Apr-May 97

KEEPING CLINTON IN FOCUS

Bill Clinton these days is being ac-cused of illegal campaign funding practices as though these are the worst of his crimes and as though the Republicans do not do likewise. So it seems appropriate to turn the spotlight on Clinton's long history of more serious offenses just to keep things in perspective.

Consider, for example, that as governor of Arkansas, he ran an anti-union, right-to-work state, and he returned to Little Rock during his first presidential campaign to preside over the execution of an African-American so brain-damaged from a suicide attempt that he saved his last piece of pie for "afterwards."

In '92 Clinton began scapegoating poor women and children by vowing to "end welfare as we know it" while not once pointing to the public assistance given to the non-poor- 20% or $280 billion to the military; and 5-7% or $50-80 billion to the corporations. What we spend on WIC in one year we spend on the military in eight hours. Indeed, each U.S. taxpayer spends around $25 on all programs for the poor in the course of a year and five times that, or $125, for the CIA alone. This does not include money spent to fund the NSC, the FBI, or any branch of military intelligence.

A report commissioned by Clinton stated unequivocally that the Republican Welfare Reform Bill would throw one to two million children into poverty. That must have been Donna Shalala's spin on the problem, for in no state does welfare bring a single family up to the poverty level that was set in 1968. These children were already living in poverty, and this bill would throw them into the streets. Still, in signing that bill, Clinton made good on one of the few promises he bothered to keep.

He certainly did not keep the promise he made to free Leonard Peltier and was cynical enough to make the same promise during his last campaign.

He withdrew the nomination of Lani Guinier even before her Senate hearing, saying he had not read her writings. If not, why not? And why was the public not allowed to hear what she had to say? He fired Joycelyn Elders for suggesting young people be reminded of masturbation as an alternative to sexual intercourse, possible pregnancy, or venereal disease. Both these women had long been his friends, but neither he nor his wife has spoken to them since. Not so with Dick Morris to whom both made sympathetic calls after his forced resignation.

Now he is replacing a moderately right-of-center cabinet with people like Madeleine Albright who are farther to the right. Doug Ireland calls our new Republican Secretary of Defense "a staunch supporter of the weapon establishment-both domestically and abroad." Though the U.S. puts $41 million an hour into the military and only $65 to $67 an hour into education, look for the Pentagon's budget to go up for this and other reasons.

Clinton bombed Iraq at least three times, first on the pretext of a plot to kill George Bush (about which we have heard nothing since) and then for equally obscure reasons. At the same time, he was trying to sabotage a UN resolution allowing the selling of enough Iraqi oil every six months to provide a whopping 25¢ worth of food and medicine to starving Iraqis in a land where over 600,000 children have died since the Gulf War. In the meantime, his commission to study Gulf War Syndrome, which may affect 100,000 to one quarter million U.S. vets alone-not even counting the French, British or Canadian soldiers and the Iraquis-included at least three people, Deutch, Perry, and Lederburg, who had been on the boards of the companies which sold the mustard gas and other chemicals to Saddam Hussein during the reigns of Reagan and Bush. He reinstated arms sales to Suharto in Indonesia where a military regime is repressing democratic dissent and committing genocide in East Timor. He signed the Helms-Burton Act punishing our allies for doing business in Cuba and the following bill adding at least Syria, Libya and Iran, blathering on about terrorism and arms proliferation, all the while spending more tax dollars advertising U.S. made weapons than either Reagan or Bush.

On the home front he signed the Terrorism Prevention Act which guts habeas corpus, undoes the ban against federal investigation of peaceful dissent, allows the deportation of permanent residents on the basis of secret evidence heard in secret hearings, and makes punishable by ten years in prison affiliation with or humanitarian support for any group opposed to U.S. foreign policy or the policies of U.S. allies such as Suharto in Indonesia or Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War. Both Senators Boxer and Feinstein voted for this bill.

