Papa Rubin's Got a Brand New Bag
The Times reports that Bob Rubin, Larry Summers' mentor and current Harvard Corporation member, has started a new endeavor: The Hamilton Project will endeavor to generate policy ideas for Democratic presidential candidates "as well as elevating the next generation of Democrat-supporting financiers."
The project will be run out of the Brookings Institution, a liberal thinktank in Washington.
(I know it well; back when I was a young and broke Washington intern, I used to illegally park my car in its lot on P Street NW. The parking lot attendants would spray the windshield with glue and put a big red sticker over the driver's side. Liberals!)
The group sounds like part of Rubin's continued effort to promote the influence of neoliberal financiers such as himself and Larry Summers—who is part of this group—over the Democratic Party, about which one must be of two minds. If there are to be obscenely rich people in this country, I suppose it's good that not all of them are Republicans. At the same time, one worries about a Democratic Party where the most influential economists make $15 million a year at Citigroup, or hundreds of millions a year from private, secretive hedge funds.
Summers' role is predictable, and not just because he and Rubin march in lockstep. The Times doesn't note this, but
Brookings is where Summers went after leaving the Treasury Department; he doesn't appear to have done much there other than go skiing and quietly aspire to attain the presidency of Harvard, but still, the connection is relevant.
(
Summers, by the way, will be in Singapore next week, attending an economic conference there.)
Rubin, as usual, downplayed his influence. "I am a little pebble of sand on the beach," he says, the transparent disingenuousness of which makes one want to puke. Interestingly, it also seems to make reporter Landon Thomas Jr. want to puke; he takes an almost sarcastic tone regarding Rubin's false modesty. "So self-denying was the assertion that it bordered on self-aggrandizement," he writes.
Thomas notes that Rubin, who is on the board of Citigroup and is paid the aforementioned $15 million a year, has served as a stalwart defender for its embattled chief, "Charles O. Price III."
Rubin defending the executive who put him on the board...sound familiar?
Meanwhile, his position there sounds like nice work if you can get it.
As an executive at the company, he has no operational responsibility, and as a director he sits on no board committees (the executive committee, of which he is chairman, rarely meets). And partly it is a function of his personal style. “He has this enormous influence and yet he is not on the radar screen when people are looking to assign credit or blame,” said Michael Holland, an investor and longtime shareholder of Citigroup. “I presume it is very comfortable for him that way.”
...As part of his contract, he is given free rein to indulge himself in this regard and to use Citigroup’s planes to do so.
(Anyone know if Rubin took/takes Citigroup planes to Corporation meetings?)
In 2005, Rubin used $330,000 worth of travel time, roughly three times as much as Price, the CEO, did.
I keep waiting for some journalist to take a more serious and sustained look at Bob Rubin. Is he really the kind of guy we want guiding the Democratic Party? Or Harvard? He is hugely wealthy, lives a privileged life, conducts as much of his business as he can in secret, and continually downplays his influence even as he labors to extend it.
The journalist who examines that sacred cow will have written a story worth reading....
