Rising fascism in the US

I will never forgive Bill Clinton for throwing people with mental illness of welfare, instituting "Don't ask don't tell", dragging the country into a lurid sex scandal and greatly expanding the number of young men in prison.

The bank crash occurred eight years after the banks were de-regulated and seven years after Clinton left office. If the succeeding Administration had lifted a finger, the crash doesn't happen. When they elect you, you're not supposed to sit on your ass and collect a paycheck-you're actually supposed to do something.

As far as crime goes, in the six years before Bill Clinton became president, murders rose 18%. By the end of Bill Clinton's two terms, murders had declined 15%-despite the population rising.

More jobs, higher pay, peace in Europe with Russia's power limited to their borders, international respect at the highest level. Cheering crowds worldwide.

What do you people WANT from this guy?

I confess that I wasn't paying a lot of attention to this issue when it was happening (nor have I paid any attention to it since then), but I thought he ended welfare for people without mental illness, rather than the reverse?

That doesn't mean I agree with him doing this. Keep in mind however that he had to win elections during the Reagan/Bush era.

We're going to have at least 19 more years of Republican control over the White House. But when the Democrats do finally regain the White House one day in the distant future, it will only be by electing a "Trump-lite" compromise candidate much like Bill Clinton won only by being a "Reagan-lite" compromise candidate.



It was a step forward considering the era. All the liberals of this time thought they had just solved the issue of gay rights with civil partnerships (or whatever it was called).



That was indeed bad, especially since the Democrats were happy to lynch Republicans over any minor offense.



Blame black activists for this, not Bill Clinton. The very same black activists who now complain bitterly about this, back then were demanding it and calling anyone who questioned it a racist.

I was generally very happy with Bill Clinton's foreign policy positions. I would have liked to have seen a lot less demonizing of his political opponents.

Anyone can cherry pick economic or crime statistics to make people or causes look good. You credit the crime rate to Bill Clinton, the NRA credits it to the elimination of gun laws.

I judge Bill Clinton by what he did (not by random statistics). In my opinion his administration set back progressive causes by decades.

1) Bill Clinton's crime law had provisions like "three strikes" that are directly responsible for the incarceration rate and the damage done to minority communities as a result.

2) Bill Clinton was accused of several credible accusations of sexual harrassment from multiple women and one believable accusation of rape. There is a real hypocrisy here from people who support the current "#MeToo" movement.

3) Bill Clinton pushed through the Welfare Bill that saved money... and hurt people. People who needed social services, including the mentally ill, were refused them.

Bill Clinton sold Republican ideas to progressives... and somehow the progressives ate them up.

What did I want from him?

- Progressive policies that built up the social safety net.
- Law enforcement policies that support communities rather than demonizing them.
- Keeping his pants on in the Oval Office and not lying under oath.

Max,
I’m curious.
What is your complaint re Don’t ask, don’t tell?

******* DOMA chafed my ass.

Yes but who cares?

Minority leaders were insisting that it be done and were calling everyone a racist if they dared to questioned the wisdom of doing it.

Now they are calling everyone a racist because they got the very proposals that they demanded.

I advise not paying any attention to their complaints.

I personally want a liberal who does not sell us out.

Quote Max:

In other words you narrowly judge a president by which laws he signed, not by how well things improved or how badly they worsened under his watch. Unfortunately that is an overly narrow viewpoint, as it ignores the effects one thing has on people and society on other things.

For instance, crime has been linked to bad economic times, people commit crimes to live or because they are hanging around with a lot of time on their hands instead of on a job. Bill Clinton's first year, 2013, murders actually went up. They dropped starting in his second year and then all the way through. Now check out the Full Time employment figures for Bill Clinton's terms, 1993-2000.



Notice how jobs went up in 1993, his first year, and then murders fell from the next year on. And the link between good economic times and crime has been established for many decades.

The economic stimulus package that Bill Clinton pushed in 1993 which jump started the economy is what led to the influx of new Full Time jobs and the consequent reduction in murders and violent crime. I'm sorry, but simply giving the amount of murders per year does not constitute "cherry-picking statistics", a term used by politicians and flacks to try to explain away things that don't go according to their worldview and predictions. Giving the number of murders per year is simply giving the facts. And showing how the number of Full Time jobs increased along with the consequent decrease in murders is simply illustrating a connection between good times and violent crime which has been well known since the early part of the 20th century.

You completely missed the point Blickers. The statistics are irrelevant to the reasons I think Bill Clinton was a horrible president (and not a very good husband either).

It was the things that he did directly that made him a crappy president; putting people in need on the street, passing draconian law enforcement policies, and selling out servicemen and women (not to mention dragging the office the country through a sexual scandal).

There is no question that the US had a time of economic success. That wasn't the problem with the Clinton presidency.

The fact is that the number of people in prison, particularly Black men, skyrocketed as a direct result of Clinton policy. If you want to correlate this with a drop in the murder rate, then so be it.

I still believe it was the wrong thing to do.

Just to be doubly clear, I am not arguing that everything that happened under Bill Clinton was bad. I am saying that some of the things that the Clinton administration did were pretty horrible (and I have already listed many of them).

But then again... Nixon created the EPA.

Right . . . this is not about fascism, it never was. It's about your pathological obsession with the Clintons.

So what?

Black people were demanding this policy and were accusing anyone who was skeptical of it of racism.

Now they want to complain because it was implemented?

Quote max:


Just wondering....If you have a crime wave steadily increasing over the course of several years, can you imagine any solution to it that doesn't involve putting more people in jail?

