[Peace-discuss] The Clinton/Bush generation

[C. G. Estabrook]

[There are few things more disgusting in contemporary US politics than a 
Democrat slavering for a Clinton Restoration.  Bush is in fact a 
thoroughly worthy purveyor of the Clinton legacy, as Bill Clinton 
himself was of Bush I/Reagan. A pox on both their houses. --CGE]

	
CHRIS HEDGES, ALTERNET - The misery sweeping across the American 
landscape may have begun with Ronald Reagan, but it was accelerated and 
codified by Bill Clinton. He sold out the poor and the working class. 
And Clinton did it deliberately to feed the pathological hunger he and 
his wife have for political power. It was the Clintons who led the 
Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough.

The Clintons argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer 
a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers would vote 
Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, the Clintons 
argued, to take corporate money and use government to service the needs 
of the corporations. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's 
leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans. In 
political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the 
Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and 
prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. 
Goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be 
happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to 
happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA 
would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United 
States. . .

Clinton's welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, 
obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, 
many of them single parents, off of the welfare rolls within three 
years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent 
subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into 
crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an 
hour, or less than $15,000 a year.

But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped 
from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by 
$115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid 
funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of 
the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill.

The growing desperation provided a pool of broken people willing to work 
for low wages and without unions or benefits. And while Clinton was busy 
selling out the poor, he lowered the capital gains tax from 28 percent 
to 20 percent, a reduction that permitted the wealthiest 1 percent of 
the population to derive 80 percent of the tax savings. Clinton, like 
George W. Bush, also provided lavish government funding for his 
corporate backers, including in 1998 a $200-billion highway and 
transportation package for the big construction companies and a 
$17-billion increase in the military budget.

This was the largest increase in military spending since the end of the 
Cold War. Corporations, flush with government aid, saw their taxes 
dwindle. Amway, for example, had its taxes cut during the Clinton years 
by an estimated $280 million. The Clinton and Bush administrations, 
through tax breaks and corporate bailouts, have squandered billions of 
our tax dollars on corporate welfare.

	###