Lest we forget what the era of Bill Clinton's Presidency was like.

[kaleckim]

37. Oh please

Last edited Wed Mar 30, 2016, 04:24 PM - Edit history (1)

"the claims about NAFTA's job losses have been refuted"

I know the damn data inside and out. You are either lying or speaking out of ignorance. Why don't you research the US's trade balance with Mexico and Canada before and after NAFTA, then research the impact on jobs. You also can't argue against the long term consequences of his policies.

Take a look:

"But you cannot deny the reality of many people doing quite well under the Clinton administration"

Most definitely, and those people have paid him kindly for his service. Like, when the East Asian financial crisis broke, or the Mexican peso crisis broke, he most definitely helped them to do well, he used public money to guarantee that. He also did that when he deregulated Wall Street and destroyed working people and unions with NAFTA and destroyed our democracy with the WTO.

"Social Security was never privatized so stop inferring that it was."

Never said it was, he was (not arguable) working to do so, then Lewinsky happened, just as I said. After that broke, he realized the last thing he needed was to piss people off even more and he backed off his plans. This is not a secret:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/10/30/how-monica-lewinsky-saved-social-security/

Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that, just like welfare, Social Security was near-broke, had to be “reformed” and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry. The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete.

It was a desperately close run thing. On the account of members of Clinton’s secret White House team, mandated to map out the privatization path for Social Security, they had got as far down the road as fine-tuning the account numbers for Social Security accounts now released to the captious mercies of Wall Street. But in 1998 the Lewinsky scandal burst upon the President, and as the months sped by and impeachment swelled from a remote specter to a looming reality, Clinton’s polls told him that his only hope was to nourish the widespread popular dislike for the hoity-toity elites intoning Clinton’s death warrant.

...We have this on the authority of high-ranking members of the Clinton Treasury who gathered in Harvard in the summer of 2001 to mull over the lessons of the 1990s. At that conclave it was revealed that on Clinton’s orders a top secret White House working party had been established to study in detail the basis for a bipartisan policy on Social Security that would splice individual accounts into the program. Such was the delicacy of this exercise that meetings of the group were flagged under the innocent rubric “Special Issues” on the White House agenda.

What was in fact being prepared for the President was precisely that second dose of welfare reform, this time targeted on the very citadel of the New Deal, the Social Security program Roosevelt himself established.

...The “Special Issues” secret team was set up by then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (later elevated to Treasury Secretary and now President of Harvard) and Gene Sperling, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers. The Deputy Treasury Secretary’s fondness for schemes to privatize Social Security comes as no surprise. As Chief Economist of the World Bank in the early 1990s Summers had commissioned a notorious report, “Averting the Old Age Crisis”, that argued that Merrill Lynch and Fidelity would be better at pension provision than any government. In fact governments should offer only a safety net and farm out their power to tax payrolls to private financial concerns, which would run mandatory funded pensions on the Chilean model. The task of the Special Issues group was to find an installment of privatization that could reconcile realistic Republicans and Democrats, and be sold as still honoring most existing entitlements.

Participants at the Harvard conference conceded that severe technical problems beset efforts to introduce commercial practices. The existing program has low administration costs whereas running tens of millions of small investment accounts would be expensive. The secret White House team sought to finesse the problem by pooling individual funds and stripping down the element of choice or customer service. But Summers was unhappy: as one Team member now recalls it, “Deputy Secretary Summers was fond of saying that we had to guard against the risk of setting up the Post Office when people were used to dealing with Federal Express”. And pooled funds were also to be avoided because they would risk government control of business.

Some members of the team also worried that allowing employees the option of setting up their own accounts would soon turn into a “slippery slope”, since the defection of the richest five or ten per cent of employees would soon undermine the program’s ability to honor its commitments to existing retirees.

Nevertheless, under Summers’ guidance, the secret team pushed forward. There were high hopes that the President would embrace what had by now had become a detailed blueprint: “The working group’s estimates were at the level of detail that it was determined how many digits an ID number would have to be for each fund and how many key strokes would therefore be required to enter all of the ID numbers each year.”

Clinton was kept up to date with briefings every few weeks and in July 1998 attended one of the “Special Issues” meetings himself. But in that same month he was served with a grand jury subpoena. A month later he finally acknowledged a sexual relationship with Monica.