Democrats may be denouncing the current assaults on social programs, writes Norman Solomon. But three decades ago Bill Clinton’s embrace of the private sector began clearing the path for Trump’s wrecking crew.
Former President Bill Clinton, on right, in 2000 at Trump Tower, shaking hands with future 45th and 47th president, Donald Trump. (Ralph Alswang, Office of the President – Clinton Presidential Library/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
By Norman Solomon
TomDispatch.com
The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?
Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.
While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.
“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”
Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.
This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters.
Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.
While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.
‘Opportunity’ as a Killer Ideology
Elon Musk and Argentine President Javier Milei in February at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr /CC BY-SA 2.0)
The Democratic Party establishment now denounces Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”
Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives.
But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.
The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options.
In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.
Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Time reported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism.”
Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise:
“Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”
Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business.
While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools.
Taking the Government to Market
Clinton with First Lady Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on his second Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1997. (White House/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”
That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in.
As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.
Ronald Reagan, left, in his 1976 failed campaign for the Republican nomination, during which he popularized the term “welfare queen.” (Florida Memory Project/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists.
When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it,” he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.
Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse.
The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate … may make America unrecognizable.”) But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.
President Bill Clinton signing the bipartisan Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act on Aug. 22, 1996, known as “welfare reform,” which put restrictions on aid to recipients who were mainly single mothers. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass.”
The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system.”
Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.
A Small Business Shell Game
During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.
Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty.
Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.
In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with.
Current figures indicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.
Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.
Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece:
“Structural problems require structural solutions and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country. … ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root.”
But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do.
Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.
During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.
“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind. “We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”
The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out.
“Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector …. It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”
Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area.
This article is from TomDispatch.com
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Anybody else who sees a “problem” with above´s last photography “President Bill Clinton signing the bipartisan Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act”?
The Deep Staters at CIA compromised Bill while he was governor. Bill became a moth loving the warm light and almost got burnt.
Bill Barr is said to have made a secret trip to Mena and talked to Bill about his creative banking bills. According to two of Clintons State Police Security officers.
Barr is also said t0 have advised Bill to not pursue the charges against the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI. Settle and end the prosecution was the word.
How convenient for Ron Reagan, CIA, Ollie North and a host of others 41 pardoned. You know the Iran – Contra affair. I cold go on about the entire White Water whitewash and why Star come up pretty much empty except for poor ole Webb Hubble. Covering crimes CIA and DEA could not tolerate going public.
Mr. Solomon has a thorough catalog of slick Willy’s sell outs of the Democratic party and it’s voters here. He had allowed himself to become involved with something much bigger than he, and when confronted sold out lock, stock and barrel. The rest, as they say, is history. Cocaine, Contras, Clinton and the CIA.
Y’all might really enjoy reading Senator John Kerry’s Subcommittee report on Terrorism, Narcotic and International Operations, U.S. Senate printed 1989 out December 1988. Titled: Drugs Law Enforcement And. Foreign Policy 100th Congress 2nd Session.
Muckrock has more info for instance xxx.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/mar/15/senates-final-report-iran-contra-undermined-all-ot/
“But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.” Norman Solomon. AND, the take-away, IMO, “We, the people” are done w/“Getting Played,” De-phkn-Frauded, by the ABC’s of the DNC, Bernie $anders & “Sandy” Ocasio-Cortez, the rabid, right-wing, rat-ba$tard Republicans; &, POTUS #42-#47!!!
…..The duopoly, “In the last year alone” [2023] “the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.” Arundhati Roy @ hxxps://pentransmissions.com/2024/10/15/no-propaganda-on-earth-can-hide-the-wound-that-is-palestine-arundhati-roys-pen-pinter-prize-2024-speech/
Hence, from sea to shining sea, “we, the people” are asked “to take responsibility for one’s life rather than relying on other people or things,” specifically the USG. Hence, the $peaker of The “People’s” House, “Mike Johnson Mocks Millions Who Could Lose Medicaid: ‘Do Something Constructive”. Mike Johnson.
Welfare Queen. Welfare to Work. SNAP!!! 6.24.25, “If you’re going to be on the public wagon and you’re able, you should try to help pull it,” Johnson said. “All we did was put in there,” BBB’s New Work Requirements, “as you all know, a 20-hour work requirement per week,” he continued, expressing shock that anyone might quibble with this. “Give me a break. They’re complaining about that. You either have to be working, you have to be looking for a job, in a job training program, or volunteering in your community. For heaven’s sake, do something constructive.”
….. “According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the legislation will force 10.3 million people off Medicaid, primarily due to the new work requirements: 1) Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” would authorize another round of tax cuts for the rich — and it would be financed, in part, with sweeping cuts to Medicaid; 2) Achieved by imposing work requirements on all supposedly “able-bodied” adults on Medicaid under the age of 65, demanding they either work or volunteer at least 20 hours a week, 3) “Effectively a demand that recipients toil in low-wage jobs in order to maintain their health insurance.”
