You know, the black caucus is very
unhappy in the House, the Democratic black caucus, very unhappy with Obama,
because he’s done, they feel, very little for black people. The Washington
Post reported on this. This is not news. So the liberals at other magazines
that I read faithfully and that I subscribe to, constantly make excuses for
Obama.
“What about the Affordable Care Act? What about the speech in Cairo? What
about this, what about that?” But on the big issues, and again, if you want to
talk about the Affordable Care Act, I have real problems with it. But on the
bigger issues, like income inequality, foreign policy, taxation, these are the
key, the big money issues. As Marcy Kaptur used to say to me, the congresswoman
from Ohio, she said, “They didn’t want me on the Ways and Means Committee,”
because she was very anti-NAFTA. “That’s the money committee!” You know, anyway,
these people don’t want to, or my liberal colleagues, don’t want to offend a
party establishment that doesn’t care about the working class.
But it’s on the Affordable Care Act that it gets sensitive, because even
though it’s a rank imitation of RomneyCare in Massachusetts it’s not original,
it’s not radical. As we know, it’s not universal. It’s obviously not
single-payer. It doesn’t address prescription drug prices, which they took off
the table from the beginning. I told you this before, I grew up in a health
insurance family. I know all about the health insurance racket. To leave health
insurance in the hands of private health insurance companies is just
unconscionable, in my mind, when you had an opportunity to really reform the
system and make it essentially Medicare for everybody, with maybe some
exceptions.
But the insurance lobby, of course, the insurance companies are delighted
with Obamacare. A lot of free subsidized policies, paid for by the government.
They don’t have to break a sweat to sell them. And their friends in Congress,
like Max Baucus, who wrote the bill, by the way, with help from an executive, a
former executive of WellPoint Insurance, they think it’s great. It’s also a
great fundraising tool. The insurance companies give money to both parties. They
give it to the Democrats now. And Max Baucus is now ambassador to China,
overseeing the cheap labor goldmine in China.
BILL MOYERS:
Adolph Reed wrote that left lives only on
the outer fringes of American politics. Is he right?
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
Well, for now, the left is utterly
marginalized. That’s why I wrote a column recently for the Providence
Journal about this, that The New York Times, by saying Hillary
Clinton is inevitable– is it’s a way of marginalizing the left. It’s assuming
the left doesn’t exist, that the left can be taken for granted. And maybe
they’re right. Maybe the left can be taken for granted because they don’t fight
back.
BILL MOYERS:
So who is the left?
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
It’s getting complicated because, you
know, you see all sorts of interesting things happening. The tea party, yes,
there’s some crazy rhetoric coming out of the tea party. But one thing the tea
party people, some of them, have in common with the old left that I am
interested in is a suspicion of the big money. They’re very anti-Wall Street.
They’re the ones who stopped the first bank bailout, you know? Remember? They
had to–
BILL MOYERS:
Oh, I do remember.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR:
When Bush is still president, they
have to pass this emergency bailout, and the Republicans revolted in the House
and said, “We’re not going to, we’re not going to do this.” Then, of course,
they whipped ‘em, as they say in Congress, and they pulled in all their favors,
and they finally passed it. But there should’ve been punishment for the people
who did this to the country. The people who deregulated the economy, who
repealed Glass-Steagall. And what Webb and others point out is there’s been no
punishment. There have been no consequences for the people who did this.
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