Weekend Edition
November 14 / 16, 2008
A Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama
How Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
When biologist Jack Ward Thomas handed President Bill Clinton the final copy of his plan for the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest Forest, Clinton asked only one question: “How much timber will it cut?”
With this revealing query began the bizarre final chapter in the saga of Clinton’s adventure in the rainforests of the Northwest, the home of the salmon and the spotted owl.
In the final two weeks of April 1994, the Clinton administration saw its strategy to reinitiate timber sales in Northwest forests come to a shocking fruition, when most of the key environmental groups in the region agreed to lift the three-year old federal injunction prohibiting new timber sales in spotted owl habitat. At the same moment, one of the nation’s largest forest products companies announced its glowing support for Clinton’s forest plan.
Watch how neatly the pattern of events unfolded.
On April 14, 1994, the Clinton administration submitted the Record of Decision for its Northwest forest plan to federal Judge William Dwyer in Seattle. A disturbing codicil to the original plan (widely known as Option 9), the 200-page Record of Decision granted a series of last-minute concessions to timber interests that were designed to accelerate the preparation of new timber sales in old-growth and keep the plan’s annual timber sale above the one billion board foot mark—the psychological barrier demanded by the timber industry.
The animals pay the price. For example, in order to meet the politically-driven cut levels, the final document shrank protection of the rare Marbled Murrelet by 250,000 acres in southern Oregon alone. The Marbled Murrelet is a chunky sea-faring bird that nests only in old-growth forests near the Pacific Ocean. It is listed as a threatened species. The diminished Murrelet was specifically tailored to clear the way for several enormous timber sales slated for the Siskiyou National Forest. Some of these sales, including the hotly contested Sugarloaf sale, are located in roadless areas.
Despite the intense uproar from the public and the scientific community over the prospect of logging and roadbuilding inside these ancient forest reserves, the Clinton plan greenlights thinning and salvage logging inside these supposedly sacrosanct areas without being subject to a detailed environmental assessment. This change was geared toward accelerating logging in the Oregon Coast Range and the Olympic Peninsula, the two areas where the Spotted Owl is most vulnerable to local extinction.
Most seriously, the final document dramatically weakened the standards for watershed analysis in order to “fast-track” logging operations in key basins. Back in 1993, Clinton and Bruce Babbitt hailed these detailed environmental assessments as the analytical and procedural cornerstone of the new ecosystem management approach. The basin-wide reviews were supposed to force timber sale planners to closely scrutinize the effects of logging and roadbuilding on entire watersheds. In fact, the group of scientists that peer-reviewed the draft Clinton plan concluded that these watershed assessment were “critical to the eventual success of adaptive management.” But with a stroke of the pen, Thomas and Clinton wiped them away.
As Clinton was taking with one hand, he was giving with the other. On April 15, 1994, a band of timber executives announced that they would not oppose the implementation of the new Clinton plan in court, opting instead for a “congressional strategy.” This meant that the industry planned to beg their congressional clients—men like Senator Mark Hatfield and House Speaker Tom Foley—to simply inscribe into law higher timber sales levels for the region than are called for under the Option 9 scheme and to insure that, once the levels are set, they remain immune from judicial scrutiny.
Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas indicated that he “might have a personal preference for timber targets” set by congress. This is where the slippery nature of Clintonism turns opaque. Instead of fighting for the ecological integrity of their own forest plan, they sent up a smoke signal to congress begging them to subvert it.
But this was a tall order. For starters, Congress didn’t want to take the blame for Clinton’s failures. Sen. George Mitchell told Bruce Babbitt point blank that he would fight any effort by the administration to shield its plan from legal review. Even traditional architects of so-called sufficiency legislation (laws that set timber and road-building targets and free activities from compliance with environmental statutes) displayed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for this approach without having an explicit and public nod of support from Clinton himself—a commitment that the president was unwilling to make.
Meanwhile, the federal courts had already struck a blow to the legality of the approach used to craft Clinton’s logging plan. In March 1994, in a suit brought by the Native Forest Council, Federal Judge Thomas Jackson ruled that the secretive process used to develop Option 9 violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA. Along with the Freedom of Information Act, FACA stands as one of the pillars of open government. It requires that all advisory panels to the federal government contain balanced representation, hold public hearings, and make their deliberative records open to public review. Judge Jackson ruled that the Clinton approach violated each of these requirements.
