Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Ralph Nader Slams The Clintons
Nader used to be a darling of the Left until the Left did what they do best by branding him a "spoiler" for the 2000 election. And his "spoiler" status from the Left is nothing more than the Left refusing to accept the loss that Albert Gore, Junior legitimately lost the election, their choice of a presidential candidate was a dud and dud, thy name is Gore Junior.
Nader teed up the golf ball and drove it far and straight, nailing the lackluster and do-nothing eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency. Here is some of what Nader wrote:
[Clinton] was seen as devoid of modest political courage, a blurrer of differences with the Republican opposition party and anything but the decisive transforming leader he promised to be was he to win the election.
He proceeded, instead, to take credit for developments with which he had very little to do with such as the economic growth propelled by the huge technology dot.com boom.
Bragging about millions of jobs his Administration created, he neglected to note that incomes stagnated for 80% of the workers in the country and ended in 2000, under the level of 1973, adjusted for inflation.
A brainy White House assistant to Mr. Clinton told me in 1997 that the only real achievement his boss could take credit for was passage of legislation allowing 12 weeks family leave, without pay.
There are changes both the Clinton Administration actively championed that further entrenched corporate power over our economy and government during the decade. He pushed through Congress the NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements that represented the greatest surrender in our history of local, state and national sovereignty to an autocratic, secretive system of transnational governance. This system subordinated workers, consumers and the environment to the supremacy of globalized commerce.
That was just for starters. Between 1996 and 2000, he drove legislation through Congress that concentrated more power in the hands of giant agribusiness, large telecommunications companies and the biggest jackpot - opening the doors to gigantic mergers in the financial industry. The latter so-called "financial modernization law" sowed the permissive seeds for taking vast financial risks with other peoples' money (ie. pensioners and investors) that is now shaking the economy to recession.
The man who pulled off this demolition of regulatory experience from the lessons of the Great Depression was Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, who went to work for Citigroup - the main pusher of this oligopolistic coup just before the bill passed and made himself $40 million for a few months of consulting in that same year.
Bill Clinton's presidential resume was full of favors for the rich and powerful. Corporate welfare subsidies, handouts and giveaways flourished, including subsidizing the Big Three Auto companies for a phony research partnership while indicating there would be no new fuel efficiency regulations while he was President.
His regulatory agencies were anesthetized. The veteran watchdog for Public Citizen of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, said that safety was the worst under Clinton in his twenty nine years of oversight.
[...]
By reappointing avid Republican Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Clinton assured no attention would be paid to the visible precursors of what is now the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
[...]
To justify his invasion of Iraq, Bush regularly referred in 2002-2003 to Clinton's bombing of Iraq and making "regime change" explicit U.S. policy.
But it was Clinton's insistence on UN-backed economic sanctions in contrast to just military embargos, against Iraq, during his term in office. These sanctions on civilians, a task force of leading American physicians estimated, took half a million Iraqi childrens' lives.
[...]
It has always been all about him, Now he sees another admission ticket to the White House through his wife, Hillary Clinton.
[...]
It's small wonder that the editors of Fortune Magazine headlined an article last June with the title, "Who Business is Betting On?" Their answer, of course, was Hillary Clinton.
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