COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Lloyd Bentsen, Comforter to the Haves : Clinton has killed any chance of real economic reform.

“Fundamental change” is not the phrase that springs to mind on contemplation of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s features. Like a gently eroded landscape, those folds and tucks and dewlaps speak to a spirit of sedate continuity, unsurprising in a conservative Texas businessman who has risen over the years to the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee.

Yet here is Bentsen, all but confirmed as secretary of the Treasury in a Clinton Administration that is fleeing pell-mell from campaign promises to alter the basic coordinates of economic policy-making.

Vested in the person of Lloyd Bentsen we have in harmonious symphony all those forces that wish profoundly to leave the basic coordinates of economic policy pretty much in place. Bentsen stands for bipartisanship in the spirit that the Haves of this country understand that comforting word.

It was Bentsen, after all, who broke ranks with his fellow Democrats in the summer of 1981 and proceeded to the White House Rose Garden, there to stand behind Ronald Reagan with 10 other legislators, all but three Republican, in support of the flat-rate three-year tax cut that launched the pig-out years.

Bentsen, up for reelection in 1982, was understandably eager to cut a deal with Reagan to ease taxes on oil producers, reduce estate and gift taxes and give breaks on depreciation. In the wake of the Bentsen defection, the Houston Post quoted “a high-level Democrat” charging that Bentsen and his ilk “committed a deliberate, planned act of betrayal. . . . In many cases they are paying off the ultraconservatives who financed their campaign.”

Bentsen continued this strategy of compromise through the Reagan years, extending it to support of military aid to El Salvador and of the covert war against Nicaragua. Summoned as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in 1988, he reined in any populist talk.

When Michael Dukakis began to charge the Reagan Administration with culpability in the savings-and-loan debacle, Bentsen (in William Greider’s words in “Who Will Tell The People?”) “communicated to campaign headquarters that this was not going to be a winning issue for their ticket.” Earlier in his business/political career, Bentsen’s holding company, Lincoln Consolidated, owned Benjamin Franklin Savings; he no doubt had an exceptionally broad understanding of the problems of that unfortunate industry.

Bentsen also has a broad understanding of the needs of landowners (he inherited ample ranch holdings along the Rio Grande) and the insurance business (that’s where he made his own fortune.) No politician-businessman from Texas is going to cast an unduly critical eye at the Free Trade Agreement with Mexico.

Bentsen’s campaign contributions offer a useful aid to understanding political economy in practice: For the years 1990 through 1992, $222,850 from finance, insurance and real estate concerns, $221,900 from lawyers and lobbyists. A note on bipartisanship: On Nov. 20, 1991, Bentsen received 18 contributions totaling $9,550 from Baker & Botts, the Houston law firm of the last Texan to inhabit the Treasury secretary’s office, James A. Baker III.

Also between 1990 and 1992, (all this according to the National Library on Money and Politics) Bentsen got $13,500 from the Wall Street finance house, Goldman, Sachs and Co. He will be able to thank Goldman, Sachs executive Robert Rubin in person, since Rubin is now scheduled to stand alongside Bentsen at Clinton’s elbow as head of the newly created Economic Security Council.

Another Wall Streeter, Roger Altman, is to be Bentsen’s second-in-command at the Treasury. Altman hails from the Blackstone Group, which made a fortune on mergers and acquisitions in the high-rolling 1980s, and which continues to make a bundle selling discounted debt from failed S&Ls.; This is what continuity is all about. Another of Altman’s partners at Blackstone, active in S&L; debt-brokering, is David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, whose deregulation policy led to the looting of the S&Ls; (and hence the debts he’s now making money from).

With Leon Panetta and Alice Rivlin at OMB, deficit-busting is the order of the day. And Messrs. Bentsen, Altman and Rubin will make sure that the necessary pain does not fall too heavily on the Haves. This is the team that is supposed to drag America away from the path of business as usual, extricating economic policy from the grip of Wall Streeters and corporations.

Appointing Berkeley professor and trade expert Laura Tyson to the Council of Economic Advisers is so meager a sop to reformists as to be insulting. Clinton has already signed the death warrant for his Administration as an agent of egalitarian economic change.