I wish Bill Clinton was president again the 90s were exciting economy was great america was great
41-45, M
FreestyleArt · 36-40, M
Reason10 · 70-79, M
Jobs? Another KKKlinton failure
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/bill-clinton-neoliberalism-welfare-nafta/
Review of A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism by Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein (Princeton University Press, 2023)
What did get passed was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Though it was not the most economically consequential, the authors argue that it “remains the most politically and ideologically toxic” issue pushed by Clinton, a “political blunder of the first order” that opened up an opportunity for the Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections and alienated large segments of the working class who, as Lichtenstein underscores, eventually became a significant proportion of today’s Donald Trump supporters.
Although Northerners were the most vocal opponents of NAFTA, it hit the South harder than the North. No demographic in the United States shifted more decisively to the GOP in 1994 than Southern whites, particularly those whose education ended with a high school degree or less. Ironically, NAFTA’s impact on US employment was not great. In the two decades after the trade bill passed, just forty thousand jobs were lost each year, a very small fraction of the nation’s larger job churn. In contrast, Mexican employment in agriculture tripled in just four years to 762,000 jobs.
But there was a deeper impact. Blue-collar workers were constantly attacked by threats that their plants would be closed if they tried organizing or striking, keeping organized workers very much on the defensive.
From Workers to Wall Street
Peter Edelman, long one of Clinton’s most progressive colleagues, was more than upset when Clinton signed a bill overhauling the country’s welfare system — the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It had attracted many Republican votes in Congress, turning welfare over to states with a huge emphasis on “welfare to work” — a system predicated on mothers getting back to work no matter how young their children.
“After all the noise and heat over the past two years about balancing the budget,” Edelman pointed out, “the only deep, multi-year budget cuts actually enacted were those in this bill, affecting low-income people.” A decade later, around 60 percent of mothers had found some work, but that statistic would deteriorate after the 2008 crisis, when poverty made a serious comeback.
In the 1990s, as Clinton became more dependent on Republicans, Social Security — the nation’s emblematic retirement program — was under severe pressure. A multimillion-dollar public relations program preached that it would soon run out of money and needed to be privatized — run by Wall Street, which was salivating to get its hands on the FDR-mandated fund.
Relatively few realized that Social Security was severely hampered by a regressive cap, which could and would greatly increase everyone’s benefits if lifted. Yet during the Clinton years, the public was under the belief that social security was close to failure. At no time had it come so close to being taken over by Wall Street, a situation that Clinton was reportedly considering seriously.
A strange phenomenon occurred. As the Monica Lewinsky scandal unfolded, Clinton was forced to turn to old-style Democrats for votes to help him stay in office. It was their support — at that moment — that pushed the administration away from privatizing Social Security. As Clinton confided to Republican apparatchik William Archer, “I’ve stiffed organized labor on trade. I can’t stiff them again.”
Afterward, he became estranged from the most consequential trade issues his administration would face. “That vacuum would be filled by men and women whose ideology, and the deregulatory free market statecraft that flowed from it, did much to firmly stamp the label ‘neoliberal’ on the Clinton presidency,” write Lichtenstein and Stein.
At a Manhattan meeting of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street insider and attacker of Social Security Pete Peterson introduced Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — a former CEO of Goldman Sachs — by saying “people sleep better because Bob Rubin is secretary of the treasury.” Rubin had become the most powerful cabinet head by this time and, by some count, almost a de facto president.
A big part of the neoliberal appeal was that it offered those with the right educational and cultural backgrounds a “transnational capacity to . . . build new careers.” When the average Joe began actively trading in the stock market, Wall Street insiders could start cashing out.
The most cataclysmic event during these years was the so-called shock therapy applied to Russia, throwing millions into poverty as jobs vanished, the ruble was devalued, and life became extremely precarious. Although company seizures and privatizations were propelled by Russian oligarchs, they were, according to Lichtenstein and Stein, “offered ideological guidance and financial support by the same Treasury circles that had played such an influential role in the IMF effort to transform Asian capitalism along lines more attuned to Wall Street standards.”
The political tone of the late 1990s was captured by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman sneering at anti-globalization protestors in Seattle as a “Noah’s Ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960’s fix.” Clinton’s main public relations ploy was to cast the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting — which collapsed on multiple fronts — as “globalization with a human face.”
