Who, then, are these two conservative "Democratic" front-men, Cowan and Kessler? They are the two top officials, and co-founders, of the think tank, Third Way, which is associated with the Democratic Leadership Council, which had been built up by Bill Clinton in order to provide Wall Street a way to control things even when Republicans are not in power. If the electorate, for whatever reason, fail to vote for Wall Street's preferred candidate (almost always the Republican), then the Government can still be bought by them, so long as they pay the price: donating to Third Way, DLC "Democrats," who eschew "economic populism," and who are more deferential to the big-money men than real Democrats would tolerate being. In other words: these Third Way, DLC, people represent the "Democratic" Establishment, not the Democratic voters who lack the wealth to buy "their" Government.
The Third Way think tank is also known as the Third Way organization , and they have top management consisting of long-time supporters of Bill and of Hillary Clinton. In other words: Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler are Clinton-functionaries. Cowan had been brought into government during the Clinton Administration, as the Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Prior to that, earlier in the 1990s, he had sold to anti-"entitlement" billionaires Ross Perot and Pete Peterson his idea for a promotional campaign to get young people to favor weakening Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, on the argument that such "entitlements" are generational warfare against the young. Perot and Peterson just wasted some money on it. Jim Kessler was the long-serving policies-director for New York's senior U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, a friend of the Clintons, now known by some as simply the Senator from Wall Street. The Albany NY website Capital New York described the key moment in 1982 that had placed then-Representative Schumer on the rising path to his becoming a U.S. Senator: "He set about making friends on Wall Street, tapping the city's top law firms and securities houses for campaign donations. 'I told them I looked like I had a very difficult reapportionment fight. If I were to stand a chance of being re-elected, I needed some help'." And he has always kept his side of the bargain with them.
As for the other three co-founders of Third Way, two of them are likewise Clintonians, and the third is closely related. Matt Bennett was the Deputy Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs throughout Bill Clinton's second term. Nancy Jacobson was an early supporter of Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign, and when he won, he appointed her as Finance Director of the Democratic National Committee. Her husband is Mark Penn, who served as Hillary's chief strategist during her bungled 2008 Presidential campaign against Obama. The fifth one, Nancy Hale, was a leading fundraiser for nonprofits -- an excellent background for political fund-raising.
As sourcewatch also notes , the major funders of Third Way include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation, three of the top foundations that donate to AEI, Heritage, Cato, and other extremely conservative think tanks. Furthermore: Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bank One, and numerous defense contractors, are also major donors.
In addition, there is a separate Clinton-supporting Third Way Foundation , created by Bill Clinton's buddy Al From, which likewise is financially backed by the Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation, as well as by the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart), and the same Wall Street and military-contracting firms. The current president of this Third Way Foundation is Will Marshall, who was one of the few "Democrats" who passionately advocated for Bush's idea of "regime change in Iraq." In fact, Marshall shared the extremist views of the far-right Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which served as the lead organization outside the Bush White House propagandizing to invade Iraq. Third Way Foundation pays Will Marshall $200,000 per year , apparently to do little but fill out forms .
Both the Third Way organization, and the separate Third Way Foundation, are closely linked to the Democratic Leadership Council, and actually grew out of the DLC, which was created by Al From. As wikipedia sums up well, "From played a prominent role in the 1992 election of President Bill Clinton - and served as Domestic Policy Advisor to the Clinton transition, prompting USA Today to write: 'The ideas at the crux of the Clinton candidacy were largely drafted by the DLC.' ... In 1998, with First Lady Hillary Clinton, From began a dialogue with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other world leaders, and the DLC brand - known as the Third Way - became a model for insurgent liberal governments around the globe." And now, he is cashing in: "The From Company, LLC, offers strategic advice to private clients. From serves on" the boards of an enormous range of large corporations, universities, and news-media, as well as on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is the largest single source of campaign funds for the Republican Party, their biggest donor, dwarfing all others (and donating very little to Democrats -- and only to the most conservative ones). "Former Democratic National Committee chair and Vermont Governor Howard Dean sharply criticized From and the DLC as the Republican wing of the Democratic Party."