This case laid the legal groundwork for the substantive challenges to future timber sales offered under the Clinton plan. For example, FACA seems likely to be a fruitful angle of attack against the consensus-based planning processes that are proliferating under the Adaptive Management approach. The response of the Clinton administration was to test congressional sentiment for a repeal of FACA. Sound familiar?
On April 19, several of the environmental plaintiffs in the Spotted Owl lawsuits declared their dissatisfaction with the Clinton plan at a press conference in Washington, DC. “The plan has come a long way politically, but falls short ecologically,” charged Andy Kerr, conservation director of the Oregon Natural Resources Department. “It fails to protect hundreds of species identified as dependent on old-growth forests, placing many at risk of extinction. Clearly, this doesn’t meet President Clinton’s own standard that the plan be scientifically credible and legally responsible.”
Kerr and Julie Norman, director of Headwaters, a southern Oregon conservation group, vowed that the environmentalists would mount a full-blown legal assault on the Clinton forest plan. She said the legal challenge would focus on “salmon, economics, and some owl claims.”
Here’s where things turn mysterious. One short day after these brawny pronouncements, Judge William Dwyer convened a status conference on the case in Seattle. At this hearing, the Forest Service officially requested that the injunction on new timber sales in Spotted Owl habitat be dissolved. The agency’s attorneys claimed that merely by filing the new plan with the court they had fully complied with the judge’s orders. At that point, Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund’s attorney shocked the court. True told Dwyer that the eleven environmental groups represented by his law firm would not oppose the Clinton administration’s request to lift the injunction and begin logging in old-growth again. He said that while the environmentalists might file an “amended complaint” to the old lawsuit, they were unlikely to seek a new injunction.
This was the second capitulation by the green lawyers to Clinton in less than a year. In September of 1993, in “a gesture of goodwill” to the Clinton administration, the environmentalists agreed to allow logging with fifty-four timber sales in old-growth forests vital to the survival of the Spotted Owl. It was at that point that the Forest Conservation Council, a Santa Fe-based group, split from the coalition and got new lawyers to press the fight.
And as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund offered to give up the entire injunction, only the Forest Conservation Council and the Native Forest Council of Eugene, Oregon demonstrated any resistance to the Clinton crowd’s political pressure to surrender the hard-won legal victory. The Native Forest Council was not a plaintiff in the original suit, but was granted amicus status by the court. Both organizations filed briefs with Judge Dwyer voicing strenuous objections to the release of the injunction. They argued that the burden of proof should lie with Clinton’s Forest Service to demonstrate that it is in compliance with the judge’s orders. But those suits were a long shot, a final protestation of a politically-driven sellout.
With the injunction lifted, the Forest Service began implementing the Clinton logging plan in June of 1994. The agency told the court it was ready to put forward 165 million board feet of timber in owl habitat during the summer—the first new timber sales since the Bush administration.
On April 21, Weyerhaeuser fulfilled its end of the bargain. The timber giant’s executive vice-president declared that the company was satisfied with the Clinton logging plan and pledged to defend it in Congress or the courts “by any means necessary.” You know you’re in deep trouble when corporate executives start quoting Malcolm X.
But Weyerhaeuser’s support for the Clinton plan shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The company, along with other industrial forest land owners, such as Plum Creek, ITT-Rayonier, Simpson and Georgia-Pacific, were the clear winners in the Option 9 sweepstakes. After all, these corporations had already been the financial beneficiaries of declining federal timber sales. As the price of lumber soared, so did their profits. The Clinton plan’s permanent restrictions on the rate of federal land logging substantially increases the long-term value of their own holdings.
More importantly for Weyerhaeuser, under the generous provisions of the Clinton administration’s new 4(d) Rule, industrial forest land owners were largely exempted from the Endangered Species Act’s strict prohibition against the “incidental taking” (that is, killing) of a listed species. This regressive rule punishes small landowners, but allows these multinational timber titans to continue clearcutting unabated in Spotted Owl habitat on their own lands, even when it ravages the owl’s already declining population.
