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Conscript
Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 4
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On Change and Experience: The Clinton Years 1993-2000
I recently heard Hillary Clinton on a story on CNN talking about herself as the candidate of both Change and Experience. It got to me to thinking and to remembering.
Like many Americans today I have a certain sense of nostalgia for the peace and relative prosperity of the Clinton years. I yet admire the Bill Clinton both for his deep human empathy and the passionate eloquence with which he speaks. His greatest achievements, the reduction of the deficit for example, were accomplished through the force of this magnificent personality and the sense of optimism that it fostered throughout the full range of Americans. I further recognize that Hillary Clinton has always been the strong woman behind the great man, and as such I recognize her claim to being the most experience democratic candidate. It is the “change” part of her assertion that concerns me.
In 1992, after Giving Ross Perot due consideration, I voted for Bill Clinton. I was a 27 year-old, blue-collar worker, a husband and father of three small children, who had abandoned his dream of being an applied cultural anthropologist some five years earlier, in order to face the harsh economic realities of raising a family in the late Regan/Bush 1 era. At work I had recently become active in the union there, serving as shop steward and as the representative of the shop to the union’s local executive board. At the time, I was kind of a Jeffersonian Marxist, a socialist democrat, advocating the “middle way” approach of countries like Sweden. Thus, confronted with the choice of George Bush, Ross Perot, or Bill Clinton, I choose Clinton as the most realistic chance of bringing forth meaningful change.
Even in 1996, after the signing of NAFTA, the failure of the Clintons to get even a corporatist version of universal healthcare through, the loss of the democratic majority in both House and Senate in 1994, I again voted for Bill Clinton, although not in the primary. In part this continued support was because my own worldview had changed. My exposure to the ideology of Total Quality in late 1994 had allowed me to see a form of capitalism, albeit a radical one, that could hold the potential of being fair to all stakeholders, including rank and file workers. I hoped that the corporations might change themselves in response to global economic and ecological pressures. Thus, I was more tolerant of the obvious Clinton linkage to Corporate International than I might have been before. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I rationalized that it was simply a matter of political necessity.
During the late 90’s I became increasingly involved in the Labor Movement. From my representative role as chief shop steward of my plant, to my efforts to reform a largely ineffectual local union internally, I fought desperately for meaningful change. At about the same time I became embroiled in a conflict between the International Union and the company I worked for over the critical issues of the company’s union busting activities and their infidelity to a “twenty year” commitment to a Total Quality agreement. This conflict would eventually culminate in a nationwide strike at the very end of the Clinton Administration. Thus I, like thousands of others, was involved in the short-lived resurgence of Labor at the very end of this period, when even an only slightly less tilted playing field, allowed Organized Labor to actually increase membership rolls for the first time in decades. But it must be noted that the Democratic Clinton Administration, like the Administrations of Carter, Johnson, Kennedy before it, did nothing to address the “death of Unions by slow strangulation” sentence implicit in certain provisions of the Taft-Hartley amendment enacted in 1947 over the veto of then president Harry Truman. Truman had called it the “slave-labor bill” and warned that it would “conflict with important principles of our democratic society.” He was right, of course, and I fault the Clintons along with the other Democratic administrations that preceded them, for lacking the moral courage and resolve to attempt to reverse this shameless historical pandering to the interests of Big Business at the expense of working people.
In late 2000, just as I was running for the office of Local president/business manager, the tide was beginning to turn on Labor. The late Clinton/Bush II recession was just beginning to set in. It would not start to subside until late 2003, and only then, when the bottom 80% of Americans had seen their real standard of living reduced by an average of 10%. During my term of office the Local union endured three major plant closings out of a total of 18 bargaining units, including the retaliatory closing of my own home plant. Only by the most strenuous cost cutting and internal organizing measures did we manage to stay afloat. But still we continued to do our best to represent our members on a shoestring budget, against the power of massive corporations with millions and millions of dollars at their disposal. We still continued to fight on.
As senator, after September 11, 2001, Hillary Clinton would be swept away in America’s understandable, but nonetheless wrong, overreaction to this tragic event. She would vote for the Patriot Act (and against the Bill of Rights) in both 2001 and for its reauthorization in 2006. She would vote to authorize pre-emptive war against Iraq, even though the alleged risks the neo-cons fed her were unproven, and, indeed, have subsequently been completely disproved. But Corporate America/International thought it would be nice to have a stable, pro-western government in Iraq to help keep energy prices low, and these institutions are, of course, the principle contributors to both Clinton’s political war chest and those of her alleged neo-con opponents’. The problem, of course, has been that the neo-cons and their “okay-dokey” Democratic supporters have been utterly unable to provide that stable, Iraqi government, in spite of all the American and Iraqi blood shed there. To date Mrs. Clinton has yet to apologize to the American people for any of these serious mistakes in judgment.
So I must dispute Mrs. Clinton’s claim to be the candidate of change. I am but one of literally hundreds of thousands of activists, from environmentalists, to community organizers, to union representatives, to social workers, to educators and religious leaders, to simply concerned citizens, all of whom have genuinely been fighting tooth and nail for meaningful change in a system dominated by corporate influence at every level.
More often than not, even during Bill Clinton’s Administration, we have been trounced soundly. Yet we fight on, with limited resources and against all but impossible odds. We fight for the sakes of our children, grandchildren, and all those generations that will come after. We fight for ecological responsibility, economic fairness, human freedom and human dignity.
So I entreat you Mrs. Clinton to rejoin the ‘revolution’ you believed in your youth. Come down from your elitist “semi-Liberal” pedestal and rejoin the fight for the sake of the common man and woman.
Renounce all that political money you have accepted from the most evil of the corporations, from the oil, pharmaceutical, financial, retail, and free trade lobbies. Free us from the worry over how much “influence” it has bought them.
If you have become too much of “political realist” to do this, let all Americans understand the kind of change that you have been “fighting” for. Let them all know the fundamental change your election (assuming you don’t give the race back to the Republicans) will bring.
Absolutely nothing of substance will change.
America will continue to be further and further subjugated to the will of the corporations; just it has, without interruption since the end of the Carter Administration.
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