🚀 go-pugleaf

It should come to no surprise that bimbos aren't the only thing
the piece of garbage in the White House was screwing. He,
along with his pals in the Sierra Club, Audubum Society and other 
environmental sellouts have raped Mother Earth for profit. Read a
story about it below and at San Jose Mercury News website at:
http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/opinion/docs/COCKBURN81.htm

Bill Mulcahy

_Published Friday, August 21, 1998, in the San Jose Mercury News

ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Clinton's legacy is already in place
BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN 
PRESIDENT Clinton has already carved his legacy, and it has nothing to do with the
Lewinsky affair. 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. 


Alexander Cockburn is a syndicated columnist.