Of course, the biggest victory for companies such as Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek came when the Clinton administration stiff-armed environmentalists and labor leaders by refusing to stem the flow of raw log exports from private, corporate, and industrial lands in the Northwest. Even though the owl takes the rap, these exports are the leading cause of job loss in the timber sector.
For years, environmental strategists had plotted the ultimate crack-up of the timber monolith, pitting private landowners against public timber buyers (such as Louisiana-Pacific), domestic millers against log exporters. Well, the fissures finally came, but they didn’t unfold the way many expected—the most socially and environmentally deviant corporations emerged as unscathed victors.
What do we make of this odd accumulation of events, this carefully executed endgame to the Northwest forest crisis? Some grassroots environmentalists and labor organizers for the pulp and paper workers’ union charge that a three-way deal was cut between mainstream green groups, log exporters, and the Clinton administration. From a distance, the pattern to this rapid denouement seemed horribly prearranged. But the conspiracy falters on one salient point: the environmentalists received nothing for their gestures of goodwill, their reluctant dealmaking. Option 9 degenerated with every concession; it didn’t improve. In the end, only the lawyers made out. Trees for fees.
No, the bizarre and tragic conclusion to the Northwest forest fight simply revealed the fundamental nature of the Clinton approach and its abiding allegiance to corporate culture. If Clinton and Al Gore really shared an interest in protecting American timber workers and the ecology of the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, there was an obvious solution: end commercial logging on public lands and terminate the export of unprocessed logs to overseas ports. But Clinton didn’t align himself with the owl, the working stiffs, or the grassroots. He sided with the suits.
This essay is adapted from Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes From the Dark Side of the Earth by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch/AK Press).
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
Showing posts with label Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Paul Craig Roberts: How to End the Subprime Crisis
Here's Roberts' last line:
However, greed and ideology won over sound advice. The result is a crisis that, if mishandled, will be calamitous.
Since Bush and Cheney want calamity in the US as they want it in Iraq, and everywhere else, they will run far and fast from any remedy to the crisis. In this case, they don't have to run. All they have to do is to do what they are now doing, nothing; and to sit on any positive movement or ideas.
March 11, 2008
How to End the Subprime Crisis
www.counterpunch.org
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Reforms often do more harm than good. This is currently the case with the “mark-to-market” rule, which is imploding the US financial system by requiring financial institutions to value subprime mortgages at their current market values.
This makes a big problem for balance sheets. These financial instruments became troubled prior to a market being established for them, as they were marketed direct from issuers to investors. Now that they are troubled and with their true values unknown, no one wants them. Their lack of liquidity assigns them a low value.
The result is tremendous pressure on balance sheets. The plummeting value of subprime derivatives is pushing institutions that own them into insolvency, destroying their own stock values and forcing the financial institutions to sell untroubled liquid assets, thus resulting in an overall decline in the stock market.
The solution is to suspend the mark-to-market rule. Instead, allow financial institutions to keep the troubled instruments at book value, or 85-90% of book value, until a market forms that can sort out values, and allow financial institutions to write down the subprime mortgages and other troubled instruments over time.
Suspending the mark-to-market rule would take pressure off the stock market and make it unnecessary for the Fed to lower interest rates in an effort to force liquidity into the economy through an impaired banking system. The problem is not a general lack of liquidity, but liquidity for poorly conceived new financial instruments. Low US interest rates could worsen the crisis by accelerating the dollar’s decline. Now that inflation has raised its head, more liquidity from the Fed adds to the economic distress.
It is mindless to allow a “reform” to cause a financial crisis, but that is what is happening. Unfortunately, there are people who argue that anything less than financial armageddon would create a “moral hazard.”
It is certainly true that securitized subprime mortgage instruments were a bad idea, that a lot of people who should have known better opened floodgates to greed and fraud, and that “somebody should pay.” But it shouldn’t be the general public and the economy that pays.
It is also true that without the Federal Reserve’s irresponsible low interest rate monetary policy, which produced a housing boom, the subprime instruments would not have been created, or at least not in such amounts. Rapidly rising real estate prices were expected to make the risky loans good. What were issuers and the Federal Reserve thinking?
No doubt but that greed, fraud, and bad policy all played their roles. But at the heart of the problem is a 1999 “reform” that repealed an earlier reform known as the Glass-Steagall Act.
