Clintontime: Was It Really a Golden Age?

From CounterPunch:

Inside the US under Clinton the ratio of wages for the average worker to the pay of the average CEO rose from 113 to 1 in 1991 to 1 to 449 when he quit. In the world, exclusive of China, between 1980 and 1988 and considering the difference between the richest and poorest 10 per cent of humanity, inequality grew by 19 per cent; by 77 per cent, if you take the richest and poorest 1 per cent.

The basic picture? "Under the full eight years of Clinton's presidency, even with the bubble ratcheting up both business investment and consumption by the rich average real wages remained at a level 10 per cent below that of the Nixon-Ford peak period, even though productivity in the economy was 50 per cent higher under Clinton than under Nixon and Ford. The poverty rate through Clinton's term was only slightly better than the dismal performance attained during the Reagan-Bush years." We had a bubble boom, pushed along by consumer-spending by the rich.

And

You think the next Democratic nominee is going to address the long and short-term horrors engendered by the neoliberal credo to which Clinton paid such fealty? Of course not.

Click here for the rest.

My last post about the high number of corporations avoiding paying income taxes in the late 90s brings up an inconvenient fact that many liberals don't want to talk about: Democrat wunderkind Bill Clinton presided over this corporate slopping of the pigs. Just because the Republicans are so obviously the party of the rich, it doesn't follow that the donkey butts are champions of the poor. Let's face it, the corporations own both parties. I think the most I'm willing to say is that the Democrats aren't quite as evil as the Republicans.

That's why voting for John Kerry will not be such a joyous occasion for me. I concede that, if elected, he probably will do a lot to repair many of the horrific damages caused by the Bush administration. Kerry will certainly be less callous toward the poor and minorities. However, it is almost equally certain that Kerry will seek to return to the less destructive, though destructive nonetheless, economic policies that Clinton embraced. I understand the need to remove Bush at all costs, but I just can't shake the feeling that progressives are making a deal with the devil: Kerry will never be as generous to the far left as Bush has been to the far right.

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