Check Out The Article By A Former Clinton Staffer Because It Helps To Understand Why The Former President Is Standing Up For Vulture Capitalism, Give Your Input

I have been thinking a lot about my old boss President Clinton the
last few days. I still have a great deal of respect and affection for
him, and remain a fan of his political skills and the many good things
he did as President -- more than a lot of people realize. But one thing
you always knew as a staffer of his was when he did make a mistake it
was a doozy. And as his Bain Capital statement reminds us, he has always had an incredible blind spot for the Wall Street crowd.

The biggest political mistake of his Presidency was to allow himself
to be seduced by the slick Wall Street guys who convinced him the
further deregulation of the financial industry -- the repeal of
Glass-Steagall and failing to regulate derivatives -- would be good for
the economy. You would think after the crash of 2008 and all that it has
wrought he would be wary of defending Wall Street again, but it appears
his massive blind spot is still there.

In the 1992 campaign I was so proud to be part of, Bill Clinton
promised to fight for the American middle class who “worked hard and
played by the rules.” And he did fight for those middle class and
working poor folks in much of his presidency. Family and Medical Leave;
children’s health insurance; raising the minimum wage; the Brady Bill;
expanding our national parks; standing up to Gingrich’s assault on
Medicare, Medicaid, school lunches, Head Start, and education; lowering
taxes for the working poor and raising them for the wealthy: all of
those policies mattered greatly to millions of middle-class Americans’
real lives. But when Clinton let the big banks free to rampage at will
in the economy, the American middle class he had been helping in all
those other ways got crushed. It was a terrible mistake that sadly
tarnished his legacy and wiped out much of the good he had done.

Now he is defending Wall Street again. Clinton said that Romney’s
work at Bain Capital was “not bad work, but very good work” and that
Romney’s business career at Bain was “sterling.” But Mitt Romney and
Bain Capital made money by playing with a stacked deck -- stacked in
favor of Wall Street and against those people in the middle class who
worked hard and played by the rules. Bain used the facts that debt was
deductible and that carried interest and capital gains were taxed
dramatically less than regular workers’ taxes to make money while the
companies they bought frequently got drained of their value. Romney got
rich while firing and outsourcing workers and slashing their wages and
benefits. Romney got rich even when the companies he bought went
bankrupt because of the way the rules were stacked in his favor. He got
richer while most of the rest of us got poorer. No, strike that: he got
rich because most of the rest of us got poorer. Bain made most of its
money by firing people and slashing their wages, not by creating new
high-wage, high-quality jobs.

This was not good work, this was vulture capitalism by an utterly
amoral man. No Democrat should be defending the company or its CEO Mitt
Romney.

So why would Bill Clinton feel compelled to defend Bain, especially
when he knows that the Bain critique is at the heart of President
Obama’s re-election strategy? The Bill Clinton I worked for used to
express outrage when any Democrat would criticize the campaign strategy
we were using. My best guess is that old Wall Street blind spot is
kicking in again: the Wall Street gang President Clinton is still close
to are crying in his ear about how unfair it is that anyone would beat
up on their way of doing business, and Clinton is trying to steer the
2012 political conversation away from a subject that causes this much
discomfort to his good friends.

President Clinton, I hope you will see the error of your ways on this
fundamental issue. Those middle-class people who work hard and play by
the rules want you back on their side where you once were, not the side
of the big banks.

You know what really haunts me about Clinton and the Wall Street
bankers? When Clinton made one of those doozies of a mistake back in the
late ’90s, that one with Monica Lewinsky, and the Republicans
recklessly pursued their absurd impeachment strategy, I rushed to the
barricades to help out. I helped People For the American Way and the
just-starting Moveon.org and many other groups run the big
anti-impeachment campaign that turned the tide of public campaign,
shocked conventional wisdom by helping win Democrats seats in the House
in the 1998 election, and defeated the drive for impeachment and
conviction. I was proud to defend the constitution from the Republicans’
terrible abuse of power. But it was in that exact same period of time
while I was fighting to save Bill Clinton’s presidency that Clinton was
working with those same Republicans in Congress to pass the big banking
deregulation bill that repealed Glass-Steagall. I have been haunted
wondering if people like me had focused on defeating that terrible
banking bill instead of trying to save Bill Clinton’s presidency,
whether the country would have been better off. I still think that
impeachment push was a terrible travesty, but I also often think my
priorities were wrong and I should have been fighting Clinton and Wall
Street on their horrible legislation.

America’s voters are going to have to decide whether the kind of
amoral business values that cause a few to get rich because the rest of
us get poorer are what they want in a president. They are going to have
to decide whether the kind of market and tax-code manipulation practiced
by Bain Capital, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America is a
good thing or a bad thing. But I sincerely hope that Bill Clinton
doesn’t stay on the side of the amoral speculators and market
manipulators. Come on back to fighting for the middle class, President
Clinton.