He has lobbied hard for more money and less restraint for the CIA, the FBI, and the BAFT and has wire-tapped twice as fast as George Bush and 2.5 times faster than Reagan.

He instituted a discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell" policy for homosexuals in the military which many claim has only made things worse when, by presidential decree, he could have outlawed overt, official discrimination in much the same way Harry Truman did for African Americans. The recent allegations of rape, harassment and intimidation of women in the military prove that it is not Gay and Lesbian folk who are the problem.

He signed the latest crime bill (street not corporate) affixing the death penalty to 60 new crimes and, in a twist conceived by Carol Mosley-Braun, sends 13-year-olds to prison for life. The ratio of corporate to street crime in dollars alone is $200 billion to $20 billion, and while deaths due to street crime number in the thousands, deaths from nicotine-a legal but highly addictive drug-number in the hundreds of thousands.

When all 23 members of the grand jury investigating Rockwell's 400 admitted crimes at Rocky Flats, sued to make the crimes and government misconduct known to the public-a first in U.S. history-the Clinton "justice" department not only actively obstructed the investigation but put each member under FBI surveillance and threatened them with arrest. Meanwhile, Rockwell officials cut a deal so that none of them could ever be held accountable for such things as spraying radioactive waste into the air. The investigation of similar crimes at Area 51 where workers have been repeatedly exposed and two have already died, has also been obstructed. This is the same Area 51 that every administration has denied existed for nigh on fifty years.

Clinton backed and fought for NAFTA, a Reagan/Bush agreement which had already cost the jobs of 1.5 million Canadians by the time he came to office and which threatens to destroy their social service and single-payer health care systems due to competition from U.S. insurance companies and an inadequate tax base. The administration denies that any U.S. jobs have been lost, but I am disinclined to believe any statistic from a Bureau of Labor which equates one hour a week at minimum wage as a person who has a job. In Mexico, NAFTA has spurred a further decline by 43% in wages that have been in freefall for over a decade and necessitated, before the year was out, the bailout of U.S. companies exploiting the Mexican worker and polluting at will. Six billion "Mexican bailout" dollars never made it out of New York City, and lots of brainless babies are being born in Matamoros, Mexico.

The GATT, a Nixon treaty, is even worse. With the World Trade Organization we now have the new world order of, by, and for, the Fortune 500. Of the top 100 economies in the world, over half are corporations. They exceed one quarter of the world's economic activity-measured in dollars which is the only kind they count. One third of all this trade is within these corporations, not between them. Of the world's approximately 200 countries, 161 had Gross National Products less than the money spent at Wal-Mart. Yet these companies provide less than 1/3 of 1/100 of the world's jobs on a planet where half the population makes $2 a day. It makes child labor legal for "cultural/traditional" reasons, in places like India where 50 million children work long, hard hours for little pay while 55 million adults go unemployed.

Speaking of children, in the early '80s Reagan was prevented by the courts of his time from throwing 200,000 adults off SSI. Clinton's Welfare Reform Bill now makes it possible to eliminate up to 200,000 children. Let us be very clear about this: Supplemental Security Income is a means-tested program for very poor children and adults who are disabled.

Most who argued that Clinton should be re-elected did so on the grounds of his "liberal" judicial appointments. Evidence suggests there haven't been any. Not one! If there had been a dime's worth of difference between Ruth Bader-Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor, would the former have been approved by 100% of Republican Senators? Does Orrin Hatch know something we don't? As of 1996, 182 of 187 Clinton nominees to the federal bench were approved without any Republican opposition. They were 68% white, 71% male, all considered moderate, and most of them conservatives. Bob Dole considered making Clinton's "liberal" appointees an election issue until he was informed that he'd voted for 97% of them. To quote Molly Ivins, "I did not make this up."

