Why Lick the Boot that Kicks You?...
It is almost hard to believe now that the reason health insurance was on the Clintons' first agenda at all, back in 1992, was because there was a mini movement for single-payer in the country. Labor unions, citizens groups, doctors' and nurses' groups, some business leaders, had all been agitating, making it an election issue in other races, writing letters, organizing meetings, protests, media attention. Bill Clinton rode that wave and immediately after being elected, while in the transition, he asked his allies to shut up; Wall Street was already breathing down his neck, the right was bringing heat, trust him and he would, as promised, "put people first" when it came to health care. A protest caravan that had been planned was canceled. One of the biggest players in the coalition, the unions, so flattered to have a president who actually spoke to them, were eager to comply. Bill gave the job of health care reform to Hillary, who studiously interviewed all the players, at one point asking Dr. David Himmelstein, a major exponent of a Canadian-style system "where's the power?" behind such a reform. "Seventy-five percent of the American people," he answered, to which she replied, "Tell me something interesting."
The people never have been interesting to the Clintons, not in organized, confident form. They have been interesting as election props and poll numbers, and interesting as victims, atomized, whose pain could be felt, causes championed, and misery exploited. They are interesting to Bill on rope lines, as exemplars of popular adulation and individuals to be charmed or lectured. Hillary used to hate the rope lines, hate being touched, and in the 1992 campaign she used to make sure that big men were around her to keep the plebs at bay. That changed as her ambition grew and she discovered Purell instant hand santizer. Having purelled universal health care as a live issue for a generation, she's back at it, just where she wants to be, as an answer to a murmured prayer, among a populace mobilized for nothing but elections.
Bill Clinton bribed and buttered up every member of Congress he could to pass NAFTA in 1993. The unions made speeches and phone calls and rallied here and there, but it wasn't much of a fight. And it wasn't the only issue that labor failed to make into an energetic public case. Even as unions were being crushed by employer intimidation during representation campaigns, they didn't fight en masse for labor law reform while Clinton had a Democratic Congress, and they didn't fight, after the long night of Reaganism, for a seachange in government priorities, for an industrial policy, for reinvestment to end the bleeding of their jobs and their communities and the class. Organized labor vowed to throw out the bums who had passed NAFTA, but ended up backing most of them for re-election in 1994, and did nothing to organize globally with other losers in the aggressively pro-capital regimen of neoliberal capitalism. The Democrats lost Congress, which only made unions (if not their members) more loyal. Clinton lectured delegates to the AFL-CIO convention in 1995 about how he was right on NAFTA and right in his vision of retraining and lifetime learning and the high-tech tomorrow, and the union men and women stood, clapping and hollering their approval. They told their members he was all that stood between them and destruction in the form of Republicans, and mobilized voters for his re-election in 1996 and that of his v.p., Al Gore, in 2000. Now workers come to Hillary's rallies and her "town halls" telling reporters of the multiple agonies of their towns and their counties and repeating the rumor judiciously planted by campaign supporters in the press and on the streets: "You know, privately she was against NAFTA from the beginning." Now she is the solution, the savior for everything that ails them.
Anyone who wants chapter and verse on how cynical the Clinton team was on the price of deindustrialization should read Louis Uchitelle's book of a couple of years ago, The Disposable American. And for a refresher course in the realities of the "peace and prosperity" that the Clintons promise to bring back -- and anyone who has trailed the campaigns in a primary state cannot miss that "the Clintons" are indeed running as a team promising to do just that -- there is Robert Pollin's devastating account of global austerity at the end of the '90s, Contours of Descent. But the larger point is how they got away with it. The prison population and prison labor (engaged in everything from taking reservations to sewing jeans to building furniture and transmissions for pennies an hour) mushroomed under Clinton's three-strikes-you're-out and kindred crime policies, and organized labor didn't fight. Prisons expanded, and organized labor didn't fight. (To the extent that more cops and more prison guards and more construction crews were real or potential union members, this development was sometimes even welcomed.) Privatization moved apace here as in so many other sectors, and organized labor didn't fight. The prisons filled with young black and Latino men, and black leadership didn't fight, Latino leadership didn't fight, the civil rights movements didn't fight -- not in any robust, sustained and visible fashion, just like the unions with job loss, NAFTA and the decline in real wages. Now one in less than 100 adult Americans is locked up. That was a blip in the news during the campaigns in Ohio and Texas. Hillary Clinton called for even more cops on the streets, more community policing and only lastly a review of sentencing.
I don't know if Obama, then struggling to defend himself as someone who would not allow America's sleeping children to be slaughtered by foreigners, said anything at all. But there was no popular outcry he might have ridden or been pressured by, no mass organized black or Latino outcry, just as there had been none during the Clinton reign. Critics say Obama is isolated because he's maintained a careful distance from black leadership, and that is true, except that that leadership has allowed its children to be criminalized and locked up, and all the while cheered for Bill, rustled votes for Bill, just plain liked Bill, and in many cases signed on early to his wife's campaign without making mass incarceration an issue. Prisons have been the only real growth industry in Ohio's Mahoning County, home of Youngstown and its supposed population of fighters, and the county went 64 percent for Hillary on March 4.
http://www.counterpunch.org/wypijewski03082008.html
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