Stop Me Before I Vote Again

J Alva passed along this link:

... as Democrats hope to take over control of the House from Republicans and as an aspiring presidential class of 2008 becomes more assertive, the Hamilton Project, named after the founding father and onetime Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, is arguably [ former Clinton Treasury Secretary and financial Svengali Robert] Rubin's most overt political act since he stepped down from the Treasury in 1999....

Housed in the Brookings Institution, the initiative embraces a number of mainstream economic prescriptions - like the necessity of equitable international trade agreements, the virtues of a balanced budget, and making economic growth more broad-based....

But by addressing issues like the costs to the economy of excessive litigation and regulation, Mr. Rubin intends to make the project a laboratory for the type of pragmatic, ideology-free policies that appeal to the project's Wall Street advisers while also hoping to lure Democratic presidential candidates away from populist economic positions. And with Mr. Rubin and his successor and friend Lawrence H. Summers on board, it will also be a training ground for the next crop of financiers with ambitions to shape policy in a Democratic administration.

They include those who have done so, like Roger C. Altman, the chairman of Evercore and a former deputy Treasury secretary; those who aspire to do so, like Steven Rattner of Quadrangle, the private equity firm; and, perhaps most important, younger Wall Street executives just now flirting with the idea.

It is with this last group of executives, drawn largely from the booming world of hedge funds and private equity, that Mr. Rubin has loomed large as an Obi-Wan Kenobi figure.

In the 1980's he cultivated their early careers as arbitrage traders at Goldman Sachs, and he is now guiding them in the ways of securing influence in Washington.

Eric Mindich, who runs Eton Park, a $5 billion hedge fund, led Goldman's arbitrage desk at the age of 25, and in 1994, at 27, became Goldman's youngest partner ever.... He is also a contributor to Mr. Rubin's favorite senator, Kent Conrad, the Democrat from North Dakota.

Then there is Richard C. Perry, who left Goldman's arbitrage desk in 1988 to form Perry Partners, now an $11 billion hedge fund. And Thomas F. Steyer, the founder of Farallon Capital, a $16 billion hedge fund, who also worked under Mr. Rubin in the 1980's and was an adviser to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004.

So, fellow plebeians, do you feel like this Wall Street gang is going to be looking out for our interests if they ride the donkey to victory? It's a bit like Dirty Harry's famous poser: "You've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"