kentuckycooner
New UKC Forum Member
Registered: Dec 2005
Location: KY
Posts: 7 |
ON SOME issues, Bill Clinton isn’t merely guilty of breaking campaign promises. In important ways, he and his pals stole parts of the Republican agenda wholesale, smoothed out the rough edges and presented it as their own.
The most obvious example is welfare "reform." In the 1994 congressional elections, Republicans--exploiting discontent with the stagnating economy and Clinton’s failure to implement health care reform--made huge gains, winning control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.
For a time, Clinton was considered to have been marginalized by the so-called "Republican revolution." But he staged a comeback in time to win reelection in 1996--by publicly connecting with the outrage at House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican right, while quietly adopting large parts of their program as his own.
Thus, with a few months to go before the 1996 election, Clinton agreed to the Republicans welfare "reform" legislation--which tore up decades of government assistance to the poor. The booming economy of the late 1990s hid the impact of welfare "reform" for a time, but its real consequence was to make the lives of the most vulnerable people in the U.S. that much harder--with Bill Clinton’s blessing.
Likewise, Clinton adopted right-wing law-and-order rhetoric to pass two "crime bills." The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, for example, limited appeals in death penalty cases, expanded the number of death penalty-eligible crimes, prohibited fundraising for vaguely defined "terrorist" organizations, and loosened rules against the deportation of legal immigrants--foreshadowing the even more repressive provisions of Bush’s USA PATRIOT Act.
Corporate America couldn’t have had too many complaints about the Clinton administration, either. The Clinton-backed Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 deregulated the radio market and set the stage for today’s media merger mania. Even as it was making a mess of health care reform, the administration pushed through the NAFTA free trade deal over the objections of many Democratic members of Congress and the opposition of organized labor.
By the late 1990s, as the U.S. economy boomed, workers’ wages finally began rising after nearly a decade of stagnation since the 1990-92 recession. But this increase barely made up for lost ground--while the already rich became massively richer during the boom. Democrats still celebrate the health of the economy during the Clinton years. But the reality is that working people never shared in the benefits of the longest economic expansion on recor
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