In 1933 the Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial banking from the securities business. It prevented securities speculation from destroying bank capital and shrinking bank deposits from bank failures and runs on banks by depositors. Congress and President Bill Clinton foolishly repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
The repeal of the 1933 law was driven by profit lust in the banking industry and by “free market” ideology, which claims the unfettered marketplace is always superior to regulation. In pushing the repeal forward, Congress and Clinton ignored warnings from the General Accounting Office that the banks needed to build up their capital levels before being permitted to enter a broad range of securities businesses. The GAO also noted that there were no regulatory structures in place to monitor the new financial networks that would result from removing the wall between commercial and investment banking.
However, greed and ideology won over sound advice. The result is a crisis that, if mishandled, will be calamitous.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
However, greed and ideology won over sound advice. The result is a crisis that, if mishandled, will be calamitous.
Since Bush and Cheney want calamity in the US as they want it in Iraq, and everywhere else, they will run far and fast from any remedy to the crisis. In this case, they don't have to run. All they have to do is to do what they are now doing, nothing; and to sit on any positive movement or ideas.
March 11, 2008
How to End the Subprime Crisis
www.counterpunch.org
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Reforms often do more harm than good. This is currently the case with the “mark-to-market” rule, which is imploding the US financial system by requiring financial institutions to value subprime mortgages at their current market values.
This makes a big problem for balance sheets. These financial instruments became troubled prior to a market being established for them, as they were marketed direct from issuers to investors. Now that they are troubled and with their true values unknown, no one wants them. Their lack of liquidity assigns them a low value.
The result is tremendous pressure on balance sheets. The plummeting value of subprime derivatives is pushing institutions that own them into insolvency, destroying their own stock values and forcing the financial institutions to sell untroubled liquid assets, thus resulting in an overall decline in the stock market.
The solution is to suspend the mark-to-market rule. Instead, allow financial institutions to keep the troubled instruments at book value, or 85-90% of book value, until a market forms that can sort out values, and allow financial institutions to write down the subprime mortgages and other troubled instruments over time.
Suspending the mark-to-market rule would take pressure off the stock market and make it unnecessary for the Fed to lower interest rates in an effort to force liquidity into the economy through an impaired banking system. The problem is not a general lack of liquidity, but liquidity for poorly conceived new financial instruments. Low US interest rates could worsen the crisis by accelerating the dollar’s decline. Now that inflation has raised its head, more liquidity from the Fed adds to the economic distress.
It is mindless to allow a “reform” to cause a financial crisis, but that is what is happening. Unfortunately, there are people who argue that anything less than financial armageddon would create a “moral hazard.”
It is certainly true that securitized subprime mortgage instruments were a bad idea, that a lot of people who should have known better opened floodgates to greed and fraud, and that “somebody should pay.” But it shouldn’t be the general public and the economy that pays.
It is also true that without the Federal Reserve’s irresponsible low interest rate monetary policy, which produced a housing boom, the subprime instruments would not have been created, or at least not in such amounts. Rapidly rising real estate prices were expected to make the risky loans good. What were issuers and the Federal Reserve thinking?
No doubt but that greed, fraud, and bad policy all played their roles. But at the heart of the problem is a 1999 “reform” that repealed an earlier reform known as the Glass-Steagall Act.
In 1933 the Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial banking from the securities business. It prevented securities speculation from destroying bank capital and shrinking bank deposits from bank failures and runs on banks by depositors. Congress and President Bill Clinton foolishly repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
The repeal of the 1933 law was driven by profit lust in the banking industry and by “free market” ideology, which claims the unfettered marketplace is always superior to regulation. In pushing the repeal forward, Congress and Clinton ignored warnings from the General Accounting Office that the banks needed to build up their capital levels before being permitted to enter a broad range of securities businesses. The GAO also noted that there were no regulatory structures in place to monitor the new financial networks that would result from removing the wall between commercial and investment banking.
However, greed and ideology won over sound advice. The result is a crisis that, if mishandled, will be calamitous.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Robert Parry: The Clinton Audacity
consortiumnews.com
The Clinton Audacity
By Robert Parry
January 25, 2008
Some rank-and-file Democrats who have weathered three decades of Republican hardball politics aren’t sure what to think when Bill and Hillary Clinton attack Barack Obama over the Iraq War, his attitude toward Ronald Reagan, and his relationship with a sleazy real-estate developer.
