[Peace-discuss] The Clinton/Bush generation

[John W.]

At 09:42 PM 9/18/2007, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

>[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]


Just imagine....if Hillary Clinton is elected President in 2008, and serves 
out two full terms, we will have had either a Clinton or a Bush in the 
White House for 28 consecutive years!  Add to that Reagan's 8 years, and 
you have more than a third of a century of mind-numbing, economy-draining 
corporate conservatism.

Carl, what was your professorial reaction to this sentence:  "NAFTA would 
also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States. . ." ?

JW



>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.
>
>         ###