[Peace-discuss] Blame Clinton (not Paul)

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Blame Clinton, Not Paul
	Posted on May 25, 2010
	By Robert Scheer

What is so great about our bloated federal government that when a libertarian 
threatens to become a senator, otherwise rational and mostly liberal pundits 
start frothing at the mouth? What Rand Paul thinks about the Civil Rights Act, 
passed 46 years ago, hardly seems the most pressing issue of social justice 
before us. It’s a done deal that he clearly accepts.

Yet Paul’s questioning the wisdom of a banking bailout that rewards those who 
shamelessly exploited the poor and vulnerable, many of them racial minorities, 
is right on target. So too questioning the enormous cost of wars that as he 
dared point out are conducted in violation of our Constitution and that, I would 
add, though he doesn’t, prevent us from adequately funding needed social programs.

Under the leadership of President Bill Clinton, Wall Street secured the radical 
deregulation of the financial industry that its lobbyists had long sought. I 
opposed that betrayal of the sensible policies of the last great Democratic 
president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I suspect that Paul applauded the move 
as an extension of the free market that he so uncritically celebrates.

Where I agree with him is that with freedom comes responsibility, and when the 
financial conglomerates abused their freedom, they, and not the victims they 
swindled, should have borne the consequences. Instead, they were saved by the 
taxpayers from their near-death experience, reaping enormous profits and bonuses 
while the fundamentals of the world economy they almost destroyed remain rotten, 
as attested by the high rates of housing foreclosures and unemployment and the 
tens of millions of newly poor dependent on government food handouts.

But the poor will not find much more than food crumbs from a federal government 
that, thanks to another one of Clinton’s “reforms,” ended the federal obligation 
to deal with the welfare of the impoverished. Yes, Clinton, not either Paul, 
father Ron or son. It was Clinton who campaigned to “end welfare as we know it,” 
and as a result the federal obligation to end poverty, once fervently embraced 
by even Richard Nixon, was abandoned.

Concern for the poor was devolved to the state governments, and they in turn are 
in no mood to honor the injunction of all of the world’s great religions that we 
be judged by how we treat the least among us. That would be poor children, and 
it is unconscionable that state governments across the nation are cutting 
programs as elemental as the child care required when you force single mothers 
to work.

“Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers” ran the headline in The New 
York Times on Sunday over a story detailing how in a dozen states there are now 
sharp cuts in child care for the poor who find jobs, and how there are now long 
lists of kids needing child care while their mothers work at low-paying jobs at 
places like Wal-Mart. In Arizona, there is a waiting list of 11,000 kids 
eligible for child care. That is what passes for success in the welfare reform 
saga, with mothers forced off the rolls into a workplace bereft of promised 
child care that the cash-strapped states no longer wish to supply.

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A couple of weeks ago came the news—reading like a page out of Dickens (or 
perhaps like a parody from The Onion )—that the Terminator was again in action, 
this time terminating California’s programs for the poor. The son-in-law of 
Sargent Shriver, who once ran the federal war on poverty, Gov. Arnold 
Schwarzenegger now seeks to eliminate the Golden State’s CalWorks program. By 
ending the once celebrated program along with child care funding, Schwarzenegger 
expects to save $2.2 billion. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Ending 
CalWorks, which provides recipient families with an average of $500 per month, 
would make California the only state not to offer a welfare program for 
low-income families with children.”

Schwarzenegger apparently doesn’t care; poor kids can’t complain too loudly, and 
while the governor backed down in his earlier threats to cut funding for 
somewhat more privileged college kids who protested those cuts loudly, he found 
the safety net for the poor an easier target: “You cannot have a safety net if 
you don’t have the money for that safety net.”

Sure you can’t, and so the safety net is being shredded in state after state, 
but why don’t we have the money, and why was responsibility for the poor left to 
the tender mercy of state governments while the federal government maintains a 
lavish welfare system for needy bankers who treat a few billion in government 
bailouts as chump change?

I am not a libertarian; I proudly remain a bleeding-heart liberal, as befits one 
who began life in a family on the dole during the Depression. But if the federal 
government exists primarily to serve super-rich defense contractors and bankers 
while ignoring the poor, I say it is time to expose as the enemy of progress the 
Washington bureaucracy that tends to the greedy rich at the expense of the truly 
needy. That is the problem; Rand Paul is the distraction.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blame_clinton_not_paul_20100525/

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