The Clinton Years:

Progressive Or Regressive?

by Mark Rathbun, We The People News Corpus Christi Texas

How soon we forget. When Bill Clinton first ran for president against George H.W. Bush he fought off claims that he was too inexperienced with these words, "The same old experience is not relevant." Clinton went on to extol the virtues of "experience" that is "rooted in the real lives of real people" exercised so that "it will bring real results if we have the courage to change."

Flash forward sixteen years and we are treated to the same Clinton now leading the charge against the alleged inexperience of Barack Obama. Never mind that Obama has served as an elected official four years longer than Mrs. Clinton. The encoded pitch both Clintons repeatedly use brushes aside that inconvenient fact. Hilary has called it the experience of "eight years with a front-row seat on history." Bill has called it a kind of "partnership" they exercised during his presidency. While both have been understandably vague when it comes to defining Hilary's exact role as First Lady, Clinton surrogates and insiders have flanked the campaign by connecting the dots with more direct statements.

One Clinton campaign official stated that Hillary was "the face of the administration in foreign affairs." Clinton friend, trade representative, and Commerce Secretary Mickey Cantor put it like this, "In the end, she was the last court of appeal for him when he was making a decision. I would be surprised if there was any major decision he made that she didn’t weigh in on." Clinton's White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum had this to say, "They really were a partnership. She was the absolutely necessary person he had to have to bounce things up against, and he was that for her. I sensed a tremendous need for each other."

Ultimately, on Saturday February 23rd as Hillary's once-large Texas lead in the polls nearly evaporated, Bill and Hillary's at-first-subtle message became at once crystal clear and contradictory respectively. According to the Caller-Times Bill Clinton told a Corpus Christi crowd on that Saturday "One big difference in these two campaigns is that Hillary believes we had it good in the 1990's, and we can do better now." On the same day Hillary lashed out at Obama in Ohio for allegedly falsely characterizing Clinton's pro-NAFTA stance. Apparently relying on the argument that "it all depends on what the meaning of the word 'Clinton' is", Hillary implied she was anti-NAFTA when in fact she has sung its praises publicly many times.

While many pundits have weighed in on the extent of Mrs. Clinton's influence during her husband's administration, curiously no one in the mainstream media seems to have examined just what the Clinton administration accomplished in eight years. They take it for granted the nineties were good times all around as Mrs. Clinton has so often reminded Americans from the stump. Was the Clinton administration good? Apparently, to the Clintons, it all depends on what the meaning of the word "good" is.

To provide a more concrete answer, we turned to the man who has come to be known as the most respected progressive historian in America, Howard Zinn. We examined issues on which the Clinton camp has invoked the 'Clinton White House experience' argument in Hillary's favor. Under each of those issues we provide a portion of text from Zinn's The Twentieth Century (HarperCollins, 2003) which constitutes a portion of his seminal A People's History of the United States. All Zinn passages appear in italics and are taken from the chapter The Clinton Presidency.

Universal Health Care

On the heels of losing ten straight primaries, Mrs. Clinton has lately become downright shrill in falsely accusing Mr. Obama of eschewing universal health care, recently claiming he will make millions of people "virtually invisible." Meanwhile, her husband has come up with a new line that both implies that electing Obama will be "tragic" and provides a convenient justification for his wife's failure to get universal health care inititiated when she was deputized to do so during his administration, "It would be truly tragic if the Democratic Party walked away from universal health care for the first time in 60 years when we finally got the business community and the medical community in line behind us." President Clinton's "only now are the moon and stars aligned" scenario would appear to be purely manufactured in the light of Mr. Zinn's take on history:

Despite Clinton's 1997 Inauguration Day promise of a "new government," his presidency offered no bold program to take care of those needs. For instance, although public-opinion polls through the eighties and nineties indicated that the American people would support a program of free universal medical care supported by the general treasury, Clinton was reluctant to advocate this. Instead, he put his wife Hillary, in charge of a commission whose final report was over a thousand pages long, impossibly dense and complicated, and yet offering no answer to the problem: how to assure every American medical care, free of the intervention of profiteering insurance companies.

