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Paul: Which again, always has an underlying racist card underneath it, as part of the support for this. I think we should talk a bit about this. It's a moment where finance, which is always powerful, but in the '90s, finance took on enormous strength in terms of their political influence, the concentration of ownership and you have the elimination of Glass-Stiegel, which is the legislation that mitigates how much banks can speculate with people's money and such.
Paul: And I think what's important here is the Democrats and Clinton very much embody this moment. It's not just under pressure of the Republicans, it's under pressure of Wall Street, who pay for their political campaigns.
Gerald Horne: Well, absolutely. I mean, once again, you get into the screwy political configuration of these parties, the Democratic Party not only being a party of organized labor, not only being a party of black workers, which has just been exemplified in the vote in Alabama just a day or two ago, but it's also the party of Wall Street. That is to say the party of the elite that is not as dependent upon masses of workers, particularly organized workers.
Gerald Horne: And their campaign donations help to fuel the Bill Clinton campaign, and subsequently, the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign, but in turn, they asked for a loosening of financial regulations, which helps to turn the US economy into one grand casino, which then comes crashing down in 2007, 2008, which impoverishes many, the black working class and the black middle class not least, but also ironically enough, helps to give rise to the so-called Tea Party movement, which instead of turning en masse against the Republican Party and Democratic Party, in some ways they help to drag both political parties to the right, because recall that the Tea Party movement comes into play in opposition to the government bailing out distressed working-class and middle class homeowners.
Gerald Horne: It doesn't come into play because of this loosening of financial regulations that turns the economy into one grand casino.
Paul: Right. I just want to go back to talking about the Clinton period. I had lunch with one of the leaders of one of the big international unions. I had lunch with him and some of his staff and his political consultant. This was in DC, and I said to them, much what you're saying, you know, the Democratic Party is these multiple classes. You have Wall Street and you have the trade unions and workers.
Paul: I said, "But you guys don't fight for leadership of the Democratic Party. You concede leadership to Wall Street." In the final analysis, you end up with Wall Street approved candidates on the whole. I said, "Why do you do that?" And the answer from the political consultant and the union leader is nodding his head, was because they're the only ones that have the money to fight the Republicans and the Republicans are just so much worse than those sections of the elites that we deal with in the Democratic Party that we're dependent on them to have the cash to fight elections.
Paul: I wonder what you think of that, although it's an interesting thing now. Sanders has actually shown that there's no longer any need for that dependency, but the corporate Democrats are still in bed with Wall Street.
Gerald Horne: Well, as you were talking, I was thinking of an article that appeared in the Financial Times of London a few days ago about British politics. And about how a certain sector of the British elite is becoming more favorable, believe it or not, to Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of the Labor Party. And that's because the Tories have proven themselves to be so dysfunctional, the way they're handling Brexit, and the way, from the elite's point of view, they're jeopardizing the British economy by withdrawing from the European Union. Some are pushing for this so-called Hard Brexit that will leave Britain's economy in some way stranded and that makes them more favorable to the Labor Party of Corbyn because of their pushing a so-called softer Brexit.
Gerald Horne: And as I was reading this, I was thinking will there come a time when the elite of the US of A decides that that they need a different political configuration in terms of parties if they're going to continue to survive. I don't think they're thinking that way as we speak, but if Britain is any guide, they may have to start thinking that way, sooner rather than later.
Paul: Hm. Alright, let's move on with this undoing the New Deal. How do you assess the Obama years in the context of this New Deal and 1960s legislation and the process we're talking about?
Gerald Horne: Well, I think that many are correct to be disappointed with the administration of President Obama. And I would say the disappointment not only comes on the domestic scene, that is to say with regard to the stimulus, because of course, he could argue that given the fact that it was difficult to scare up any Republican votes for this multi-billion stimulus of 2009, that he was constrained and constricted. But I think that the disappointment of the Obama years comes disproportionately from his foreign policy.
Gerald Horne: That is to say the apparent inability to embark on a new and different path that at the same time could have possibly affected the correlation of force in the United States. And I look particularly at the major blunder of the Obama years, which was the 2011 invasion and overthrow of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, which put wind in the sails of the right wing hawks, which they could then parlay into domestic gain in Washington DC, but also sent a signal to many developing countries, that they needed to bend the knee to Uncle Sam, which in turn helps to accelerate this movement of runaway shops abroad.
Gerald Horne: To me, that was the major disappointment of the Obama-
Paul: Let me ... can I add one thing to that? During the ... when Barack Obama becomes president, he controls both houses of Congress. The economy is an absolute disaster. There's a real opportunity, many people asked him to be the next FDR and to take on the issue of banking, which means the possibility of even nationalizing a bank instead of a privatized solution to the auto industry and putting it onto the backs of auto workers, which he did. All the various measures.
Paul: There was a real moment there, an FDR potential moment. Instead, I mean, Obama is who he is, but he was a Clinton extension, an extension of Clinton. He certainly wasn't an FDR.
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