Joe Biden’s Rooseveltian Ambitions Are Officially Dead

Austerity-minded Jeff Zients’s appointment as White House chief of staff signals Joe Biden’s return to the fiscal hawkishness that has always been his sweet spot

di Branko Marcetic

With the grand ambitions of Joe Biden’s first year or so dead and buried, the 2022 midterms seemed to serve as a chapter break ending the first, pseudo-Rooseveltian phase of his presidency. We can’t know exactly what the next phase is going to entail, but we may have just gotten a big clue.

Among the big news out of Dc this week is that Biden is replacing outgoing chief of staff Ron Klain with Jeff Zients, millionaire and former Covid-19 czar. This has, for good reason, sparked outrage among progressives, who view Zients’s panoply of conflicts of interest, private equity past, and mishandling of the pandemic as disqualifying.
Despite Klain’s questionable record, he won progressives over through what seemed like genuine efforts at outreach, making them feel — unusually, for a modern White House occupied by either party — that their ideas were being factored into policymaking. Zients would’ve struggled to fill his shoes no matter what. But his sketchy past has made that a particularly tall order, and possibly signals that Biden is ready to ditch the already tenuous progressive populist approach of his first two years.

So Long, Social Contract
Progressives and good government groups were already less than enthused by Zients when he was picked to head Biden’s pandemic response, given his corporate background. For one, Zients got his start out of college, as he explained in 2014, at “a company that I didn’t talk a lot about for a period of time but now I talk openly about, which is Bain & Company in Boston,” where he had a “great experience.” The reason he hadn’t talked about it was that Bain, once headed by Barack Obama’s 2012 election opponent Mitt Romney, had been the target of a quite justified demonization campaign by the Obama camp, which depicted it a ruthless corporate raider.

Zients made his real break at the Advisory Group, and then its spin-off, the Corporate Executive Board, a management consulting firm that compiled confidential details from executives into reports about best and worst business practices, which it then sold back to the corporate world. What did that advice entail? Don’t bother trying to reestablish the social contract between worker and boss after a round of layoffs because it’s gone forever.

As groups like the Revolving Door Project pointed out, this wasn’t even the worst of it. One of the companies Zients’s investment firm Cranemere bought had a history of allegations of surprise billing and other shady practices, a pattern common to several other companies owned by the firm. Other health care firms Zients was involved with over the years had to pay out tens of millions of dollars to settle accusations of fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid billing, with the whistleblower who brought the offense to light claiming she’d been told by management to let it go in case the government never noticed.

Continua la lettura su Jacobin