It's the economy, stupid

When Obama was threatening her anticipated Super Tuesday sweep Mrs. Clinton played the "Clinton Years" card in spades in the Kodak theater debate in Hollywood. She invoked how well everyone was doing financially in the nineties implying she somehow shared in that alleged state of affairs. Mr. Zinn wrote the following about the economy during the Clinton years':

Clinton's small gestures would 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.

According to business magazine Forbes, the 400 richest families owned $92 billion in 1982, but thirteen years later this had jumped to $480 billion. In the nineties, the wealth of the 500 corporations of the Standard and Poor's Index had increated by 335 percent. The Dow Jones average of stock prices had gone up 400 percent between 1980 and 1995, while the average wage of workers had declined in purchasing power by 15 percent.

It was therefore possible to say that the U.S. economy was "healthy" -- but only if you considered the richest part of the population. Meanwhile, 40 million people were without health insurance (the number having risen by 33 percent during the nineties), and infants died of sickness and malnutrition at a rate higher than that of any other industrialized country. There seemed to be unlimited funds for the military, but people who performed vital human services, in health and education, had to struggle to barely survive...According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1998, one of every three working people in the United States had jobs paying at or below the federal poverty level.

Clinton's foreign economic policy was in keeping with the nation's history, in which both major parties were more concerned for corporate interests than for the rights of working people, here or abroad, and saw foreign aid as a political and economic tool more than as a humanitarian act.

Commander-In-Chief, ready on day one

In The Greatest Story Every Sold (The Penquin Press, 2006), author/columnist Frank Rich closely analyzed the campaign of fear George W. Bush and Karl Rove orchastrated against the country during the 2002 mid-term and 2004 presidential elections. Mr. Rich exposed the fact that Bush specifically targetted women of child-bearing and child-raising years, attempting to extort their votes by creating in their minds the ever-present danger of their children being blown away in a terrorist attack.

In 2008 Mrs. Clinton's adoption of the Bush/Rove tactic went largely unremarked. It began in earnest in the wake of the Iowa caucuses where Mr. Obama unexpectedly beat her by a large margin. The very next day, while stumping in New Hampshire Mrs. Clinton predicted that "terrorists" would test out the nerve of our next president by conducting some spectacular, mass-destruction strike in America. She, of course, swore she would be ready on day one. After all, who could be better battle tested than "the face of foreign policy" in the Clinton administration.

While the mainstream media largely gave President Clinton a pass when it came to his initiated military engagements, Mr. Zinn found that while Clinton pandered to the Military/Industrial complex with ever-spiraling appropriations his military engagements were some of the most ill-advised and badly executed in the history of America.

In Clinton's presidency, the government continued to spend at least $250 billion a year to maintain the military machine. He was accepting the Republican claim that the nation must be ready to fight "two regional wars" simultaneously, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. At that time, Bush's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had said, "the threats have become so remote that they are difficult to discern." General Colin Powell spoke similarly (reported in Defense News, April 8, 1991): "I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung."

Clinton seemed anxious to show strength. He had been in office barely six months when he sent the Air Force to drop bombs on Baghdad, presumably in retaliation for an assassination plot against George Bush on the ocassion of his visit to Kuwait. The evidence for such a plot was very weak, coming as it did from the notoriously corrupt Kuwaiti police, and Clinton did not wait for the results of the trial supposed to take place of those accused of the plot.

And so, U.S. planes, claiming to have targeted "Intelligence Headquarters" in the Iraqi capital, bombed a suburban neighborhood, killing at least six people, including a prominent Iraqi artist and her husband.

Columnist Molly Ivins suggested that the bombing of Baghdad for the purpose of "sending a powerful message" fit the definition of terrorism. 'The maddening thing about terrorists is that they are indiscriminate in their acts of vengeance, or cries for attention, or whatever...What is true for individuals...must also be true of nations.'