Yet globalization, write Lichtenstein and Stein, carried on brutally on the American end. Of the 3.5 million jobs lost in the United States over this period, at least half were from an influx of imported Chinese products. After a while, it became clear that China’s accession to the WTO generated a “China shock,” with one academic paper analyzing the “surprisingly swift” decline of US manufacturing during the end of the Clinton years.
Although it had taken a decade for Congress to pass legislation clearing China’s entrance to the WTO, things happened quickly. Only 35 percent of Democrats voted for the agreement, but the Senate easily passed it. From then on, issues like trade would be handled by the WTO. Within months of its passage, more than 80 corporations, from Walmart to Home Depot, announced plans to shift production to China, with retailers telling numerous small and medium-size US manufacturers that if they could not meet “the China price” — a phrase Business Week called “the three scariest words in U.S. industry” — they could either close up or transfer production to China.
By 2006, Walmart was responsible for $27 billion in US imports from China — up from $9.5 billion in 2001. By then, 80 percent of the six thousand foreign factories in Walmart’s supplier database were located in China. One thing to be learned from A Fabulous Failure is that, in many ways, Bill Clinton was the best “good ol’ boy” governor the region had ever produced for its wealthiest citizens. It was, and still is, a massive corporate bonanza — certainly not for the many, but for those who really counted.
In the days leading up to his nomination, few saw who Clinton really was. By the time he ascended to power, it was too late. And in writing off decent, well-paid American blue-collar jobs as integral to the economy, the devastation he wrought has not ended. Clinton marked the end of the Democratic Party as a body naturally supported by the working class, spawning instead the incredible popularity of Trump.
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/bill-clinton-neoliberalism-welfare-nafta/
Review of A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism by Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein (Princeton University Press, 2023)
What did get passed was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Though it was not the most economically consequential, the authors argue that it “remains the most politically and ideologically toxic” issue pushed by Clinton, a “political blunder of the first order” that opened up an opportunity for the Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections and alienated large segments of the working class who, as Lichtenstein underscores, eventually became a significant proportion of today’s Donald Trump supporters.
Although Northerners were the most vocal opponents of NAFTA, it hit the South harder than the North. No demographic in the United States shifted more decisively to the GOP in 1994 than Southern whites, particularly those whose education ended with a high school degree or less. Ironically, NAFTA’s impact on US employment was not great. In the two decades after the trade bill passed, just forty thousand jobs were lost each year, a very small fraction of the nation’s larger job churn. In contrast, Mexican employment in agriculture tripled in just four years to 762,000 jobs.
But there was a deeper impact. Blue-collar workers were constantly attacked by threats that their plants would be closed if they tried organizing or striking, keeping organized workers very much on the defensive.
From Workers to Wall Street
Peter Edelman, long one of Clinton’s most progressive colleagues, was more than upset when Clinton signed a bill overhauling the country’s welfare system — the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It had attracted many Republican votes in Congress, turning welfare over to states with a huge emphasis on “welfare to work” — a system predicated on mothers getting back to work no matter how young their children.
“After all the noise and heat over the past two years about balancing the budget,” Edelman pointed out, “the only deep, multi-year budget cuts actually enacted were those in this bill, affecting low-income people.” A decade later, around 60 percent of mothers had found some work, but that statistic would deteriorate after the 2008 crisis, when poverty made a serious comeback.
In the 1990s, as Clinton became more dependent on Republicans, Social Security — the nation’s emblematic retirement program — was under severe pressure. A multimillion-dollar public relations program preached that it would soon run out of money and needed to be privatized — run by Wall Street, which was salivating to get its hands on the FDR-mandated fund.
Relatively few realized that Social Security was severely hampered by a regressive cap, which could and would greatly increase everyone’s benefits if lifted. Yet during the Clinton years, the public was under the belief that social security was close to failure. At no time had it come so close to being taken over by Wall Street, a situation that Clinton was reportedly considering seriously.
A strange phenomenon occurred. As the Monica Lewinsky scandal unfolded, Clinton was forced to turn to old-style Democrats for votes to help him stay in office. It was their support — at that moment — that pushed the administration away from privatizing Social Security. As Clinton confided to Republican apparatchik William Archer, “I’ve stiffed organized labor on trade. I can’t stiff them again.”
Afterward, he became estranged from the most consequential trade issues his administration would face. “That vacuum would be filled by men and women whose ideology, and the deregulatory free market statecraft that flowed from it, did much to firmly stamp the label ‘neoliberal’ on the Clinton presidency,” write Lichtenstein and Stein.