Did you know, in Israel “Healthcare Insurance IS a Right NOT a Privilege?!?” Israel’s National Health In$urance Law rocks & works, by, “Self-Determination.” The Consumer chooses from FOUR (4) universal healthcare plans:
1) Every resident of Israel is insured for healthcare under the National Health Insurance Law, through payment of monthly premiums to the National Insurance Institute (Bituach Leumi). New Olim, Ktinim Chozrim and Ezrachim Olim are entitled to up to six months of free health insurance for the basic level of coverage, if they are not working;
2) Every resident can choose one of the four health plans (Clalit, Leumit, Maccabi and Meuhedet) regardless of age, pre-existing condition(s) or state of health. hxxps://www.nbn.org.il/life-in-israel/healthcare-in-israel/overview-of-israeli-healthcare-system/ (Last updated, June 17, 2025).
Proving neither the “transactional” POTUS, Trump-Vance, Inc., Bernie “the Independant, hot-air factory, fm Vermont” Sanders &/or “Sandy” fm the Bronx [Sanders is from Brooklyn] , will effect peace or prosperity for the people they victimize. Concluding, Norman Solomon calls it, “Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Trump.” 100%!!!
Yes. And so did slavery and the civil war it brought that brought the Electoral College.
Just about everything indicates, that the u.s.a. is ruled by a severely criminal syndicate for many decades already.
Plundering the people and the planet.
Killing whoever is getting in their way; babies, children, women, men- there is no mercy and limit when it is about maximizing profits of the “elites”.
The u.s.- “elites” are all fascists.
At the cost of the majority of the people.
If you have the stomach for more, there is a book on this aspect of the presidency of the execrable William J. “I feel the pain I’ve caused you but the plan for more will really make you freeloaders squeal!” Clinton:
“Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution”
by Michael A. Meeropol
I used to teach business ethics at universities in North America and earlier was a rabid capitalist. I’m happy that Clinton got welfare under control but as the article suggests he did not get corporations under control. If income disparity and the brutality of the American health system is not remedied, I fear that there will be a civil war. Too many times in history, the downtrodden have resorted to violence to make their voices heard, and the corporate big wigs and billionaires have the most to lose (Consider the Luigi phenomenon ). If they are sensible, they will help implement change and get us back on an even keel with responsibility on all sides being the important principle.
I know this by bitter experience. I was a rank and file blue collar union activist for 28 years as well as a local Dem campaign mgr so one of many who fought the neolib takeover. The neolibs dumped the New Deal, including financial regs, thereby enabling the ’07-08 econ meltdown. The Ds then bailed out Wall St. while the millions who lost jobs, pensions, houses got nothing. The Ds are no longer the party of FDR, but of Chuck Schumer, who in 2016 said: “For every blue collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you can repeat that for OH and IL and WI.” If the reprehensible morality isn’t troubling, then consider how it’s a losing strategy.
Yet we the majority working class still hear comments like the one I read today on a nice progressive site. “The MAGAs blame ‘immigrants’ not the filthy rich for their poverty.” A few weeks ago, a study of Rust Belt political attitudes was released by three pro-labor think tanks. Neither immigrants nor the so-called culture wars were important. Intense anger at the Dems is about D failure. Strong economic populism tested very well, especially if voiced by a hypothetical independent candidate and there was a significant fall off if voiced by a D candidate. After 40 years of neglect, why would we trust the Ds?
Isn’t it wonderful bigotry is considered by both far right Rs and educated Ds to be the issue? They have in common the belief we commoners are stupid. One courts us, the other blames us; neither ever mentions the horrifically inequitable econ system. Well, both parties have the same 1%er and corporate sponsors.
Debs said in 1904. “The Republican and Democratic parties … are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principle. With either of these parties in power one thing is always certain and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle … The ignorant workingman who supports either of these parties forges his own fetters and is the unconscious author of his own misery.’
With all due respect for your good intentions, like almost every analyst, you focus solely on the corruption and weakness of the Democratic Party. You avoid the control the DNC exerts in order to maintain the 2-party control of politics. The significant monies and efforts made to prevent Dennis Kucinich from full participation in pre-election platforms, attempts to prevent Jill Stein from being on the recent Presdientail ticket in many states (costing that campaign precious time and monies), the scurrilous lies promulgated. There are some significant structural and procedural flaws in our much-flaunted ‘democracy’ as much of the world can attest to. There is simple legislation, if enforceable, that would begin a much needed process: All political campaigns are financed equally and solely by the government. Close all US overseas military bases. Reparations, as requested by the ‘host’ country. Disarm. Period. The list goes on.
