Clinton's Legacy

by Alexander Cockburn

And since he's now truly in the soup, expect worse. In the months that remain before inglorious sunset on his presidency, we can surely expect him to sell off Social Security to the mutual funds industry and move toward financing government via user fees, which will be socially regressive but pleasing to big business, only too happy to take over the national parks and put turnstiles on them.

They talk of Bill's desire for a legacy beyond jokes about his DNA. But he's already carved his legacy: Clinton's '90s will be remembered as the decade when national assets were plundered at will. The first week in August saw the auction bell sound for sell-off of the national oil reserve in Alaska to the oil companies. Five years earlier, in the summer of '93, the timber companies got the White House go-ahead to start the final raid on America's old-growth forests. The coal companies are stripping West Virginia, Arizona and even Al Gore's favorite vistas in Tennessee. The gold-mining companies have also enjoyed a rich bonanza -- whether they be Barick, which, for less than $10,000, bought a federal gold deposit in Nevada worth $10 billion, or Noranda, which was paid $65 million not to mine next to Yellowstone on federal lands it had acquired for less than $5,000.

The Clinton legacy goes on for pages, starting with the dismantling of the Delaney Clause, a piece of legislation dating from the 1950s that imposed an absolute ban on the presence of carcinogens in processed foods. Year after year, Monsanto, Dupont and American Cyanamid fought it with no success. Then came Clinton Time. In 1996, the White House proposed, and Congress disposed. The Delaney Clause, a splendid monument to federal regulatory supervision in the interests of public safety, went down.

Still nominally on the books, but substantively hollowed out, is the single greatest piece of environmental legislation in American history, the Endangered Species Act. In Clinton Time, timber companies and real estate barons have been handed permits to destroy the habitat of endangered species such as the California gnatcatcher, the spotted owl and the red-cockaded woodpecker. These permits have been scattered like confetti to corporate rapers who have been scarcely able to believe their good fortune. Unlike every other president in memory, dating back to Theodore Roosevelt, Clinton cannot boast of a single substantive environmental monument to his administration.

In other sectors, the corporations have fared equally well. Clinton has given Wall Street everything it wanted, as he has the arms companies, Silicon Valley, the insurance industry, the telecommunications industry, the banks, the food processors and other segments of the Fortune 500.

Each time Bill Clinton has felt it necessary to demonstrate resolve and political achievement, it's been at the expense of the poor and the disenfranchised: the welfare bill, the attacks on teenagers, the Counter-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, refusal to alter blatantly racist drug laws such as the 100-to-1 disparity in cocaine and crack penalties, enhanced powers of surveillance, harsh anti-immigrant enforcement.

Clinton could never have done this on his own. His greatest political legacy will probably be reckoned as his ability to induce liberals to run point for him as he sank the bayonet ever deeper into their backs. We have only to recall the environmentalists who were recruited to act as cheerleaders for the North American Free Trade Agreement or the women's groups whose leaders kept their mouths shut when the welfare bill was going through or Jesse Jackson's endorsement of Clinton in Chicago at the 1996 convention. The liberals sold out for Bill and never got anything in return, except to see the last remnants of the New Deal scattered to the wind.

But it also should be said that Bill Clinton has summoned forth the finest, most enlightened instincts of the American people who, despite the outraged squawks of the better element, have stubbornly refused to see anything particularly awful in his fling with Monica Lewinsky. This is a glorious moment in the centuries-long struggle against the window peepers and the Puritans who have blighted so many American lives. In this sense, a permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian of Bill's DNA on Monica's dress would be a fitting and honorable legacy.