While the right — both old and new — keeps hammering Barack Obama (largely out of racism and Islamophobia), Bill Clinton harmed the people of this country (and others) far more gravely than Obama ever did
Bill Clinton jeffrey epstein ghislaine maxwell
© William J. Clinton Presidential LibraryBill Clinton with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in 1993.
by Guy Vantresca

This post was motivated by an email blast sent out by Mikki Willis late last year, arguing that Barack Obama was "was our most dangerous leader", and "the most destructive president this nation has ever experienced." Willis based this judgement on a range of measures taken by Obama — extending the "war on terror" (adding five new wars to Bush/Cheney's two), increasing surveillance and spy programs, bolstering the financial position of the top 10%, blaming voters for failure of the democratic process, and more.

I found this to be a superficial analysis, since all those steps were merely caretaker actions, perfectly in line with the warlike and repressive program that had been overtaking us since JFK's assassination. Willis' specious email jogged my memory of Thomas Frank's book Listen, Liberal (2016). Here I take Frank's salient points and flesh them out a bit, to show that Obama was, in fact, a "punter" compared to the catastrophic "Democrat" Bill Clinton.


Comment: As an aside, Bill is also a Rhodes Scholar, albeit the Rhodes track record has not been particularly good for humanity. However, by and large the Clinton's came as a pair, as in a 'double, double, toil and trouble' pair. The Clinton's, as suggested above, would certainly weigh heavy on the scales, while Obama added his own weight to the other side.

At the end of the day, both Bill and Barack answered to others, without conscience, in a long procession spanning a millennium and more.

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Democrats reflexively applaud five major actions by that president, deeming them "successes" that did all of us tremendous good. In fact, those actions had the opposite effect. It was under Clinton that the Democratic Party abandoned its core principles, thereby selling out the working class. The legacy of FDR, and the New Deal, was dismantled. ("Ending welfare as we know it," and replacing it with food stamps, is just one example, but the Party doesn't talk up that "success.")

Here are Clinton's five "successes":
  1. NAFTA (1994) moved millions of US jobs to Mexico, but only for about 6 years, after which they moved to China, so that all those poor Mexican farmers who had sold their land to giant corporations, and moved to northern Mexico's industrial zone for factory jobs, had to go somewhere — guess where.
  2. In 1995, Clinton replaced the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) with the World Trade Organization (WTO). This was unnecessary, as GATT was working fine. The WTO was then enlarged, as Clinton pushed for China to get "Most Favored Nation" status, which was temporarily approved on an annual basis, in violation of WTO rules. Permanent "MFN" status was granted in 2000, with China finally entering the WTO, legally, in 2001. This opened the floodgates for the majority of manufacturing jobs, world-wide, to move to China.
  3. Clinton's Crime Bill (1994 — which Joe Biden zealously supported, and Hillary promoted by warning of the "super-predators" among the urban poor ("no conscience, no empathy," she said projectively) — doomed generations of black and brown men to life in prison, creating the corporate prison- industrial complex. And now the US has the highest per-capita prison population in the world.
  4. In 1999, Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, whereby FDR had separated banks from investment houses and insurance companies. Clinton wanted Wall Street to "like him," so Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers told him to repeal Glass-Steagall. Wall Street badly wanted CitiCorp to merge with Travelers Insurance, as the test case for the giant mergers that would follow, and Glass-Steagall was in their way. Clinton, allied with Republican senators, got merger approved as an exception, which paved the way for Congress to eliminate Glass-Steagall. Thus Big Finance was born. As a warning of things to come, in 1998, a year prior, Long Term Capital Mgmt, was collapsing, so the big banks bailed it out. More mergers followed, until the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), when the Federal Reserve bailed out the banks. And now we're facing the next GFC, which will be even worse than the one some 18 years ago. Who will bail out the Federal Reserve?
  5. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, pushed by Al Gore, allowed the merger of TV, radio, newspapers and Internet media into huge conglomerates. Now, 90-95% of all media that you read, watch and/or listen to is owned by just six global corporations.
In the foreign policy arena, Clinton listened to his Neo-Con advisors, and doubled the size of NATO, ignoring the 1989 Malta agreement between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. (This was not a treaty, but a mere verbal agreement — which was confirmed many times in diplomatic cables.) Gorbachev was replaced by Boris Yeltsin, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the US had the opportunity to help Russia with a second "Marshall Plan." Instead, Neo-Liberal Larry Summers forged an economic rape-and-pillage team from the Harvard Business School, whose actions are rightly called "the rape of Russia." Once in Russia, they met with their cat's-paw, Anatoly Chubais; and they convinced the drunkard Boris Yeltsin to privatize all major industries. Summers then created a credit scheme enabling the 14 top Russian financiers to purchase all the shares — thereby creating the notorious Oligarchs who now own everything. Imagine that, "we" created Russia's Oligarchs!

This set the stage for Vladimir Putin to become President, whose mission was to save his country from completely imploding. Under the Yeltsin privatization, Russian life expectancy dropped from 70 to 64 in just a few years. It took Putin five years to reverse this trend, and another five years to get Russia back on its feet (a program that the Western press hysterically decried). Then Clinton's successor, and ally, Bush the Younger tried to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine, both of which were invaded by Russia to prevent direct threats on their borders. There is a long list of provocations, going back to 1995, made by the US/UK, using NATO as a proxy, to try and break the back of Russia. NATO should be disbanded, or, at the least, the US should withdraw completely, and NATO made into an all-Europe alliance. This would help undo the vast and bloody damage done by Clinton (whose gratuitous bombing of Belgrade in 1999, and the Western media's whitewash of that crime, deserves a separate post).

Thus Clinton's "successes" were, in fact, all gigantic failures, whose consequences cannot be undone without radical reform of the Congressional, Judicial, and Executive branches.