In Somalia, East Africa, in June 1993, with the country in a civil war and people desperate for food, the United States intervened late and badly...The Clinton administration made the mistake of intervening in an internal conflict between warlords. It decided to hunt down the most prominent of these, General Mohamed Aidid, in a military operation that ended with the killing of 19 Americans and perhaps 2,000 Somalis in October 1993.

The catastrophic policy in Somalia led to another one the following year, in Rwanda, where famine and murderous tribal warfare were ignored. There was a U.N. force in Rwanda that might have saved tens of thousands of lives, but the United States insisted that it be cut back to a skeleton force. The result was genocide -- at least a million Rwandans died.

By early 1997, the United States was selling more arms abroad than all other nations combined. Lawrence Korb, a Department of Defense official under Reagan but later a critic of arms sales, wrote: 'It has become a money game: an absurd spiral in which we export arms only to have to develop more sophisticated ones to counter those spread out all over the world."

International Trade: NAFTA

While Mrs. Clinton has lately adopted a Texas-Two-Step response on NAFTA questions since Mr. Obama has been pressing the point that the American-job devourer was signed during her presidential partnership, shortly after she launched her presidential bid she told Time magazine, "I think NAFTA was, in principle, a good idea to try to create a better trading market between Canada and the United States and Mexico." At other times, she has attempted to position NAFTA as something the Clinton administration unwillingly adopted from the first Bush. Again, Mr. Zinn's history tends to expose another Clinton attempt to rewrite history:

The slogan of "free trade" became an important objective for the Clinton administration, and, with the support of Republicans as well as Democrats, Congress enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico. This removed obstacles for corporate capital and goods to move freely back and forth across the Mexican-United States border...

Two economists for the Institute for Policy Studies, examining NAFTA in early 1995, after a year of its operation, found that it had caused a net loss of 10,000 U.S. jobs While more workers in Mexico were now hired by U.S. corporations that moved there, they were working at low wages, with 'lax enforcement of workers' rights and environmental standards.'

The claim of the United States to support 'free trade' was hardly to be believed, since the government interfered with trade when this did not serve the "national interests", which was a euphemism for corporate interest.

Immigration

We found no reference to Mrs. Clinton invoking her White House experience on the issue of immigration. However, given her emotional pandering to the Latino vote and professed deep, personal comitment to humane immigration policy, one might ask "where was she when her partner was cracking down ruthlessly on immigrants, both legal and undocumented?" After all, she has said she "was intimately involved in so much that went on in the White House, here at home and around the world." Mr. Zinn recounted the Clinton Administration's policies on immigration:

The reform spirit of the sixties had led to an easing of restrictions on immigration, but in the nineties, Democrats and Republicans alike played on the economic fears of working Americans. Jobs were being lost because corporations were firing employees to save money ("downsizing") or moving plants out of the country to more profitable situations. Immigrants, especially the large numbers coming over the southern border of Mexico, were blamed for taking jobs from citizens of the United States, for receiving government benefits, for causing higher taxes on American citizens.

Both major political parties joined to pass legislation, which Clinton then signed, to remove welfare benefits (food stamps, payments to elderly and disabled people) from not only illegal immigrants but legal immigrants...

Illegal immigrants fleeing poverty in Mexico began to face harsher treatment in the early nineties. Thousands of border guards were added...

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who had fled death squads in Guatamala and El Salvador while the United States was giving military aid to those governments now faced deportation because they had never been deemed "political" refugees. To admit that these cases were political would have given the lie to US. claims at the time that those repressive regimes were improving their human rights record and therefore deserved to continue receiving military aid.

In early 1996, Congress and the President joined to pass an "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act," allowing deporation of any immigrant ever convicted of a crime, no matter how long ago or how serious. Lawful permanent residents who had married Americans and now had children were not exempt. The New York Times reported that July that "hundreds of long-term legal residents have been arrested since the law passed." There was a certain irrationality to this new law, for it was passed in response to the blowing up of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, who was native born.