On each topic, the Clintons are arguably more vulnerable than Obama: Hillary Clinton voted to give George W. Bush authorization to invade Iraq (while Obama opposed the invasion), the Clintons both have praised Reagan far more than Obama has, and the Clintons had closer ties to an ethically challenged developer, Whitewater’s James McDougal, than Obama apparently had with Tony Rezko.
It’s as if the Clintons are channeling Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, whose legendary audacity included attacking an opponent on a strong point even when their candidate was more vulnerable. Think Rove’s assault on John Kerry’s Vietnam War heroism, though George W. Bush had shirked his National Guard duty.
But some Democrats who send us e-mails view this political chutzpah as a good thing, that the Clintons are showing they’ve learned from the Republican scorched-earth tactics and thus are best qualified to wrest control of the White House from the GOP.
These Democrats ridicule what they call Obama’s “kumbayah” strategy of trying to achieve some form of unity among America’s bitterly divided political factions. The mocking reference to “kumbayah” relates to the campfire song derived from an old African spiritual.
Obama’s “kumbayah” is dismissed as either hopelessly naïve or disingenuous.
Some of these hard-bitten Democrats, who now are rallying behind Hillary Clinton, also say they suspect that Obama is a “closet DLCer,” a reference to the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference, where ironically Bill Clinton was chairman for two years.
As First Lady, Hillary Clinton pushed her own DLC-like strategy, the concept of “triangulation” which rejected traditional Democratic positions and distanced the Clintons from many rank-and-file Democrats, in favor of “third way” compromises with Republicans.
In her memoir, Living History, Mrs. Clinton claims credit for bringing Republican pollster Dick Morris back into President Clinton’s inner circle in 1994, overriding resistance from others in the White House who feared that Morris would be a right-wing mole.
“Nobody in the Democratic power structure liked or trusted him,” she acknowledged.
While Morris did help advance Mrs. Clinton’s “triangulation” strategies, he ultimately proved his critics right by betraying the Clintons and going on TV to decry Democrats in the most venomous terms, helped by the insider credibility that Hillary Clinton had bestowed on him.
Attacking Obama on Reagan
Regarding Reagan, the Clintons have excoriated Obama for stating in a Nevada newspaper interview that the Republican icon “changed the trajectory of America.” At the Jan. 21 debate, Hillary Clinton accused Obama of “admiring Ronald Reagan.”
Obama denied Clinton’s characterization, claiming he was just acknowledging Reagan’s historical significance. The Illinois senator also noted that Clinton had “provided much more fulsome praise” of Reagan in Tom Brokaw’s book, Boom!, which quotes Clinton as praising Reagan’s flexibility.
“He could call the Soviet Union the Evil Empire and then negotiate arms-control agreements,” she said. “He played the balance and the music beautifully.”
Clinton also found herself explaining remarks she made in gaining the endorsement of the Salmon Press weeklies in New Hampshire. The endorsement editorial said Clinton’s list of favorite presidents included “Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan” – plus her husband, Bill Clinton.
Trying to back away from the praise of Bush I and Reagan, the Clinton campaign released a statement quoting the Salmon Press co-owner saying “the question posed was originally what portraits would you hang in the White House if you were President and as the dialogue progressed, who are the presidents you admire most? … She did not say Reagan was her favorite President.”
[For more details on these disputes, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s Dubious Praise for Reagan” or “The Democrats-Praise-Reagan Game.”]
Bill on Ron
However, it turns out that Bill Clinton may have been one of the Democratic pioneers in the tactic of hailing Reagan as a way to demonstrate independence from the Democratic “base.”
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. recalls how Bill Clinton wowed the Post’s editorial board in October 1991 when he credited Reagan with winning the Cold War and praised his “rhetoric in defense of freedom.”
"The idea that we were going to stand firm and reaffirm our containment strategy, and the fact that we forced them to spend even more when they were already producing a Cadillac defense system and a dinosaur economy, I think it hastened their undoing," Clinton said, with the caveat that there was some wasted U.S. money.
