March 14, 2015
Lydia DePillis and Jim Tankersley had an interesting wonkblog piece on how even mainstream Democrats are now at least paying lip service to the argument that unions are necessary to reduce inequality. The piece includes a pro-union statement from Robert Rubin who it describes as someone “whom liberals consider overly friendly to Wall Street.”
This misrepresents Rubin’s background. Robert Rubin was a top executive at Goldman Sachs before coming to the Clinton administration. After leaving the Clinton administration he went to Citigroup where he made tens of millions of dollars from the marketing of subprime mortgage backed securities. The reason that Robert Rubin has influence in policy debates is because he is very rich from the money he made on Wall Street and he can get other very rich Wall Street types to donate money to Democratic candidates and favored causes. Given his background, referring to Robert Rubin as someone who is “close to Wall Street” would be like referring to Rich Trumka as someone who is close to organized labor.
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