People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [388]
“Big government” had, in fact, begun with the Founding Fathers, who deliberately set up a strong central government to protect the interests of the bondholders, the slave owners, the land speculators, the manufacturers. For the next two hundred years, the American government continued to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful, offering millions of acres of free land to the railroads, setting high tariffs to protect manufacturers, giving tax breaks to oil corporations, and using its armed forces to suppress strikes and rebellions.
It was only in the twentieth century, especially in the thirties and sixties, when the government, besieged by protests and fearful of the stability of the system, passed social legislation for the poor, that political leaders and business executives complained about “big government.”
President Clinton reappointed Alan Greenspan as head of the Federal Reserve system, which regulated interest rates. Greenspan’s chief concern was to avoid “inflation,” which bondholders did not want because it would reduce their profits. His financial constituency saw higher wages for workers as producing inflation and worried that if there was not enough unemployment, wages might rise.
Reduction of the annual deficit in order to achieve a “balanced budget” became an obsession of the Clinton administration. But since Clinton did not want to raise taxes on the wealthy, or to cut funds for the military, the only alternative was to sacrifice the poor, the children, the aged—to spend less for health care, for food stamps, for education, for single mothers.
Two examples of this appeared early in Clinton’s second administration, in the spring of 1997:
From the New York Times, May 8, 1997: “A major element of President Clinton’s education plan—a proposal to spend $5 billion to repair the nation’s crumbling schools—was among the items quietly killed in last week’s agreement to balance the federal budget. . . . ”
From the Boston Globe, May 22, 1997: “After White House intervention, the Senate yesterday . . . rejected a proposal . . . to extend health insurance to the nation’s 10.5 million uninsured children. . . . Seven lawmakers switched their votes . . . after senior White House officials . . . called and said the amendment would imperil the delicate budget agreement.”
The concern about balancing the budget did not extend to military spending. Immediately after he was elected for the first time, Clinton had said: “I want to reaffirm the essential continuity in American foreign policy.”
In Clinton’s presidency, the government continued to spend at least $250 billion a year to maintain the military machine. He was accepting the Republican claim that the nation must be ready to fight “two regional wars” simultaneously, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. At that time, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had said, “The threats have become so remote, so remote that they are difficult to discern.” General Colin Powell spoke similarly (reported in Defense News, April 8, 1991): “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”
Clinton had been accused during the election campaign of having evaded military service during the Vietnam war, apparently in opposition to the war, like so many other young Americans. Once in the White House he seemed determined to erase the image of a “draftdodger,” and took every opportunity to portray himself as a supporter of the military establishment.
In the fall of 1993, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, announced the results of a “bottom-up review” of the military budget, envisioning the spending of over $1 trillion for the next five years. It called for virtually no reduction in major weapons systems. A conservative analyst with the Woodrow Wilson International Center (Anthony Cordesman) commented: “There are no radical departures from the Bush Base Force, or even from earlier U.S. strategy.”
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