Clinton earned high marks from the Post’s editors and other news organizations for his “free-thinking” about Reagan and his courage in “saying things most Democrats wouldn’t allow to pass their lips,” Dionne wrote. [Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2008]
But Clinton wasn't really demonstrating much courage; he was embracing the Establishment’s safe conventional wisdom on Reagan. It was another “Sister Souljah moment” in which Clinton essentially put down the congressional Democrats and independent investigators who had risked their reputations by critically examining Reagan’s record.
Clinton’s praise for Reagan supposedly winning the Cold War coincided with dramatic Senate Intelligence Committee hearings in fall 1991 when veteran CIA analysts stepped out of the shadows to testify against George H.W. Bush’s nominee for CIA director, Robert Gates, accusing him of politicizing the intelligence analysis in the 1980s.
A principal point of these analysts was that Gates had helped the Reagan administration exaggerate the Soviet threat in the early 1980s and thus obscure evidence of the communist bloc’s disintegration, all the better to justify an expensive military buildup and support for bloody wars in the Third World.
The signs of Soviet weakness already were apparent in the 1970s when many experts concluded that Moscow was facing technological and economic crises, and was eager for serious negotiations with the West. That analysis – that the Cold War was nearing its end – gave rise to the “détente” strategies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
However, old Cold Warriors and a new breed of intellectuals, known as the neoconservatives, resisted this analysis and insisted that the Soviet Union actually was on the march, building highly sophisticated weapons and still moving toward world domination.
Though ultimately shown to be false, these arguments carried the day after Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980. To scare the American people into support for a massive arms buildup, the neocons hyped evidence of Soviet capabilities, essentially setting up a straw man that Reagan’s military expansion could get credit for knocking down.
In 1991-92, while Bill Clinton was cozying up to this Reagan legacy, several investigations were underway into other Reagan-era deceptions – from Republican collaboration with Iran’s radical mullahs, to secret military assistance for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, to corruption and human rights abuses in Central America.
By giving Reagan credit for “winning the Cold War,” Bill Clinton bought into the key justification for ignoring the crimes committed during the Reagan-Bush years. He also was earning brownie points from the journalistic and political elites in Washington.
Under the Rug
After defeating George H.W. Bush in November 1992, Clinton was perfectly positioned to help pending investigations into Reagan-Bush crimes – from special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s Iran-Contra probe to Rep. Henry Gonzalez’s examination of the Iraq-gate scandal to a House task force’s review of the October Surprise issue, whether Reagan’s 1980 campaign had colluded with Iran behind Jimmy Carter’s back.
Even though the evidence in all these cases pointed toward Republican guilt, Clinton and other key Washington Democrats, such as Rep. Lee Hamilton, swept the scandals under the rug, all the better to gain some bipartisan favor from the Republicans. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege, or Consortiumnews.com’s “The Clintons & the Bushes.”]
As it turned out, Clinton’s collaboration in these cover-ups didn’t work out exactly as he planned. Spared from having to defend Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the Republicans and their right-wing attack machine went after Bill and Hillary Clinton, who remained on the defensive for nearly their entire eight years in office.
Now, the Clintons are battling for a new lease on the White House – and they are applying lessons learned from the win-at-all-cost Republicans to discredit Barack Obama.
Though Obama had the foresight to oppose George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, the Clintons accuse Obama of lacking consistency in his anti-war positions. Bill Clinton called the story of Obama’s war opposition a “fairy tale,” ignoring the fact that Hillary Clinton was a war supporter from 2002 almost until the day she jumped into the Democratic race.
The Clintons have sought to make an issue, too, out of Obama’s links to low-income housing developer Tony Rezko, who is under federal indictment in an Illinois corruption probe. [For some background, see Chicago Sun-Times article, Nov. 5, 2006.]
However, the Clintons have had their own difficulties in similar areas, from their ties to the swindler Jim McDougal during their Arkansas days, to the Marc Rich pardon while in the White House, to donations from fugitive Norman Hsu in Campaign 2008.
