Robert Rubin had an op-ed in The New York Times earlier this week titled “In Six Decades of Public Life, I Never Thought I Would Write This Piece.”
Wow, what could the subject be?
I’m sorry that as Bill Clinton’s secretary of the Treasury, I successfully pushed for sweeping deregulation of Wall Street, leading directly to the 2008 financial crisis and paving the way for the election of Donald Trump? I’m sorry that I used my influence to lead Democrats to turn their back on their core constituency of working people, also leading to Trump?
Or maybe: I’m sorry that I got Obama to hire the same team of my protégés, so that the recovery from the deep recession was far too slow and Democrats lost even more credibility, further foaming the runway for Trump?
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Uh, no.
Rubin’s subject is the threat to American democracy. Most of the piece is an entirely conventional and predictable recounting of the explicit assaults on democracy in the Trump era.
But it also includes this rather odd sentence: “If the Trump administration launches an effort to manipulate the outcome of the midterms, the economic impact could be felt immediately, and it could last long after Mr. Trump’s presidency ends.”
Read that again. Is Rubin worried about a Trump coup, more for the impact on the economy than for the destruction of democracy itself? It sure sounds like that.
He adds: “When I talk to leaders in business and politics, even many of those who acknowledge the election threat seem to consider such a possibility remote. They do not tend to take Mr. Trump’s attacks on voting seriously. That’s another way of saying that the markets are not pricing in what I consider a meaningful risk.”
The single most influential advocate over the last 30 years of markets being inherently efficient has now discovered them making a gross error. Now that Rubin is a statesman, he can tell us these things. But with Rubin’s financial deregulation, markets didn’t “price in” the risk of financial collapse either.
Rubin, however, laughed all the way to the bank. After leaving Clinton’s service, he became chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup, with total annual compensation of $15 million to $18 million, which was real money in those pre-Musk days.
Rubin is basically confirming that the business elite doesn’t really care about democracy.
And then the op-ed’s punch line: “Over the next few weeks, leaders in business and in all sectors of our society should work with state and local elected officials to help protect the political process that lies at the heart of our constitutional system. They can do this by making clear, nonpartisan declarations of support for election integrity, by supporting nonpartisan organizations that protect our elections and by using behind-the-scenes influence to discourage those who might be considering any steps to disrupt or overturn the midterms.”
The piece is revelatory, but not quite in the way Rubin intended. He is basically confirming that the business elite doesn’t really care about democracy. Business can profit whether we have a democracy or a dictatorship; whether Republicans govern or Democrats do.
And that certainly describes Rubin’s own career. He used his ample influence to make sure that whichever party was in the White House, financial capital would have its way with the economy, to the detriment of ordinary people and to democracy itself.
Judging by the way the piece has been approvingly quoted, Rubin’s entirely unremarkable call to defend election integrity passes for some kind of courage. His business cronies don’t care, but good old statesman Bob does.
You want to show a little courage? How about calling for getting big money out of politics? Or re-regulating finance? Or doubling down on antitrust? Or taxing concentrated wealth? Funny, I can’t find those op-eds from statesman Rubin.
