DON'T BE FOOLED AGAIN
Cockburn, Alexander
Don't Be Fooled Again BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN It's 2000 A.D., sometime in July. We're in the final year of Clinton's second term, and the battle rages over Social Security and Medicare. The...
...The famous attack on "Lesser of Two Evilism," written back in 1968 by Hal Draper, pointed out that in 1932 the socialists urged a vote for Field Marshal Hindenburg, as an evil less than Adolf Hitler...
...Since Clinton has never articulated any such principles, the use of the word "betrayal" is a little unfair...
...Bill Clinton would be running for Baseball Commissioner or maybe working as a golf pro at the course back in Hot Springs...
...Or maybe we'll see Clinton buy off the union chieftains on Social Security "reform" with exciting proposals for their own pension funds...
...50 percent of the time, Nichols says (though this seems to me to be a very generous use of the word "liberal") as the Reagan judges...
...At the same time, the League announced that "Bill Clinton's environmental record in office is the best of any President...
...sat on their hands...
...Gore pledges to "take another look" the minute he enters the Oval Office...
...Has there been an election in recent memory where the lineaments of evil—lesser or greater—have been so similar in the political complexions of the prime candidates...
...and the Republicans finally ended the war because of the pressures on the party...
...The liberal advocates sit on their hands...
...this time around, that you haven't been warned.0...
...and sparing themselves the inconvenience of having to explain why this compromise with the coal industry—a "monument" with a status that will not impede grazing, off-road vehicles, or even mining—made Bill a green hero...
...He says that he'll appoint bipartisan commissions...
...What has been less adequately described is the history that has the most relevance for the next few years—namely, the complicity of the public-interest, advocacy movement with this disgusting performance...
...Clair and I took an unsparing look at the Administration's awful record...
...Meanwhile, the other bipartisan commission will be making similarly lunatic assumptions about the prospective insolvency of Medicare...
...People didn't listen, or persuaded themselves "welfare reform" was camouflage for a national jobs program...
...Simultaneously the Clinton White House (as John Nichols pointed out vividly in the September issue of The Progressive) has been naming judges to the federal bench distinguished by their wealth and by their lack of any liberal feature that might perturb Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee...
...But you know all this...
...In a Stand for Children rally in June, she could not even summon the courage to mention Clinton's name, though his attack on poor mothers and their kids was by that time far advanced...
...Given Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Gins-burg, any Clinton nominees to the Supreme Court will be awful by any measure other than the pro-choice standard designed to placate Clinton's supporters in the women's movement...
...Of course, Clinton said the same thing about welfare in 1992...
...After prolonged battles, both Senate and House vote for cutbacks...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan publicly denounced the liberal advocacy groups, saying he could see all the way to the Supreme Court without a single indignant picketer or placard obscuring his view...
...As regards public-interest Washington, lack of accountability or even a grassroots membership means the liberal advocates are mostly useless or actively pernicious...
...A good example is Michael Waldman, who used to promote campaign-finance reform at Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, until he went on the White House payroll at $85,000 a year, whereupon he participated enthusiastically in the Democratic National Committee's fundraising orgies...
...Clinton deliberates whether to sign the bill...
...Its mission is to "eradicate hunger and under-nutrition in the United States...
...Both major parties carried on the Vietnam War...
...Stay with the opening scenario...
...The Center barely raised a bleat against budget cuts, which is not surprising when you look at its board, featuring Carol Tucker Foreman, who discreetly lobbies for Monsanto and Procter & Gamble, David Greenberg of Philip Morris, and Ron Pollack of Families USA...
...I put the word "betrayal" in quotes because the word implies departure from some previously held principle...
...the price of a subway ride to his office and a sandwich at the diner...
...At the one-day Democratic Party convention in Cleveland...
...Will the organizing among liberal religious communities now under way for two or three years bear fruit...
...Here in The Progressive a while back Jeffrey St...
...Of course, by the time this issue of The Progressive is headed into the recycling bin...
...Nader would be my pick even though his campaign has suffered from Ralph's apparent spending limit of $5 a day...
...Some opt for a political equivalent of the lay-away policy at stores like Kmart, where you make gradual payments and get the clockwork teddy in time for Christmas: Lay-away votes for Bill and Al with the hope of a Bill-free-to-be-Bill in his second term...
...Jesse Jackson rails, but stays aboard...
...The great disaster of the past four years was the absence of any effective countervailing force from the progressive end of the spectrum...
...It's one thing to support Clinton for the three seconds it takes to pull a lever in the polling booth...