Most audacious of all, however, the Clintons are making an issue out of Obama’s mild praise of Ronald Reagan, when they have spent years not only complimenting Reagan but protecting his dubious legacy.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
The Clinton Audacity
By Robert Parry
January 25, 2008
Some rank-and-file Democrats who have weathered three decades of Republican hardball politics aren’t sure what to think when Bill and Hillary Clinton attack Barack Obama over the Iraq War, his attitude toward Ronald Reagan, and his relationship with a sleazy real-estate developer.
On each topic, the Clintons are arguably more vulnerable than Obama: Hillary Clinton voted to give George W. Bush authorization to invade Iraq (while Obama opposed the invasion), the Clintons both have praised Reagan far more than Obama has, and the Clintons had closer ties to an ethically challenged developer, Whitewater’s James McDougal, than Obama apparently had with Tony Rezko.
It’s as if the Clintons are channeling Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, whose legendary audacity included attacking an opponent on a strong point even when their candidate was more vulnerable. Think Rove’s assault on John Kerry’s Vietnam War heroism, though George W. Bush had shirked his National Guard duty.
But some Democrats who send us e-mails view this political chutzpah as a good thing, that the Clintons are showing they’ve learned from the Republican scorched-earth tactics and thus are best qualified to wrest control of the White House from the GOP.
These Democrats ridicule what they call Obama’s “kumbayah” strategy of trying to achieve some form of unity among America’s bitterly divided political factions. The mocking reference to “kumbayah” relates to the campfire song derived from an old African spiritual.
Obama’s “kumbayah” is dismissed as either hopelessly naïve or disingenuous.
Some of these hard-bitten Democrats, who now are rallying behind Hillary Clinton, also say they suspect that Obama is a “closet DLCer,” a reference to the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference, where ironically Bill Clinton was chairman for two years.
As First Lady, Hillary Clinton pushed her own DLC-like strategy, the concept of “triangulation” which rejected traditional Democratic positions and distanced the Clintons from many rank-and-file Democrats, in favor of “third way” compromises with Republicans.
In her memoir, Living History, Mrs. Clinton claims credit for bringing Republican pollster Dick Morris back into President Clinton’s inner circle in 1994, overriding resistance from others in the White House who feared that Morris would be a right-wing mole.
“Nobody in the Democratic power structure liked or trusted him,” she acknowledged.
While Morris did help advance Mrs. Clinton’s “triangulation” strategies, he ultimately proved his critics right by betraying the Clintons and going on TV to decry Democrats in the most venomous terms, helped by the insider credibility that Hillary Clinton had bestowed on him.
Attacking Obama on Reagan
Regarding Reagan, the Clintons have excoriated Obama for stating in a Nevada newspaper interview that the Republican icon “changed the trajectory of America.” At the Jan. 21 debate, Hillary Clinton accused Obama of “admiring Ronald Reagan.”
Obama denied Clinton’s characterization, claiming he was just acknowledging Reagan’s historical significance. The Illinois senator also noted that Clinton had “provided much more fulsome praise” of Reagan in Tom Brokaw’s book, Boom!, which quotes Clinton as praising Reagan’s flexibility.
“He could call the Soviet Union the Evil Empire and then negotiate arms-control agreements,” she said. “He played the balance and the music beautifully.”
Clinton also found herself explaining remarks she made in gaining the endorsement of the Salmon Press weeklies in New Hampshire. The endorsement editorial said Clinton’s list of favorite presidents included “Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan” – plus her husband, Bill Clinton.
Trying to back away from the praise of Bush I and Reagan, the Clinton campaign released a statement quoting the Salmon Press co-owner saying “the question posed was originally what portraits would you hang in the White House if you were President and as the dialogue progressed, who are the presidents you admire most? … She did not say Reagan was her favorite President.”
[For more details on these disputes, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s Dubious Praise for Reagan” or “The Democrats-Praise-Reagan Game.”]
Bill on Ron
However, it turns out that Bill Clinton may have been one of the Democratic pioneers in the tactic of hailing Reagan as a way to demonstrate independence from the Democratic “base.”
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. recalls how Bill Clinton wowed the Post’s editorial board in October 1991 when he credited Reagan with winning the Cold War and praised his “rhetoric in defense of freedom.”
"The idea that we were going to stand firm and reaffirm our containment strategy, and the fact that we forced them to spend even more when they were already producing a Cadillac defense system and a dinosaur economy, I think it hastened their undoing," Clinton said, with the caveat that there was some wasted U.S. money.
