I was one of a smallish group of bloggers who met Bill Clinton yesterday at the Clinton Global Initiative.1 The interview was supposed to be exclusively about the Initiative, but about 70% of the conversation ended up focusing on the financial turmoil. For the benefit of anyone who’s interested, my impression (based on notes – no recording was allowed) below the fold. Dana Goldstein, who was at the event too, has more to say “here”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=09&year=2008&base_name=bill_clinton_revisits_his_econ.
Obituaries here and here. I should say upfront that I never met Camejo, but we had many associates in common. The people I knew who had been expelled from the SWP around the same time regarded him with something like reverence; in fact it always seemed to me that he was the one person who could have led the various layers of people who were expelled into some sort of alternative grouping. Perhaps he thought that would have been a bad thing to do; if so, perhaps he was right. He preferred to put his efforts (and his not inconsiderable financial support) into a wider range of (admittedly only somewhat) broader efforts. After expulsion from the SWP he worked for Merrill Lynch; and after being expelled from there he was a major figure in the socially responsible investing movement. According to the wikipedia article, he participated in the 1960 Olympics on the Venezualan yachting team.
We were talking about him over dinner last night and, finding out he was a socialist, my 11-yr-old said “oh well, then he’d have supported Obama”. My response: “I wouldn’t bet on it”. Merrill Lynch outlived him by a week. I’m sorry that he’s gone.
Update: a touching memoir from Louis Proyject gives you a real sense of the man and his world.
Steven Poole is taking a break from blogging, so we can’t get his thoughts on the “clean bailout” as an example of Unspeak. To me the natural association is something like “clean handover” as in “I want a clean handover. Leave the money in unmarked used bills, no tricks and no police, nobody gets hurt”