That could also be called the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. After Cowan and Kessler published in Rupert Murdoch'a Wall Street newspaper their take-down of Senator Warren, Lee Fang at the Nation headlined on December 11th, "Third Way: 'Majority of our Financial Support' From Wall Street," and he reported that the Sr. V.P. of Third Way (the organization, not the Foundation) admitted that "the majority of Third Way's donor support comes from the group's board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector." Fang linked to the Third Way web-page where the bios of all 29 of their trustees were shown, and 27 of them were Wall Streeters. "Warren, whom Time magazine calls the 'new sheriff of Wall Street,' has demanded greater regulation of the industry."
So, basically, it seems that the Masters of the Universe, who aren't satisfied that Obama has favored them enough by merely protecting them from prosecution, and by continuing Bush's taxpayer-funded bailouts of their investors, are looking eagerly now at Hillary Clinton, because she won't just continue Obama's worst policies -- she will bow and scrape to these people as well. It wasn't enough for them that Obama had kept his privately stated promise to them that he made in the White House near the start of his Presidency, on 27 March 2009: "My administration ... is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." They demand more -- and, with Hillary Clinton, they know that they will get more .
So, between now and Election Day 2016, one should reasonably expect that Hillary Clinton's campaign against Elizabeth Warren will be so well-funded, that Warren won't be able to get past the primaries without all the mud that Wall Street can throw against her being thrown, and we should therefore expect that, if Senator Warren runs, then the campaign that Wall Street financed in 2012 for the then-incumbent Massachusetts U.S. Senator Scott Brown, whom she was running against, will be amplified to a deafening roar, even in the Democratic primaries, before there is any contest at all against the ultimate Republican U.S. Presidential nominee in 2016.
The smear they brought against her in heavily Democratic Massachusetts, where her being a progressive was no political disadvantage to her in a liberal state, was that she had cheated in order to get admitted into Harvard and didn't earn it. (No evidence was brought forth by Scott Brown's forces to back their charge.) The smear that Cowan and Kessler bring against her now, in a national political contest where the electorate are much more conservative than in Massachusetts, is that she wants big government and high taxes so as "to increase benefits to all seniors, including billionaires, and to pay for them by increasing taxes on working people and their employers." In other words, that she wants to stoke a generational war between the old and the young. But this is just the beginning of the assault, by the Clinton forces and the Republicans.
The conservative Cowan is making his bid to pitch to the aristocracy his long-time specialty: trying to separate young Americans from progressives, by his arguing that "entitlements" (not of the rich but of everyone else) Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, represent takings from the productive young and healthy, to go toward the unproductive elderly and sick. This argument, against what is actually a core part of the Democratic Party's tradition (social insurance programs), is the core mission of his Third Way organization. Eric Laursen exposed it, and its funding by billionaires, in Huffington Post, on 9 April 2012, under the headline, "Third Way's Jon Cowan: Once Again Ginning Up Faux Youth Outrage."
The appeal that this argument has for Hillary Clinton is the same that it is to her masters on Wall Street: It argues to deal with the federal debt that was created by the trillions in taxpayers' bailouts of Wall Street, by the public's paying yet more for it in "entitlement"-reductions, so that not only will the public's taxes have to rise in order to pay that debt from bailing out the financial insiders, but the public's "entitlements" (social insurance benefits) will also have to be reduced. Instead of Cowan's argument -- that progressives threaten to take from the young and healthy in order to give to the old and sick -- the reality is that Wall Street wants the general public to transfer even more of the public's wealth to Wall Street than has yet happened.
So, the start of the Hillary team's preemptive attack against Elizabeth Warren is to portray Warren negatively as a "redistributionist." As Laursen documented there, Cowan's ploy for Wall Street, which started in 1992, and on the basis of which he was accepted into Bill Clinton's Administration, failed to catch fire with the young back then, or since then.
But, as the adage says, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" -- and they don't want to leave it to Hillary during the 2016 primaries to have to be the person to take down Elizabeth Warren. That just wouldn't likely work: for her to mudsling, either by arguing that Warren cheated to get into Harvard, or that Warren wants to play Robin Hood against the young and healthy, would be too obviously opportunistic a ploy, even to many in the Clintons' core voting base of conservative Democrats.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .
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