The Hypocrisy of Bill Clinton's New Book 'Giving'

Bill Clinton has written a new book. It is called Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World. He will give a portion of the proceeds to charity.  Giving, the former president informs us, gives us fulfilment in life and is “the fabric of our shared humanity.”

His book is the political equivalent of Marley & Me . It is filled with a lot of vapid, feel-good stories about ordinary and wealthy Americans setting out to make the world a better place. 

It smacks of the philanthropy-as-publicity that characterized the largesse of the robber barons—the Mellons and the Rockefellers—and has become a pastime for our own oligarchic elite.  Clinton’s call for charity is the equivalent of well-scrubbed prep school students spending a day in a soup kitchen, doling out food to the people whose jobs were outsourced by their mommies and daddies.  It does little to alleviate suffering.  But it is a balm to the conscience of the oligarchic class that profits handsomely from the impoverishment of the working class, globalization and our anti-democratic corporate state.  The rich love to dine out on their own goodness.

The misery sweeping across the American landscape may have begun with Ronald Reagan, but it was accelerated and codified by Bill Clinton.  He sold out the poor and the working class.  And Clinton did it deliberately to feed the pathological hunger he and his wife have for political power.  It was the Clintons who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. 

The Clintons argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally.  Workers would vote Democratic anyway.  They had no choice.  It was better, the Clintons argued, to take corporate money and use government to service the needs of the corporations.  By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton’s leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans.  In political terms, it was a success.  In moral terms, it was a betrayal. 

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico.  Goods would be cheaper.  Workers would be wealthier.  Everyone would be happier.  I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters.  NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.

"There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home,” President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton’s rosy predictions.  Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States.  The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted.  At least 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off their land from 1993 through 2002.  And guess where many of them went?  This desperate flight of Mexicans into the United States is being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China’s totalitarian capitalism.

Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation’s social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single parents, off of the welfare rolls within three years.  It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage.  Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year.