...The favored model of the privatizers is Pinochet's gift to the people of Chile, fervently hailed by the World Bank and the Cato Institute and soon, no doubt, by the Progressive Policy Institute...
...This notion that there is an inner and spiritual liberal essence of Bill, yearning to cut loose, is as silly as hoping that there is an inner and spiritual Keynesian essence to your bank manager, yearning to pump free money into your account...
...In the meantime, cherish no illusions...
...Nowhere has the corruption of the public-interest crowd been more egregious than in the green movement...
...Ultimately, if change comes to America, it won't come through the voting booth...
...The Administration has appointed the judges, engineered the cutbacks, and cut down the old trees amidst a truly degrading silence from those who should have been raising the roof...
...Secretary-General and preoccupied with Republican charges that he is about to pardon Hillary Rodham, says it's a simple choice: Would Democrats rather have Social Security and Medicare cuts supervised by Al Gore or by his Republican opponent...
...The last fragments of the New Deal are destroyed...
...So vote for Bob Do .. . Stick with the probabilities...
...The fine print already ludicrously figures that by 2030 A.D...
...Many liberal advocates got bought with an invite to the White House, many more with the offer of a government job...
...Under President Dole the preceding scenario is a non-starter...
...There'll be lots of virtuous talk about not "stealing from our children," and — bingo!—the bipartisan commission proposes that the retirement age be hiked to seventy-two, at which time Dr...
...Now there's not much point in itemizing the innumerable faults, failures, and "betrayals" of Bill Clinton...
...health-care inflation will be such that people will be spending 97 percent of their income on it...
...Too many people entertained them in 1992...
...Kevorkian all the more alluring...
...Change will come through tumultuous movements around the country, movements that are so strong that whatever party is holding power has to respond...
...Kevorkian will present himself to administer the final rites...
...Jim Hightower says you don't have to be a dead armadillo to dance Alexander Cockburn, based in Petrolia, California, is a columnist for The Nation and co-editor of Counter Punch (P.O...
...Clinton's appeals court judges have issued "liberal" decisions on labor and economic issues at the same rate...
...Here's what will happen in the case of Social Security: The bipartisan commission will take the most pessimistic assumptions of the Trustees of the Social Security System in their annual report...
...The Democratic Party remains united...
...The September day Clinton went to the north edge of the Grand Canyon and announced 1.8 million acres on the Utah side would gain "national-monument" status, the leaders of the main green organizations held a collective press conference, once again lauding Clinton as a latter-day incarnation of John Muir...
...It's a scheme whereby employees are forced to put 10 percent of their earnings into mutual funds that duly swallow them up, charge grotesque handling fees, and—for many poor Chileans—eventually yield an austere retirement nut amounting to less than $2 a day, which would make the arrival of Dr...
...Speaking personally...
...In other words, they'll cook up exactly the same statistical flim-flam and Malthu-sian doomtalk about entitlements as they did in the case of welfare "reform," which Clinton successfully shoved down the throats of the liberals this past summer, who gagged only a couple of times before lustily cheering him in Chicago...
...Since then we've been treated to one tragi-comedy after another...
...The liberal advocates bought in...
...Families' board was profuse with Democratic Party funders, hacks, and functionaries...
...sold out...
...All you have to do in 1996 is read USA Todav for September 19, where Leon Panetta relays Clinton's thoughts about his "legacy" in reforming Social Security and Medicare...
...At the very moment when fierce pressure from the liberal public-interest groups in Washington might push Clinton into a veto with every chance of success...
...The fate of the country won't be determined by who wins the election...
...Mortified though Marian Wright Edel-man of the Children's Defense Fund may have been when Clinton ultimately placed his signature on the welfare bill, she shrank from any vigorous preemptive assault on welfare "reform" when it would have counted...
...The Democrats would muster themselves to defend the New Deal...
...Figure, as Henwood does, even a modest growth rate of 2.0 percent, and the system will stay solvent...
...The bipartisan commissions, which President Bill suitably stacked with Wall Streeters and icons of the planned-shrinkage crowd, have issued their collective and predictable judgment: Only by fierce cuts can these entitlements survive...
...It's hard to recall a President keener on registries, watch lists, and police data bases designed to ensnare the poor and the suspect...
...The future will be determined by whether citizens organize and mobilize and create a commotion...
...It's another to speak for him, to support him in his perfidy, in his hypocrisy, in his Republicanism...
...On September 19, 1996, Bill Clinton announced on the front page of USA Today that he wants his "legacy" to be reform of Social Security and Medicare...
