Tom Waters wrote:
> I think that it would be a good parlor game and probably something much
> more useful to come up with a list of Clinton's more historically
> significant crimes and put them in Starr-like form.
>
> Tom
Here is a crime of OPPORTUNISM at the expense of disabled children to start the Significant Crimes list:
When Clinton signed the last version of welfare "reform," the Work Opportunity and Personal Responsibility Act contained a provision unrelated to traditional welfare (AFDC) which redefined what consitutes "disability" for children. It did away with the individual functional assessement (IFA) test which allowed Social Security to go beyond the formal listing of impairments in order to evaluate an individual child's combined impairments to determine whether s/he was eligible for SSI.
The neoliberal Clinton did not insist that the misplaced provision be dropped because it was part of the Social Security disability regulations for children. Instead Clinton remarked that the Personal Responsibility Act "had serious flaws that are unrelated to welfare reform" but he believed it was his "duty to seize the opportunity it gives us to end welfare as we know it."
The result of restricting the definition of disability: SSA has thrown some 500,000 children off SSI and in many cases, they have lost their only form of health care, Medicaid. The American Bar Association has been working to see that some of the children get reinstated.
Marta Russell