At a Manhattan meeting of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street insider and attacker of Social Security Pete Peterson introduced Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — a former CEO of Goldman Sachs — by saying “people sleep better because Bob Rubin is secretary of the treasury.” Rubin had become the most powerful cabinet head by this time and, by some count, almost a de facto president.
A big part of the neoliberal appeal was that it offered those with the right educational and cultural backgrounds a “transnational capacity to . . . build new careers.” When the average Joe began actively trading in the stock market, Wall Street insiders could start cashing out.
The most cataclysmic event during these years was the so-called shock therapy applied to Russia, throwing millions into poverty as jobs vanished, the ruble was devalued, and life became extremely precarious. Although company seizures and privatizations were propelled by Russian oligarchs, they were, according to Lichtenstein and Stein, “offered ideological guidance and financial support by the same Treasury circles that had played such an influential role in the IMF effort to transform Asian capitalism along lines more attuned to Wall Street standards.”
The political tone of the late 1990s was captured by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman sneering at anti-globalization protestors in Seattle as a “Noah’s Ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960’s fix.” Clinton’s main public relations ploy was to cast the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting — which collapsed on multiple fronts — as “globalization with a human face.”
Yet globalization, write Lichtenstein and Stein, carried on brutally on the American end. Of the 3.5 million jobs lost in the United States over this period, at least half were from an influx of imported Chinese products. After a while, it became clear that China’s accession to the WTO generated a “China shock,” with one academic paper analyzing the “surprisingly swift” decline of US manufacturing during the end of the Clinton years.
Although it had taken a decade for Congress to pass legislation clearing China’s entrance to the WTO, things happened quickly. Only 35 percent of Democrats voted for the agreement, but the Senate easily passed it. From then on, issues like trade would be handled by the WTO. Within months of its passage, more than 80 corporations, from Walmart to Home Depot, announced plans to shift production to China, with retailers telling numerous small and medium-size US manufacturers that if they could not meet “the China price” — a phrase Business Week called “the three scariest words in U.S. industry” — they could either close up or transfer production to China.
By 2006, Walmart was responsible for $27 billion in US imports from China — up from $9.5 billion in 2001. By then, 80 percent of the six thousand foreign factories in Walmart’s supplier database were located in China. One thing to be learned from A Fabulous Failure is that, in many ways, Bill Clinton was the best “good ol’ boy” governor the region had ever produced for its wealthiest citizens. It was, and still is, a massive corporate bonanza — certainly not for the many, but for those who really counted.
In the days leading up to his nomination, few saw who Clinton really was. By the time he ascended to power, it was too late. And in writing off decent, well-paid American blue-collar jobs as integral to the economy, the devastation he wrought has not ended. Clinton marked the end of the Democratic Party as a body naturally supported by the working class, spawning instead the incredible popularity of Trump.
MrBrownstone · 46-50, M
Reason10 · 70-79, M
KKKlinton left the country with a RECESSION and a ticking 911 time bomb.
He and KKKarter are tied as the two WORST presidents of the 20th Century.
You REALLY wanted to open that can of worms?
https://reason.com/2012/10/14/clintons-legacy-the-financial-and-housin/
Clinton, however, sowed the seeds of the Great Recession by helping to inflate the housing bubble, a key part of the financial debacle of 2007. But this wasn't because he (not George W. Bush) signed two financial deregulation bills. Although Clinton legalized interstate banking in 1994 and commercial/investment banking combinations in 1999, that had nothing to do with the meltdown.
Clinton's contribution to the crisis lay in his appointment of Cuomo to HUD. Cuomo became HUD secretary in 1997 after becoming assistant secretary in 1993. In a heavily researched 2008 article in the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett writes,
Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that — in combination with many other factors — helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded 'kickbacks' to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.
He and KKKarter are tied as the two WORST presidents of the 20th Century.
You REALLY wanted to open that can of worms?
https://reason.com/2012/10/14/clintons-legacy-the-financial-and-housin/
Clinton, however, sowed the seeds of the Great Recession by helping to inflate the housing bubble, a key part of the financial debacle of 2007. But this wasn't because he (not George W. Bush) signed two financial deregulation bills. Although Clinton legalized interstate banking in 1994 and commercial/investment banking combinations in 1999, that had nothing to do with the meltdown.
Clinton's contribution to the crisis lay in his appointment of Cuomo to HUD. Cuomo became HUD secretary in 1997 after becoming assistant secretary in 1993. In a heavily researched 2008 article in the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett writes,
Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that — in combination with many other factors — helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded 'kickbacks' to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.