Clinton earned high marks from the Post’s editors and other news organizations for his “free-thinking” about Reagan and his courage in “saying things most Democrats wouldn’t allow to pass their lips,” Dionne wrote. [Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2008]
But Clinton wasn't really demonstrating much courage; he was embracing the Establishment’s safe conventional wisdom on Reagan. It was another “Sister Souljah moment” in which Clinton essentially put down the congressional Democrats and independent investigators who had risked their reputations by critically examining Reagan’s record.
Clinton’s praise for Reagan supposedly winning the Cold War coincided with dramatic Senate Intelligence Committee hearings in fall 1991 when veteran CIA analysts stepped out of the shadows to testify against George H.W. Bush’s nominee for CIA director, Robert Gates, accusing him of politicizing the intelligence analysis in the 1980s.
A principal point of these analysts was that Gates had helped the Reagan administration exaggerate the Soviet threat in the early 1980s and thus obscure evidence of the communist bloc’s disintegration, all the better to justify an expensive military buildup and support for bloody wars in the Third World.
The signs of Soviet weakness already were apparent in the 1970s when many experts concluded that Moscow was facing technological and economic crises, and was eager for serious negotiations with the West. That analysis – that the Cold War was nearing its end – gave rise to the “détente” strategies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
However, old Cold Warriors and a new breed of intellectuals, known as the neoconservatives, resisted this analysis and insisted that the Soviet Union actually was on the march, building highly sophisticated weapons and still moving toward world domination.
Though ultimately shown to be false, these arguments carried the day after Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980. To scare the American people into support for a massive arms buildup, the neocons hyped evidence of Soviet capabilities, essentially setting up a straw man that Reagan’s military expansion could get credit for knocking down.
In 1991-92, while Bill Clinton was cozying up to this Reagan legacy, several investigations were underway into other Reagan-era deceptions – from Republican collaboration with Iran’s radical mullahs, to secret military assistance for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, to corruption and human rights abuses in Central America.
By giving Reagan credit for “winning the Cold War,” Bill Clinton bought into the key justification for ignoring the crimes committed during the Reagan-Bush years. He also was earning brownie points from the journalistic and political elites in Washington.
Under the Rug
After defeating George H.W. Bush in November 1992, Clinton was perfectly positioned to help pending investigations into Reagan-Bush crimes – from special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s Iran-Contra probe to Rep. Henry Gonzalez’s examination of the Iraq-gate scandal to a House task force’s review of the October Surprise issue, whether Reagan’s 1980 campaign had colluded with Iran behind Jimmy Carter’s back.
Even though the evidence in all these cases pointed toward Republican guilt, Clinton and other key Washington Democrats, such as Rep. Lee Hamilton, swept the scandals under the rug, all the better to gain some bipartisan favor from the Republicans. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege, or Consortiumnews.com’s “The Clintons & the Bushes.”]
As it turned out, Clinton’s collaboration in these cover-ups didn’t work out exactly as he planned. Spared from having to defend Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the Republicans and their right-wing attack machine went after Bill and Hillary Clinton, who remained on the defensive for nearly their entire eight years in office.
Now, the Clintons are battling for a new lease on the White House – and they are applying lessons learned from the win-at-all-cost Republicans to discredit Barack Obama.
Though Obama had the foresight to oppose George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, the Clintons accuse Obama of lacking consistency in his anti-war positions. Bill Clinton called the story of Obama’s war opposition a “fairy tale,” ignoring the fact that Hillary Clinton was a war supporter from 2002 almost until the day she jumped into the Democratic race.
The Clintons have sought to make an issue, too, out of Obama’s links to low-income housing developer Tony Rezko, who is under federal indictment in an Illinois corruption probe. [For some background, see Chicago Sun-Times article, Nov. 5, 2006.]
However, the Clintons have had their own difficulties in similar areas, from their ties to the swindler Jim McDougal during their Arkansas days, to the Marc Rich pardon while in the White House, to donations from fugitive Norman Hsu in Campaign 2008.
Most audacious of all, however, the Clintons are making an issue out of Obama’s mild praise of Ronald Reagan, when they have spent years not only complimenting Reagan but protecting his dubious legacy.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
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