People were getting shot up on the street, gangs were shooting through the front doors of apartments in housing projects not caring if babies were in the living room on the other side of the front door. Even if lack of employment opportunities was a big big part of why the young men doing the shooting fell into a life of crime, it's not enough to just give him a job and say all is forgiven. If you have murderers running around loose, you have to prosecute and jail if he's guilty.

I cannot imagine reversing a violent crime wave without increased imprisonment being at least part of the solution, can you?

Continuing targeted personal harassment.
If this is ok, I will begin doing the same. Won’t make for a pretty sight, but fair is fair, and I like equality.

That didn’t take long.

American Pravda has arrived.

https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/424191-us-ndependent-press-miller/

Pravda is run by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, while your source (rt.com) is owned by the State-owned news agency RIA Novosti.
Both excellent examples of independent media.

It’s one of the few places, currently, where American journalists can speak their news about America.

If Russian journalists wanted to disseminate critical stories about Putin, they couldn’t do it in their own countries either.

That’s the state of journalism in this country, too, now.

https://theintercept.com/2018/05/04/six-animal-rights-activists-charged-with-felonies-for-investigation-and-rescue-that-led-to-punishment-of-a-utah-turkey-farm/

Our government is protecting companies that lie to us about what we’re eating, and crucifying the people in our society who have the balls to tell us.

Excerpt:

In January 2017, the six activists entered a farm in Moroni, Utah, that supplies turkeys to Norbest, a large company that aggressively markets itself to the public as selling “mountain-grown” turkeys who are treated with particularly humane care. Its marketing materials feature bucolic photographs of Utah nature, designed to create an image that its turkeys are raised in fresh and healthy natural settings, accompanied by assurances that its “practices are humane” and ethical, “with the health and comfort of the birds of paramount importance.”


What the activists found at the farm was something radically different: tens of thousands of turkeys crammed inside filthy industrial barns, virtually on top of one another. The activists say the animals were suffering from diseases, infections, open wounds, and injuries sustained by pecking and trampling one another. Countless chicks and adult turkeys were barely able to stand, or were lying in their own waste, close to death.

They also say that, as a result of the filth in these barns, hepatitis and other viral diseases were rampant and spreading throughout the flock, which in turn caused the farm to put various antibiotics, including penicillin, into the barns’ water supply.

The mass or indiscriminate use of antibiotics by industrial farms poses a severe danger to the public health, since it breeds antibiotic-resistant bacteria into the human food supply. Between 70 to 80 percent of all antibiotics administered in the United States are given to farm animals as part of the agricultural industry.

Norbest expressly promises that its farms do “not use, nor does our drug policy permit, the routine use of medically important antibiotics.” (While the company admits that conditions at the farm were abusive and unacceptable, it denies that hepatitis was rampant and that antibiotics were indiscriminately administered.)

The activists, all volunteers with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, filmed and photographed the conditions inside the farm. “In my 20 years of investigating animal abuse, I’ve never seen conditions this horrifying at a corporate farm,” Hsiung told the Intercept. “We saw animals that looked dead but were still breathing; animals, languishing, who had virtually been pecked to death; many animals collapsed on the ground in their own feces and filth. It was as bad as it gets.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/rt-america-was-not-pro-trump/

Excerpt:

Larry King, one of America’s best-known interviewers, who now hosts Politicking on RT America, interviewed Trump himself. After introducing the then–GOP nominee as a “good friend,” King proceeded to push back against Trump on a number of issues, including his “secret plan” to defeat ISIS.

Ed Schultz, who hosts News with Ed Schultz, also routinely ran segments that criticized Trump. “Who’s gonna stop Donald Trump!?” pleaded Schultz before a segment on how the GOP was worried about the reality-TV star’s unstoppable rise. Schultz also aired an interview with Bernie Sanders, who lambasted Trump’s bigotry and sexism and called Clinton “far and away the superior candidate”.

Lesser-known names on RT America have also criticized Trump on-air. Lee Camp, who hosts the satirical show Redacted Tonight, has mocked Trump relentlessly, calling one segment on climate change: “Why Donald Trump Is Dangerous For All Humanity.”

A simple look through RT America’s YouTube channel throws up numerous clips in which guests refer to Trump as misogynistic, bigoted, and racist. Guests on RT America have also claimed Trump does not stand up for regular workers, that his presidency would be exceedingly harmful to the markets, that he is not to be trusted on Social Security, and that his election could be more threatening to the global economy than ISIS. A political psychologist invited on to discuss whether Trump was a “textbook narcissist” called Trump “unstable.”

RT America has also critically covered Trump’s plans to “load up Guantánamo” with “bad dudes,” run negative segments on his personal taxes, reported on Latinos fearing deportation of friends and family, criticized his joke about assassinating Hillary Clinton, covered controversy around his choice of Steve Bannon as chief strategist and run segments calling both his health-care and foreign-policy plans lacking in detail.

It would be hard to describe any of this as Trump promotion.

If RT can be accused of trying to influence the American public, it certainly was not by feeding them a steady diet of pro-Trump information. It would be fairer to say RT tried to influence its viewers by airing coverage consistently critical of the American democratic system and process in general—and unfortunately for US intelligence agencies—there is no crime in that.

If RT’s critical reporting on the United States is factual—and not even the intelligence report is claiming that it isn’t—then it’s no different to any other channel with an editorial slant, albeit one with far less influence on the American public than mainstream US channels. The disparagement of RT as a Vladimir Putin–controlled engine for pro-Trump propaganda boils down to anger over the fact that the American journalists who work for RT have the audacity to shine a light on unflattering aspects of the American political system.