http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/inequal/america.htmThe Rich Can Afford to Share the Wealth
By Robert Reich
San Jose Mercury News
December 29, 1999
Exactly eight years ago I trudged through sleet and slush of New Hampshire telling anyone who'd listen that Bill Clinton would do wonders for the American economy. Now, as the nation lurches into a millennial election year with unemployment at its lowest level in thirty-five years with no inflation in sight, most Americans seem largely content. The economy has faded as an election-year issue. But there are two big things that have been happening to the American economy which should be framing the upcoming election nonetheless. It's still the economy, stupid.
Big Thing Number One: America has been growing faster than ever. Productivity has been rising 2.1 percent a year since 1993, according to just-revised statistics from the Commerce Department. I wish the Clinton Administration could take full credit, but it turns out that productivity-growth spurt actually began picking up steam in the early 1980s. The recession of 1991-92 was only a temporary pause. Neither Reagan's supply-side tax cuts nor Clinton's deficit-thwacking budget cuts have made much difference. The real cause has been a revolution in information technology, which is transforming America into a super-efficient digital colossus. There's no reason to suppose this long-term trend should slow. Put simply, America is richer than ever and will become even more so.
Which brings us to Big Thing Number Two: Almost all these gains have been going to people at the top. According to recent data from the congressional budget office, this year the richest 2.7 million Americans, comprising the top 1 percent, will have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom 100 million put together. Meanwhile, the poorest one-fifth of households will have an average income of $8,800 this year, down from $10,000 in 1977 (in current dollars). Not even people in the middle have done particularly well. Since the start of the Clinton administration, the incomes of richest have risen twice as fast as the middle.
This calculation doesn't even include deferred income and other perks, such as stock options, which have gone mostly to people at the top. And, notably, it doesn't include increases in the values of their stock portfolios. Add in these, and the wealth gap turns into the Grand Canyon. At the start of the Clinton administration, the Dow stood at 3300. Now it's hovering around 10,800. Eighty-five percent of this windfall has gone to the top 10 percent of earners -- and forty percent to the top 1 percent.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18068First Blood
By Michael I. Niman
Bill Clinton followed suit, ditching his cumbersome "draft dodger" cognomen somewhere between Kosovo and Serbia. Clinton gave the command, Wes Clark mobilized the troops and missiles went a-flying into bridges, trains, TV studios and damn near anything that moved, including columns of fleeing Kosovar refugees. When it was all over, the former Yugoslavia, like Bush Senior's Iraq, was littered with "depleted" uranium. But Clinton, like Bush Senior before him, had his bloodletting, and was dubbed a "man."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/arms/So, once elected, Bill Clinton did what he does best: He took advantage of the opportunity. Rather than insert human-rights concerns into the arms-sales equation, as did his Democratic predecessor President Carter, Clinton decided to aggressively continue the sales policies of President Bush, himself no slouch when it came to selling U.S. arms.
Early on, Clinton required our diplomats to shill for arms merchants to their host countries. The results were immediate: During Clinton's first year in office, U.S. arms sales more than doubled. From 1993 to 1997, the U.S. government sold, approved, or gave away $190 billion in weapons to virtually every nation on earth.
The arms industry, meanwhile, has greased the wheels. It filled the Democratic Party coffers to the tune of nearly $2 million in the 1998 election cycle.
...
Shipping Jobs Overseas
According to the Pentagon, the defense industry laid off 795,000 American workers between 1992 and 1997. At the same time, many of these corporations were sweetening their arms deals to other countries by offering "offsets" -- incentives provided to foreign countries in exchange for the purchase of military goods and services. The programs often include agreements to manufacture some or all of the products in the purchasing country.
Turkey, for example, agreed to buy 160 F-16s from General Dynamics in 1987 (for delivery through 1994) for an estimated $4 billion -- on the condition that most of the planes be built in Turkey. The offset resulted in 1,500 jobs going to Turkey. In 1992, General Dynamics entered into a similar F-16 offset deal with South Korea and brought 400 Koreans to its Fort Worth, Texas, plant for training, after having laid off 10,000 workers in the previous two years.
