>From what I understand, Treasury Secretary Bentsen basically told Clinton
that that was the way things were going to go, which is why he threw a
temper tantrum. Also, I think there's an argument to made that during and
after the Asian financial crisis, Greenspan felt that the global economy
needed the U.S. to keep strong and to keep spending so he didn't want to
prematurely slow down the economy.
What I don't understand is why any liberal would defend Clinton after he ended welfare as we knew it back in '96. Just concerning the class struggle dimension, I came across this bit from a Chrisitan Parenti piece on labor in the '70s:
"There are many ways to measure working -class power. One is what economist Juliet Schor calls "the cost of job loss" - that is, the amount of income, measured in terms of potentially missed wages, that the average worker loses between jobs. When the cost of job loss is high (e.g., when unemployment benefits are reduced, or when welfare benefits slashed or restricted), workers will be less likely to risk being fired for militant labor activity - and so their power is reduced."
Parenti prefaces the piece with a quote from "Alan Budd, chief economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher, 1992" (wasn't she out of power in '92?) The quote reads, "Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.... What was engineered - in Marxist terms - was a crisis in capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labor, and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since."
Peter