A People's History of the United States (99 page)

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who had fled death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador while the United States was giving military aid to those governments now faced deportation because they had never been deemed “political” refugees. To admit that these cases were political would have given the lie to U.S. claims at the time that those repressive regimes were improving their human rights record and therefore deserved to continue receiving military aid.

In early 1996, Congress and the President joined to pass an “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act,” allowing deportation of any immigrant ever convicted of a crime, no matter how long ago or how serious. Lawful permanent residents who had married Americans and now had children were not exempt. The
New York Times
reported that July that “hundreds of long-term legal residents have been arrested since the law passed.” There was a certain irrationality to this new law, for it was passed in response to the blowing up of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, who was native born.

The new government policy toward immigrants, far from fulfilling Clinton's promise of “a new government for a new century,” was a throwback to the notorious Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 and the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act of the 1950s. It was hardly in keeping with the grand claim inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

In the summer of 1996 (apparently seeking the support of “centrist” voters for the coming election), Clinton signed a law to end the federal government's guarantee, created under the New Deal, of financial help to poor families with dependent children. This was called “welfare reform,” and the law itself had the deceptive title of “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.”

By this decision, Clinton alienated many of his former liberal supporters. Peter Edelman resigned from his post in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, bitterly criticizing what he considered Clinton's surrender to the right and the Republicans. Later, Edelman wrote: “His goal was reelection at all costs. . . . His political approach was not to calculate the risks but to take no risks at all. . . . His penchant for elevating shadow over substance has hurt poor children.”

The aim of “welfare reform” was to force poor families receiving federal cash benefits (many of them single mothers with children) to go to work by cutting off their benefits after two years, limiting lifetime benefits to five years, and allowing people without children to get food stamps for only three months in any three-year period.

The
Los Angeles Times
reported: “As legal immigrants lose access to Medicaid, and families battle a new five-year limit on cash benefits . . . health experts anticipate resurgence of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases. . . . ” The aim of the welfare cuts was to save $50 billion over a five-year period (less than the cost of a planned new generation of fighter planes). Even the
New York Times,
a supporter of Clinton during the election, said that the provisions of the new law “have nothing to do with creating work but everything to do with balancing the budget by cutting programs for the poor.”

There was a simple but overwhelming problem with cutting off benefits to the poor to force them to find jobs. There were not jobs available for all those who would lose their benefits. In New York City in 1990, when 2,000 jobs were advertised in the Sanitation Department at $23,000 a year, 100,000 people applied. Two years later in Chicago, 7,000 people showed up for 550 jobs at Stouffer's, a restaurant chain. In Joliet, Illinois, 200 showed up at Commonwealth Edison at 4:30
A.M
. to apply for jobs that did not yet exist. In early 1997, 4,000 people lined up for 700 jobs at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. It was estimated that at the existing rate of job growth in New York, with 470,000 adults on welfare, it would take twenty-four years to absorb those thrown off the rolls.

What the Clinton administration steadfastly refused to do was to establish government programs to create jobs, as had been done in the New Deal era, when billions were spent to give employment to several million people, from construction workers and engineers to artists and writers. “The era of big government is over,” Clinton proclaimed as he ran for President in 1996, seeking votes on the supposition that Americans supported the Republican position that government was spending too much.

Both parties were misreading public opinion, and the press was often complicit in this. When, in the midyear election of 1994, only 37 percent of the electorate went to the polls, and slightly more than half voted Republican, the media reported this as a “revolution.” A headline in the
New York Times
read “Public Shows Trust in GOP Congress,” suggesting that the American people were supporting the Republican agenda of less government.

But in the story below that headline, a
New York Times
/CBS News public opinion survey found that 65 percent of those polled said that “it is the responsibility of government to take care of people who can't take care of themselves.”

Clinton and the Republicans, in joining against “big government,” were aiming only at social services. The other manifestations of big government—huge contracts to military contractors and generous subsidies to corporations—continued at exorbitant levels.

“Big government” had, in fact, begun with the Founding Fathers, who deliberately set up a strong central government to protect the interests of the bondholders, the slave owners, the land speculators, the manufacturers. For the next two hundred years, the American government continued to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful, offering millions of acres of free land to the railroads, setting high tariffs to protect manufacturers, giving tax breaks to oil corporations, and using its armed forces to suppress strikes and rebellions.

It was only in the twentieth century, especially in the thirties and sixties, when the government, besieged by protests and fearful of the stability of the system, passed social legislation for the poor, that political leaders and business executives complained about “big government.”

President Clinton reappointed Alan Greenspan as head of the Federal Reserve system, which regulated interest rates. Greenspan's chief concern was to avoid “inflation,” which bondholders did not want because it would reduce their profits. His financial constituency saw higher wages for workers as producing inflation and worried that if there was not enough unemployment, wages might rise.

Reduction of the annual deficit in order to achieve a “balanced budget” became an obsession of the Clinton administration. But since Clinton did not want to raise taxes on the wealthy, or to cut funds for the military, the only alternative was to sacrifice the poor, the children, the aged—to spend less for health care, for food stamps, for education, for single mothers.

