Michael Winship: Poor Little Rich Boys (and Girl)

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http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1062


Michael Winship: Poor Little Rich Boys (and Girl)
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 06/05/2007 - 9:39am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship


When John F. Kennedy was running for president and asked how he became a war hero, he had the wit and grace to reply, "It was entirely involuntary. They sank my boat."


Rudy Giuliani, on the other hand, would have you believe that God and Fate had somehow aligned the spheres to place him -- and only him -- at the helm of New York City on 9/11. He bestrode the metropolis to save it from certain doom, even though he had less than four months to go in his second, up-until-then undistinguished term as mayor... Giuliani decided to parlay his new reputation for in extremis leadership into megabucks. When he left City Hall, his gross assets were listed at between $1.16 million and $1.83 million, most of it in retirement funds and two Manhattan apartments. Since then, his company, Giuliani Partners, has pulled in more than $100 million in consulting, security, management, and financial service fees, and has quadrupled in size...

Oh well. You have to be rich to run for the presidency, or have lots of friends who are, and these days it doesn't necessarily seem to matter much how the cash was acquired. Monday's New York Times reported how Republican Mitt Romney amassed his personal fortune of almost $350 million through his creation of the private equity firm Bain Capital. As per the Times, "Mr. Romney's Bain career -- a source of money and contacts that he has used to finance his Massachusetts campaigns and to leap ahead of his presidential rivals in early fund-raising... exposes him to criticism that he enriched himself excessively, sometimes by cutting jobs to increase profits." The Times quoted Boston University business professor James E. Post: "Increasingly, this world of private equity looks like a world of robber barons, and Romney comes out of that world."

Big bucks and corporate attachments aren't limited to Republicans by any stretch. John Edwards, who has made the fight against poverty in America a keystone of his presidential candidacy, was a consultant for the Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund with assets of more than $30 billion. Fortress employees thus far have contributed $167,460 to his '08 campaign. Barack Obama's wife Michelle just resigned from the board of TreeHouse Foods, a Wal-Mart supplier (and quit her $215,000 a year job as a vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals).

And then, of course, there's Hillary Clinton. A recent cover story in The Nation suggests, "If Clinton really wanted to curtail the influence of the powerful, she might start with the advisers to her own campaign, who represent some of the weightiest interests in corporate America."
The comprehensive and engrossing article, by Ari Berman, goes on to chronicle the big business connections of such strategists and confidantes as Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson, Robert Rubin, Roger Altman, Harold Ickes and Senator Clinton's own husband. "Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals," Berman writes, "but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media, and other Democratic Party antagonists."

Nonetheless, all that money sure as hell is a strong argument for the public financing of campaigns. And in an era of increased outsourcing and globalization, subcontracting, and privatization -- the so-called "externalization of state functions" -- it raises questions whether those with ties to big business interests truly understand the purpose of government. That would be to protect its citizenry from war and want, to provide services and infrastructure that make the pursuit of health and happiness accessible to all -- without profit for itself.



Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.