During the last presidential campaign, the Democrats held out the specter of Dole/Gingrich cuts and kept silent about the Democratic Leadership Council's plan to privatize Social Security (remember Orange County?) , eliminate affirmative action (remember "adjust," not abandon?), and make it harder to get a divorce, a bright idea of Pat Schroeder's. The Democrats are the party that considered nominating Lee Iacoca of burning Ford Pinto and Chrysler bailout fame, and Colin Powell of Iran/Contra and Gulf War and Gulf War Syndrome fame. Both are registered Republicans. When Jim Hightower quipped he'd settle for a second party, he was not just being cute. If Dole and Gingrich are vicious and crooked, so is Bill Clinton and so are almost all of the Republicrats most all of the time. And when it looks like they are doing or saying something beneficial to the rest of us, they are usually giving with one hand while taking away with the other.

Finally, environmental groups maintain that the Clinton administration has done more harm to the environment in four years than Reagan/Bush did in twelve. He signed the Salvage Rider Bill. He has not replaced the midlevel rightwing ideologues in every agency who are still covering for, or representing, the interests these agencies were created to police. Not once has he mentioned pollution credits whereby nonpolluting industries sell to polluting industries the credits they bought from the government, enabling polluting industries to go on polluting.

And just as Wilson came to the rescue of methyl bromide in California, so did Clinton on the national level. And the Ohio incinerator he and Gore promised to close in '92 is still operating 300 feet downhill from an elementary school where the windows are level with smokestacks. He "saved" Yellowstone by promising a Toronto-based mining company $65 million worth of federal properties elsewhere, and they have the right to nix the deal. He and Diane Feinstein are currently trying to cut a similar deal with Charles Hurwitz for about a tenth of the Headwaters forest. And when the 1872 Mining Law, which would sell the above unnamed properties for $2.50 an acre was within two votes of reform, Bill Clinton backed down. Just before the election he signed something called the Federal Oil and Gas Royalty Simplification and Fairness Act. It sounds benign only as long as one doesn't ask, "simple and fair" for whom? Why does it let ten major oil companies off the hook for underpaying the U.S. Treasury by $1.5 billion for oil and gas extracted in California? This is how Clinton deals with corporate crime. Draw up a law that makes legal whatever they have done. Business as usual. One of these companies-Exxon-was subsidized $11.5 million to create just one job and was subsidized so efficiently for the cleanup of Prince William Sound, it actually made a profit and did a lousy job.

I only wish this were a comprehensive list of this man's crimes or that he were not typical of our elected officials. How can anyone excuse him for writing off the lives of nine million children on the advice of Dick Morris who had also served Jesse Helms as Dick Gergin had served Ronald Reagan? Clearly, the Fortune 500 are safe in the hands of Bill Clinton just as they had been for many years in the hands of a Democratically controlled Congress. The Dole faction did not have to win for the ruling elite to maintain control.

If there are any truly decent people in government, they serve only to prop up the illusion of a democratic republic, the conciliators between oppressors and oppressed. I can't get over Ron Dellums and Barney Frank arguing for Newt Gingrich maintaining his Speakership. As long as we buy the illusion, the rape and murder of our people and our planet will go on. The temperature will go on rising and the poles will continue to melt and the 42-mile crack in the Arctic ice will grow longer, and the waters will go on rising. Our shoreline cities and islands will be inundated and our forests and rivers and farmland will continue to die. And the one in four children living in abject poverty in the richest nation in history will soon become one in three, then, one in two. They will join the millions worldwide who now starve while the elites of Europe and the United States continue to redistribute the world's wealth upward.

I am sick of the devils I know. They control whether or not we have enough money to feed, clothe and house ourselves and our children. They decide whether or not we get a minimum wage-and a lot of people in this country don't-and how little that minimum will be. They decide whether or not we have education and health care. They decide whether or not our neighborhoods are toxic and how and when to kill another forest or river and how long people will have even a dangerous and boring job. These are the people who make and break with impunity the laws most of the rest of us are forced to abide by or else join the largest, fastest growing prison population in the world. They have all the power and they make all the laws.

But only as long as we let them!

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