Reply #64: Thanks, Jef-Dem. Hey Jackson-Dem, about your tagline about Bill Clinton, think about this:

[Lefty-Taylor]

I know this is long and you may not want to read it but your Bill quote about the poor is such revisionist history. Remember Clinton championed the neo-con "welfare reform" act. This is Paul Street, often quoting the great Professor Zinn:

"Clinton's domestic agenda was first announced as a gigantic jobs-creation program coupled with a determined effort to guarantee health care for all. But, Zinn notes, Clinton quickly betrayed these declared campaign priorities by "concentrating on reduction of the deficit, which under Reagan and Bush I had left a national debt of $4 trillion." This emphasis, Zinn argued, "meant that there would be no bold programs of expenditures for universal health care, education, child care, housing, the environment, the arts, or job creation." Clinton's "small gestures" toward social democracy did "not come close to what was needed in a nation where one-fourth of the children lived in poverty; where homeless people lived on the streets in every major city; where women could not look for work for lack of child care; where the air, the water were deteriorating dangerously."

More than being merely inadequate to the needs of America's millions of truly disadvantaged citizens, the Clinton administration actually attacked the disproportionately non-white poor in numerous interrelated ways. Clinton signed a punitive neoliberal welfare "reform" bill that ended the federal government's guarantee of financial help to impoverished families with dependent children. By forcing poor families getting federal cash assistance (such families were mainly non-white single-parent units) to find employment without establishing concomitant government programs to create or directly provide livable wage jobs, Clinton flooded the nation's low- and poverty-wage and no-benefits job market with hundreds of thousands of defenseless new proletarians. He also scored points with the grinders of the poor by taking welfare benefits away from legal as well as illegal immigrants.

It was all done in the name of "Personal Responsibility," "Work Opportunity," and "Reconciliation," to use the key Orwellian phrases of the Clinton-Gingrich welfare-elimination regime.

Clinton enthusiastically signed a "Crime Bill" that expanded federal prison construction, helping turn the "land of freedom" into the world's leading incarceration state. Poor blacks made up a wildly disproportionate number of the Clinton era's massive and expanding army of prisoners and felony-marked "ex-offenders".

Meanwhile, Clinton increased economic insecurity in poor and working-class American communities by signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA destroyed tens of thousands of American industrial jobs by tearing down long-established regulatory barriers to the movement of corporate capital and commodities across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Clinton claimed that "the era of big government is over." He was more than content, however, to sustain funding for the regressive, repressive, and militaristic "right hand of the state." His concern with balanced budgets did not extend to the prison- and military- industrial complexes. As Zinn notes, Clinton's federal government "continued to spend at least $250 billion a year to maintain the military machine." Clinton "accept the Republican claim that the nation must be ready to fight two regional wars simultaneously, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989."

It was only the left hand of the state, the part that serves the poor and non-affluent majority, that Clinton targeted in his quest for deficit reduction."

Any thoughts?