The new government policy toward immigrants, far from fulfilling Clinton's promise of "a new government for a new century," was a throwback to the notorious Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 and the McCarthy-era McCarren-Walter Act of the 1950s.

Electability

For several months the Clinton campaign has been pimping out Bill to double team Mr. Obama in every primary state. Just who the candidate truly is has sometimes become so confusing some media have resorted to calling it the Billary ticket. Billary continually hammers home the "electability" issue, claiming it has been 'tested and vetted' and been elected to the White House twice, while its opponent only offers "rhetoric." But did the Clinton Presidency ever win a mandate from American voters? And did it deliver on its own rhetoric? Mr. Zinn wrote the following about Bill's two Presidential campaigns:

Clinton had barely won election both times. In 1992, with 45 percent of the voting population staying away from the polls, he only received 43 percent of the votes, the senior Bush getting 38 percent, while 19 percent of the voters showed their distates for both parties by voting for a third-party candidate, Ross Perot. In 1996, with half the population not voting, Clinton won 49 percent of the votes against a lackluster Republican candidate, Robert Dole.

There was a distinct absence of voter enthusiasm. One bumper sticker: "If God had intended us to vote, he would have given us candidates.

At his second inauguration ceremony, Clinton spoke of the nation at the edge of 'a new century, in a new millennium.' He said: "We need a new government for a new century." But Clinton's rhetoric was not matched by his performance.

Al Qaeda’s choice for President

by Mark Rathbun

If Hillary Clinton successfully robs the Democratic nomination as she has vowed to do anti-war Democrats would be well advised to cross the party line and vote for John McCain.

Militarist, temper-tantrum-prone McCain, you ask? Without question.

Hillary Clinton has become so possessed in her crusade to be king she has taken to Rovian scare tactics. Her 3 a.m. phone call ad in fact is far more crass and devious than any Bush ad of his 2004 reelection campaign. Bush was no saint, but do you recall him ever showing close ups of infant’s sleeping faces to strike fear into the hearts of women of child-bearing, child-rearing, and grandchild-savoring years?

Clinton first played the fear card in spades the day after losing her blouse in the Iowa caucuses. There she predicted terrorist attacks in the wake of the general election, implying America would become a Jihadist battleground should Americans be so naive as to elect her opponent.

More recently she had the temerity to state to the American public that she and John McCain are qualified to serve as Commander in Chief, while her Democratic opponent Barack Obama is decidedly not.

And that is where we begin our character analysis. A week after gushingly telling Mr. Obama on national television that it "is an honor" to sit beside him, Mrs. Clinton tells the country she’d prefer to sit with the Republican candidate and that when it comes to the Oval Office Mr. Obama should not be allowed through the door, let alone permitted to sit at the table. On a personal level most regular folks would consider such a facile two-faced spine stabbing about as cowardly and distasteful as one can get. But when one considers she had just completed a Texas campaign where she overtly fanned what she perceived to be a Latino racist view toward African Americans, well, one might read more into it.

For those in doubt about Clinton’s eagerness to play on Mr. Obama’s race and culture should look up her recent 60 Minutes interview where she not-so-subtlely attempted to stoke the unconsionable "Islamic" smear campaign. If she’s willing to do such to a red, white and blue United States Senator, what do you think she’ll do with the millions of people of color who live atop the majority of the world’s known oil reserves? And isn’t she already starting it by implication?

Now assume Al Qaeda is contemplating a terrorist strike in order to influence the election as Mrs. Clinton has predicted. What outcome would they be attempting to achieve? Elect Barack Obama, who of all candidates has more potential for bringing world sentiment back onto the side of the United States of America? That result would further isolate violent extremists and cut off the rich pool of fresh recruits that the Bush administration’s reactionary, Anglo-Christian supremecy policy has replenished over and over again.

Elect John McCain, who while clearly no dove and not the calmest of the three remaining candidates, was outspoken against the excesses of the Iraq campaign that flamed Anti-American passions throughout the Islamic world?