Two examples of this appeared early in Clinton's second administration, in the spring of 1997:

• From the
  New York Times
  , May 8, 1997: “A major element of President Clinton's education plan—a proposal to spend $5 billion to repair the nation's crumbling schools—was among the items quietly killed in last week's agreement to balance the federal budget. . . . ”
  
• From the
  Boston Globe,
  May 22, 1997: “After White House intervention, the Senate yesterday . . . rejected a proposal . . . to extend health insurance to the nation's 10.5 million uninsured children. . . . Seven lawmakers switched their votes . . . after senior White House officials . . . called and said the amendment would imperil the delicate budget agreement.”
  

The concern about balancing the budget did not extend to military spending. Immediately after he was elected for the first time, Clinton had said: “I want to reaffirm the essential continuity in American foreign policy.”

In Clinton's presidency, the government continued to spend at least $250 billion a year to maintain the military machine. He was accepting the Republican claim that the nation must be ready to fight “two regional wars” simultaneously, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. At that time, Bush's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had said, “The threats have become so remote, so remote that they are difficult to discern.” General Colin Powell spoke similarly (reported in
Defense News
, April 8, 1991): “I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”

Clinton had been accused during the election campaign of having evaded military service during the Vietnam war, apparently in opposition to the war, like so many other young Americans. Once in the White House he seemed determined to erase the image of a “draftdodger,” and took every opportunity to portray himself as a supporter of the military establishment.

In the fall of 1993, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, announced the results of a “bottom-up review” of the military budget, envisioning the spending of over $1 trillion for the next five years. It called for virtually no reduction in major weapons systems. A conservative analyst with the Woodrow Wilson International Center (Anthony Cordesman) commented: “There are no radical departures from the Bush Base Force, or even from earlier U.S. strategy.”

After being in office two years, and facing a Republican upsurge in the congressional elections of 1994, Clinton proposed even more money for the military than had been envisioned in the bottom-up review. A
New York Times
dispatch from Washington (December 1, 1994) reported:

The examples most often given by the Pentagon of “two simultaneous major regional wars” were Iraq and North Korea. Yet the 1991 war against Iraq had followed repeated U.S. arming of Iraq in the eighties. And it was reasonable to suppose that heavy military aid to South Korea, and a permanent U.S. military force in that country, had provoked increases in the North Korean arms budget, which was still much smaller than that of South Korea.

Despite these facts, the United States under Clinton was continuing to supply arms to nations all over the world. Clinton, coming into office, approved the sale of F-15 combat planes to Saudi Arabia, and F-16s to Taiwan. The
Baltimore Sun
reported (May 30, 1994):

That pattern continued through the Clinton presidency. In the summer of 2000, the
New York Times
reported that in the previous year the United States had sold over $11 billion of arms, one-third of all weapons sold worldwide. Two-thirds of all arms were sold to poor countries. In 1999 the Clinton administration lifted a ban on advanced weapons to Latin America. The
Times
called it “a victory for the big military contractors, like the Lockheed-Martin Corporation and the McDonnell Douglas Corporation.”

Clinton seemed anxious to show strength. He had been in office barely six months when he sent the Air Force to drop bombs on Baghdad, presumably in retaliation for an assassination plot against George Bush on the occasion of his visit to Kuwait. The evidence for such a plot was very weak, coming as it did from the notoriously corrupt Kuwaiti police, and Clinton did not wait for the results of the trial supposed to take place in Kuwait of those accused of the plot.

And so, U.S. planes, claiming to have targeted “Intelligence Headquarters” in the Iraqi capital, bombed a suburban neighborhood, killing at least six people, including a prominent Iraqi artist and her husband.

The
Boston Globe
reported: “Since the raid, President Clinton and other officials have boasted of crippling Iraq's intelligence capacity and of sending a powerful message that Iraq leader Saddam Hussein had better behave.” It turned out later that there was no significant damage, if any, to Iraqi intelligence facilities and the
New York Times
commented: “Mr. Clinton's sweeping statement was reminiscent of the assertions by President Bush and General Norman Schwartzkopf during the Persian Gulf War that later proved to be untrue.”

Democrats rallied behind the bombing, and the
Boston Globe
, referring to the use of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter as legal justification for the bombing, said this was “diplomatically the proper rationale to invoke . . . Clinton's reference to the UN Charter conveyed the American desire to respect international law.”

In fact, Article 51 of the UN Charter permits unilateral military action only in defense against an armed attack, and only when there is no opportunity to convene the Security Council. None of these factors were present in the Baghdad bombing.

Columnist Molly Ivins suggested that the bombing of Baghdad for the purpose of “sending a powerful message” fit the definition of terrorism. “The maddening thing about terrorists is that they are indiscriminate in their acts of vengeance, or cries for attention, or whatever. . . . What is true for individuals . . . must also be true of nations.”

The bombing of Baghdad was a sign that Clinton, facing several foreign policy crises during his two terms in office, would react to them in traditional ways, usually involving military action, claiming humanitarian motives, and often with disastrous results for people abroad as well as for the United States.