The Language of Betrayal

Peter K. peterk at enteract.com
Tue Nov 28 20:09:42 PST 2000



>Clinton, by whatever means, managed to get the Fed to keep interest rates
>low enough to pump up unemployment (or so it is alleged that the Fed was
>able to do), something Reagan and Bush failed to accomplish in their
>relations with the Fed.
>
>Why shouldn't Clinton get credit for that?
>
>-- Nathan Newman


>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



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