Lockheed Martin has continued the trend since it bought General Dynamics' F-16 program in 1993: In vying for a contract to supply fighters to Poland, it is offering to build an assembly plant there for all future F-16 sales to Central Europe -- so the planes won't be made in the U.S. at all. Makes you feel patriotic, doesn't it?
Corporate Pork
Under a Defense Department policy initiated in 1993, U.S. taxpayers wind up covering a big chunk of the cost of defense-corporation mergers. The tally so far has reached $856.2 million in perfectly legal write-offs, including $405 million for the Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger, to name one example. Because of the policy, Lockheed was able to bill the Pentagon up front for $2.4 million of CEO Norman Augustine's salary.
In 1996, Congress created the Defense Export Loan Guarantee program to finance U.S. weapons sales to foreign countries. Its first beneficiary? A United Industrial sale of pilotless aircraft and training systems to cash-strapped Romania. If Romania defaults on its payments (not a bad bet for a country in economic turmoil), U.S. taxpayers will be left holding the bag: $16.7 million. But United Industrial gets paid either way.
Arming Both Sides
The Clinton administration has not been shy about arming potential foes in regional conflicts. For example, two of America's biggest arms customers are Greece and Turkey, which have been threatening to go to war with each other for decades over the tiny Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Both countries stake a claim to the island, more than a third of which has been occupied by Turkish forces since 1974, and the two have clashed hundreds of times in the 25 years since.
Though barred by Congress from selling offensive weapons to Cyprus itself, in 1997 the U.S. sold (or allowed American corporations to sell) more than $270 million worth of weapons to Greece and nearly $750 million worth to Turkey. Now if there's a war, the two NATO allies can blast away at one another with far greater efficiency, thanks to the U.S. defense industry and its cheerleader, Bill Clinton.
http://antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=2089 2004: Choose Your Favorite Pro-War Candidate
by John Pilger
The truth is that Clinton was little different from Bush, a crypto-fascist. During the Clinton years, the principal welfare safety nets were taken away and poverty in America increased sharply; a multibillion-dollar missile "defense" system known as Star Wars II was instigated; the biggest war and arms budget in history was approved; biological weapons verification was rejected, along with a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, the establishment of an international criminal court and a worldwide ban on landmines. Contrary to a myth that places the blame on Bush, the Clinton administration in effect destroyed the movement to combat global warming.
In addition, Haiti and Afghanistan were invaded, the illegal blockade of Cuba was reinforced and Iraq was subjected to a medieval siege that claimed up to a million lives while the country was being attacked, on average, every third day: the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign in history. In the 1999 Clinton-led attack on Serbia, a "moral crusade," public transport, nonmilitary factories, food processing plants, hospitals, schools, museums, churches, heritage-listed monasteries and farms were bombed. "They ran out of military targets in the first couple of weeks," said James Bissett, the Canadian former ambassador to Yugoslavia. "It was common knowledge that NATO went to stage three: civilian targets." In their cruise missile attack on Sudan, Clinton's generals targeted and destroyed a factory producing most of sub-Saharan Africa's pharmaceutical supplies. The German ambassador to Sudan reported: "It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor country died as a consequence . . . but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess."
Covered in euphemisms, such as "democracy-building" and "peacekeeping," "humanitarian intervention" and "liberal intervention," the Clintonites can boast a far more successful imperial record than Bush's neocons, largely because Washington granted the Europeans a ceremonial role, and because NATO was "onside." In a league table of death and destruction, Clinton beats Bush hands down.
And he gave us, Defense of Marriage, Welfare Reform without Corporate Welfare Reform, NAFTA/GATT/WTO, Bono copyright act, DMCA, and a whole bunch of other nifty procorporate actions.
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