[Peace-discuss] The Clinton/Bush generation

[C. G. Estabrook]

Professorially, I'd recommend that David Harvey's A BRIEF HISTORY OF
NEOLIBERALISM become your bedside reading -- followed by the
soon-to-be-published THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER
CAPITALISM, by Naomi Klein. --CGE

John W. wrote:
> ... 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.
>> 
>> ###
>