Is the Democratic Party deliberately trying to commit suicide?   Why in the hell does it continue to embrace Robert Rubin? 

He is Clinton's former Treasury Secretary who helped kill New Deal regulations on the financial industry.  He's Wall Street scum. 

For me, President Obama showed his DINO credentials right out of the starting gate when he chose Rubin as his economic adviser and filled his team with Rubin acolytes like Summers and Geithner.  At that time, I wrote: "That's like having a drunk driver who caused terrible accidents give driving lessons.  Rubinomics is terrible.  For Pete's sake, Bob Rubin is a disastrous choice with his anti-working Americans, deregulation baggage.  This is a Republican lite, not a Democrat."    

Also those DINO majority leaders in 2008 were enamored with Rubin, ignoring labor leaders' warnings.  But many of those "leaders" were multi-millionaires so they were acting true to form.

I've written many times about the hypocrisy and terrible record of Robert Rubin.  Plug Robert Rubin into Quick Search on this site and read all about it, or as much as the stomach will allow.

Jonathan Tasini at Working Life writes about the current rehabilitation attempt: "Forget the criminals on Wall Street. What is more telling, troubling and almost bizarre is how quickly the chattering classes and political power brokers have shaken off the stain of the financial crisis, inviting back to center stage some of the very people responsible for destroying trillions of dollars in wealth and costing millions of people their jobs. To explain, let's look at the re-emergence of Robert Rubin as Democratic Party economic sage.

"Why even care about Robert Rubin? Robert Rubin was at the center of creating the world that spawned the collapse of the financial system, and, in the process, he acquired a personal fortune for himself. His whole persona and ego were wrapped up in his role as a major "fixer": a Wall Street Democrat who could be an emissary to all corners of the political and economic world. He was, along with his political patron, Bill Clinton, seen as the architect of the economic "good years" in the 1990s.

"He has now spent the past 2-3 years, evading his responsibility for the financial crisis, (mainly, in his role at Citigroup) by blaming others and, then, dropping below the radar screen. And it could be said, after reading his sworn testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, that he outright lied; if not lies of an indictable nature, then, certainly he had a convenient loss of memory and recollection. I'll come back to the Commission report in a moment.

"On February 25th 2011, Rubin was the moderator of a panel on job creation at the Democratic Governors Association meeting.

"So, here is the first point: Rubin's resurfacing at a Democratic Party forum presents a choice made between two visions. One vision--Rubin's--frames the challenges we face pretty much with the same foolish, and economically bankrupt, garbage that many Republicans are flogging: the deficit "crisis" is the main problem, that government is a problem and that our national economic crisis is about something called "competitiveness", and, if we are "serious" about all those issues, we can be a great nation again. Rubin makes a brief reference to the need to consider “tax rates and tax structures”, with no details.

"The second vision of the crisis--one I share, with many others--is something very different: we are locked in the greatest class warfare we've seen in 100 years; that Rubin's vision of the world, in fact, has accelerated that warfare and the widening divide between rich and poor; that the deficit and debt "crisis" is phony and manufactured; that we have plenty of money in the country if we had political leaders with the spine to tax the wealthy in a serious way; that "competitiveness" is a distraction from the urgent crisis of the complete collapse of a decent wage and standard of living in the world; and that being a great nation is about something bigger than "beating" other countries around the world. For example, valuing communities over profits. Oh, pshaw.

"It strikes me that, in choosing Rubin to embody what Democrats stand for, the party is embracing a bankrupt philosophy--and Rubin's failure, if you just judge simple competence, trumpets the bankruptcy of that philosophy.

"Robert Rubin believes in the foolish system we have had in place for the past three decades. No, he helped put in place, guard, defend and use that very system.

"Conclusion: Robert Rubin Should Be Radioactive. Giving him a forum, a way to rehabilitate himself, is a stain on the Democratic Party.

",,,,,so it just defies logic that anyone would turn to him for advice on how to run anything.

"But, most important, he carries the flag of a discredited economic philosophy. If Democrats want to keep walking behind that standard-bearer, then, we have not learned anything--and woe to the people of this country, and the planet, if we continue to blindly repeat the mistakes of the past 30-40 years by defending an economic system that has impoverished the many while enriching the few."