We don’t believe this was meant to be an encyclopedic article on this issue of which of course there are other angles.
Those of us who are not ignorant of history or politics know full well that the Democrats are just as much capitalist exploiters and warmongers as any Republican. The only difference is that the Republicans are also nutty as squirrel poo. If you still support either the Repubs or the Dems, you are perpetuating the rotting capitalist system. The working class wants socialism and there are more of us than there are of the rich and the pampered upper middle class. Of course the military is a waste of money. It is also the biggest environmental polluter on the planet. War is a waste of not only money that should be used to fund absolutely free healthcare, free education, affordable housing and clean energy, but of lives. The U.S. is a dying empire and the worst of the worst have floated to the top, like the scum they are. Socialism now.
I could not agree more ^^
Thank you!! Great, and welcomed, post!) I added my own observations of our “predicament” (from 30 years of observing) in a post below ..
The policies/legislation you talk about are anathema to the duopoly – any dissident in a “major” Party must be adequately disciplined or “Kuciniched” and any dissident outside a “major” party must be excluded from even participating in the process – in debates or at the polls
I am old enough to remember non-corporate or at least not-particularly-corporate Democrats. But I have mostly quit trying explain that to people in their 40’s and younger. They never saw one in office: even the ones who employ some part of the post-FD Roosevelt rhetoric stump for corporatists. It feels like insisting that there were unicorns or faeries before people became literate.
1992 happened 33 years ago.
1980 happened 45 years ago.
In early 1981, the last moderate American president left office.
I remember eye-rolling when my elders spoke of the Depression or of Charles Lindbergh. The Depression had ended less than 25 years prior. If we say, a bit arbitrarily, that an average person becomes politically aware at about fifteen, that would mean that the youngest people who have actually experienced an arguably non-corporate Democrat in the White House are now 60, hopefully cruising into retirement.
Reagan, B Clinton, the various Bushs, Obama, and Biden have each ruled along nearly identical principles, mouthing somewhat different tropes. What Trump does I can’t make out. Maybe it’s interpretive dance; maybe he wants to save the other ear. Sure, the Democrats brought him to office, but he sure returned the favor. He might again.
The biggest reason people vote either party is the other. Maybe we still do have two parties, in whatever sense we do, because the goons need each other. Even with the best of intentions, people who convince others to vote for corporate Democrats also push Trump into office, though that’s likely not the worst of it.
What really amazes me is why so few u.s.- citizens vote for a 3rd party.
It is not that there was or is none.
Having been a 3rd Party voter since ’96, I have long wondered, as well, why people shun them and i have come up with some reasons, all of which much pretty wind up being propaganda from the duopoly, swallowed by too many in the electorate, but propaganda repeated so often and for so long that it has achieved the status of “common knowledge”, something “everybody knows”, not to be challenged …To whit;
1) “3rd parties can’t win” – (which is nonsense, any candidate on a ballot can win if enough people vote for ’em
– a 3rd Party, won in 1860 with Lincoln – people then didn’t buy that nonsense)
2) 3rd Parties are “spoilers” – (but any candidate is trying to “spoil” it for the other candidates, otherwise he/she wouldn’t be running against them – and, in any case, isn’t it about time we the people “spoiled” it for both “major” parties who have spoiled so much for the rest of us )
3) considering 1) and 2), there is no alternative to those 2 Parties (TINA), we have to choose one of them –
4) considering 3) and considering how both duopoly Parties have been taking us downhill, in a “bipartisan” manner, for decades, our choice must be a LOTE (lesser of 2 evils), even as they get more and more “E” all the time, or stay home, which more and more are doing
The irony is, though we the people haven’t figured out what a crock this all is, the duopoly knows it – it knows if enough people were aware of (and they would be if they paid attention) that there were better alternatives out there, on the ballot, they would choose them, so the duopoly, principally the Ds, does its best to keep those alternatives off ballots, (ask Nader or Stein). Other countries, “dictatorships” outlaw political parties or imprison or assassinate their opponents, we don’t have to do that, we just keep them off ballots.
Between “3rd Parties can’t win”, and/or are spoilers, TINA, LOTE – we have the perfect recipe for the “sh**show” put on for decades by our “Leaders” – it is not the electoral system that has failed, it is how we have chosen to use it, allowing ourselves to be convinced that, in fact, TINA
OK, whaddya think? Discussion welcomed …
When this country killed Huey Long style populism it issued its death warrant.
Kudos to Norman Solomon/Tom Dispatch & Consortiumnews for this informative and timely narrative!!! Awaken from your induced slumber America, retaining freedom is a team effort!!
As Usual,
EA