...Still, people cling to lesser-of-two-evil-ism with pathetic tenacity...
...No less than 34 percent of Clinton's nominees have been millionaires, as against 24 percent of Reagan's and 4 percent of Carter's (Of course, Reagan created the expanded millionaire pool that Clinton picked from—a fine example of bipartisanship at work...
...None of this will emerge on the editorial pages or the talking-head shows...
...1 find it unimaginable to envisage a vote for either Bob or Bill...
...Are we now set for more of the same'.' Will Sweeney's AFL-CIO sponsor or encourage any effective groundswell of opposition...
...In the midst of the fight over the welfare bill on Capitol Hill...
...Though polls have shown the public to be strongly supportive of these programs, the national press and big Washington think tanks launch a strident campaign in favor of promoting the "crisis...
...Progressive readers to go with the Democratic ticket on November 5. Our focus here is on what happens in the years that separate these brief engagements with the ballot box...
...If there had been, over the past four years, any sort of coherent, spirited opposition, the Clinton-Gore-Democratic-Leadership-Council Democrats would not have risked half the initiatives that they felt emboldened to try, and got away with...
...Review the supposedly liberal public-interest organizations in Washington and the tax-exempt foundations across the country that dole out the money to them, and you'll find a triangle of self-aggrandizement and political timidity, with the third leg lodged in the Democratic Party apparat...
...Al Gore .. . well, that's another story...
...Both BUI and the bank manager answer to the same bosses...
...We're not dealing here with that brief, dark spasm of inner debate and spiritual compromise that no doubt prompts some, perhaps many...
...But aside from this dark moment in the polling booth, there's the matter of what happens the rest of the time...
...The Germans voted for the lesser evil and got both...
...with Al Gore (challenging the general view that only a dead armadillo would have the patience for such a pastime...
...Study this triangle carefully and you'll understand why the Democratic Party is not only the graveyard of social movements but also the suffocator of even polite protest against what the Administration has done...
...From the Pentagon budget, whose future under a Democratic Presidency—Al Gore recently boasted to the Veterans of Foreign Wars—is fatter even than in the Republican promises, to the unending assaults on civil liberties and basic constitutional rights, to the retreat from healthcare reform, to the debauching of environmental protections, to the surrender to Wall Street and balanced budgetry, Clinton has blended a uniquely noisome mix of the corporate agenda with the techniques of totalitarian government supervision secluded from democratic oversight or intervention...
...Box 18675, Washington, D.C 20036...
...Moynihan was right...
...Now Families USA had been a big promoter of single-payer health insurance, but began to swerve away from this posture after Pollack, the group's chieftain, met Clinton and became a campaign adviser, and later a frequent visitor to the White House...
...The liberals sit on their hands...
...Read the fine print {or, more profitably, read Doug Hen-wood's very useful explications in Left Business Observer and in his forthcoming book, Wall Street) and you find that the worst-case projection assumes a growth rate over the next seventy-five years of 1.4 percent, which is half the rate of the past seventy-five years and worse than the rate in the Great Depression of the 1930s when it was 1.9 percent...
...Take the Food and Action Center, deemed a liberal outfit...
...There's no aspect of his tenure that is not an affront to even a demure progressive standard...
...Dole himself has voted for 97 percent of Clinton's nominees...
...The alternative will be a very severely scaled-back government pension scheme, with all sorts of tax incentives to encourage people to invest their retirement savings in the mutual-fund industry, which can't wait to get its hands on the vast pool of capital now locked up in the federal pension accounts...
...The League of Conservation Voters has targeted a "dirty dozen" predominantly Republican reps, tactfully glossing over the fact that the Democrats are in many ways more dangerous, certainly more hypocritical...
...Howard Zinn put it well the other day in Rolling Stone: "People need to start thinking outside the two-party system...
...Don't say...
...As someone wrote the other day, bringing things up-to-date, vote for either Clinton or Dole and you get the other one free...
...Vice President Al Gore issues a passionate plea: Nothing can be done to mar party unity, or to expose it to charges that it is once again hostage to "the special interests...
...Bob Dole may have been elected— though at the time of this writing his campaign is drifting like a death ship in the Sargasso Sea...
...Hindenburg duly became president and after a brief interval named Hitler as his chancellor...
...We need to scare the hell out of them: that's what we need to do...
...A couple of months ago, CounterPunch, the newsletter edited by Ken Silverstein and myself, took a detailed look at the complicity of groups like Edelman's...
...Bill Clinton, in the midst of his run for U.N...
Vol. 60 • November 1996 • No. 11
