Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Clinton's Bigger Lies“Don’t worry, it’s cost plus,” was a saying made famous in Baghdad’s Green Zone, but the deluxe war spending was pioneered in the Clinton era.While there is still some attention to Hillary Clinton’s role in the 1990s US foreign policy in the Balkans, I think we ought to be discussing untruths much more significant than her fib about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire. Clinton deserves the negative attention she is getting for her fabrication, but other lies, like the ones about her track record on economic policy, are what need ongoing scrutiny.
So let’s go back to some other statements of Hillary Clinton and to some other features of the US military presence in the Balkans. Last year, earlier on in her campaign, Clinton said
As she reflects back on the US military presence in the Balkans under her husband’s administration, and on her role in forming and carrying out his policies, Hillary Clinton needs to speak about the Bill Clinton administration’s “practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions.” In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein observes that Halliburton, with Dick Cheney at the helm, made its first major expansions in the area of privatizing government functions in the Balkans—under Bill Clinton.
Under the Clinton administration, we also saw the privatization of information technology divisions of the US government.
And whom do we find on the board of Lockheed Martin during this period?
So, yeah, I’m concerned about the “practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions”—concerned that new private corporate inroads into government functions were pioneered under Bill Clinton and expanded wildly under George Bush. I am concerned that the corporate takeover will not be reversed unless there is a formal plan to accomplish this reversal. As far as I can see, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has such a plan. In his Blueprint for Change, Obama champions the return of appropriate government regulatory functions, from the Labor Relations Board to the Department of Justice, but he sidesteps the new roles of private corporations in government function. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has claimed to be a standard bearer for the fight against these destructive economic policies, and it is nothing but a cynical lie. If Hillary Clinton is going to continue to stake claims on her husband’s presidential legacy, then we should be concerned that she may be as friendly to Dick Cheney’s economic vision as George Bush is. (Cross-posted on Hungry Blues.) Labels: bill clinton, bosnia, dick cheney, george bush, halliburton, hillary clinton, lockheed martin, lynne cheney, NAFTA, Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine
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Dollars & Sense might also find it interesting to check out the role that the Obama campaign's national finance chair, Penny Pritzker, played in the subprime mortgage lending scandal, as a board member of the failed Superior Bank until 2001. See the following link for more info on this:
http://thismodernworld.com/4222
There's also an article by Dave Moberg indicating Penny Pritzker's role, titled "Breaking The Bank," that appeared in the Nov. 8, 2002 issue of In These Times, at the following link:
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