We Forget What It Was Really Like Under the Clintons [View All]

NAFTA failures; deregulation of banking and ENRON's rise; "Welfare Reform" that led to more poor people. This and more is what the Clintons gave us.

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The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major overhaul of United States telecommunications law in nearly 62 years. The broadcasting industry couldn't get the legislation through under Reagan or George H.W. Bush, but it succeeded under Clinton. The day he signed the bill into law, Clinton boasted, "Landmark legislation fulfills my administration's promise to reform our telecommunications laws in a manner that leads to competition and private investment, promotes universal service and provides for flexible government regulation."

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In 1999, the Financial Services Modernization Act overturned the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The Act effectively barred banks, brokerages and insurance companies from entering each others' industries, and separated investment banking and commercial banking. The law was enacted in response to revelations of gross corruption and manipulation of the market by giant banking houses that organized huge corporate mergers for their own profit, leading to the collapse of the stock market in 1929.

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Clintonism never saw a sector it didn't want to deregulate. Wholesale electricity deregulation began under George H.W. Bush, but Clinton worked relentlessly to extend it and bring it to the retail level. We forget that Ken Lay, the founder of Enron and the driving force behind electricity deregulation was a friend of and mentor to Clinton as well as George W. Bush. Enron gave $420,000 to Clinton's party over three years and donated $100,000 to his inauguration festivities.

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NAFTA was enacted despite the opposition of Clinton's own party. Two-thirds of House Republicans voted in favor while 60 percent of House Democrats voted against. In the Senate, Republicans voted 4-1 in favor while a slim majority of Democrats voted against.

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And then there is healthcare, an issue that Bai did comment on. History has been rewritten in regard to the Clintons' health initiative. Today it is viewed as a bold but failed effort. Even Michael Moore's movie, Sicko, paints this picture. Nonsense. It was Hillary who concluded that it was politically impossible even to argue for a single-payer system. Whether a single payer initiative would have won is unclear, although the national educational effort around it would have been of unparalleled value. But as it was, Hillary's political miscalculation led not only to the idea of universal health care coverage being taken off the table for the next 13 years, but the loss of the House of Representatives and the coming to power of Newt Gingrich and the Republican right.

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http://www.alternet.org/story/72336/?page=3

During his eight years in the White House, President Clinton oversaw an Iraq policy that killed over 350,000-500,000 children via sanctions, repeatedly bombed Iraq out of concern over WMD, and made regime change the official policy of the United States.

The most notable aspect of President Clinton's Iraq policy was his maintenance of a sanctions regime that decimated Iraq's economy and that was estimated to have killed 500,000 children. While the figures would later be disputed with lesser estimates of 350,000, their destructive impact is undeniable. Responding to concerns over the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright would famously state "I think it is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Ordinary Iraqis reported significant hardship from the sanctions, while food and medicine were lacking and the economy crumbled.