Or elect Hillary Clinton, who by every indication cannot wait to bomb Palestine, invade Iran, and prove her masculine mettle? The petulant candidate, who strikes back with vengence whenever her perceived enemy seems to make an advance, even when that opponent does not demonstrate the slightest ill will toward her. The candidate whose opponent is consistently hit by her campaign with encoded racist attacks and yet never complains of it, while she squeals like a stuck razorback pig about the "prejudice" against her to explain every dip in the polls. The candidate who will rundown her fellow Democrat as "dangerous" for offering the idea we might advance our national interests by communicating with other nations or the notion we ought to hunt down the actual culprits of the 911 attacks rather than begin new extremist-enabling middle east conflagerations.

By now you might be thinking "but, geez, why on earth would extremists want a hawk like that in power?" Simple. The more chaos and destruction the U.S. sows, the more anarchy, the more ill-will toward the West spreads through the Islamic world. The more likely in the minds of extremists that Jihad - all out sectarian war - is achievable.

Then why John McCain over Hillary Clinton? John McCain, for all his chest beating, understands these dynamics. For all his personal temperment faults, none have seemed to influence his official actions or public utterances. John McCain does not need to prove his machismo.

For all Clinton’s questionable claims of 35 years of stoic public service, she cannot mask her vindictive temper. Just watch her face while Mr. Obama speaks during debates. Listen carefully to the encoded racist undertones of her attacks on her opponent. Hear her consistently "tough" foreign policy talk. Her apparent need to prove her masculinity promises us another eight years of George Bush in a gaudy pant suit.

Continued bellicose saber rattling and might-makes-right foreign policy would be a boon to Al Qaeda and their ilk.

The last thing extemists want is a rational, peaceful and tolerant leader of the United States of America. It would fairly put them out of business.

Just when you thought race was no longer an issue

by Mark Rathbun, We The People News Corpus Christi, Texas

While the major news networks, owned - to a one - by even more major corporations, have decided they have done their "liberal" best by inviting Barack Obama into the house, they have more recently decided he will not be permitted into the dining room, let alone be allowed to sit at the table. After all, there appeared to be for a moment the real possibility he might stride right for the head of the table.

Surprised? If you know the sordid history of this country - and not just the pablum creation myth that the American public is forced to ingest from the cradle - you wouldn’t be.

By mid-March the very best newspapers across the country were full of commentary by brilliant pundits telling us we should not flinch at Clinton’s continual playing of the gender card.

Every primary loss, every sag in the polls, every faux pas by herself or her royal husband is explained away - without challenge - with just how tough it is to be a white woman in America.

At the same time the spinmeisters masquerading as analysts and journalists have taken to telling us we should scrutinize the black man "we know so little about."

The right wing has resorted to the sophomoric (actually early elementary school) tactic of exaggeratedly invoking Mr. Obama’s middle name to evoke deep-seated, well-concealed racial prejudices in this land of the free. The "liberal" media has flanked it by demanding Mr. Obama denounce a controversial black Muslim’s praise of the candidate. Of course, Scarlet O’hare...uh... Hillary Clinton... was simply shocked at the temerity of Mr. Obama’s failure to add the verb "reject" to "denounce." She further fanned the flames of prejudice on 60 Minutes by refusing to "denounce or reject" the attempts to smear Mr. Obama by the Islamic innuendo.

In January, even the generally pro-Obama New York Times columnist Frank Rich came down on Mr.Obama like a ton of bricks when he got so uppity as to tell Hillary "you are likable enough." Rich called it a "most inhuman" moment for the Illinois senator.

The national media tells us it is ok for a Southern belle to smear and disrespect a well-intentioned black man. Just as certainly that same media will tell a black man 'should you make even the most innocent of snide sounding remarks to a respectable white lady you are guilty of "inhuman" crimes.

A double standard has been created by the national media and the filthy rich white fellows who own them. Pure and simple.

To those who are not of the privileged race in America the picture is becoming crystal clear. A well educated African American woman put very succinctly, "it all goes to show it is still easier to be a white woman than a black anything in this country."