Tuesday, July 21, 2015

On today's episode of Hillary Clinton Is The Worst

While we're still figuring out how much fun we had at poor Bernie Sanders' expense last weekend (much of it deserved.. more on that later),  now is a good time to remind ourselves that Hillary Clinton Is The Worst.
Bill Clinton’s overhaul of the welfare system, which was passed in conjunction with a Republican-controlled Congress, replaced a major federal welfare program with block grants to states, required adults to find a job within two years of receiving aid, placed a five-year limit on aid, blocked future legal immigrants from welfare assistance, and cut $24 billion in food stamps. It was denounced by many Democrats, including Peter Edelman, who resigned from his post at the Department of Health and Human Services, arguing that the law would do “serious injury to American children.”
The rest of that article is a series of snippets in which Hillary is being the worst person to families her husband was cutting off of welfare. My favorite parts are when later Senator Clinton starts talking about "deadbeats."
In an April 2002 interview with the Gettysburg Times, then-Senator Clinton reiterated the impetus behind her husband’s effort to “substitute dignity for dependence.” At the time, Congress was considering the reauthorization the 1996 law.
“There were people in the White House who said, ‘just sign anything,’ you know,’ the New York senator said in an interview. ‘And I thought that was wrong. We wanted to do it in a way that kept faith with our goals: End welfare as we know it, substitute dignity for dependence, but make work pay.’”
In that same interview, Clinton also said that people who had moved from welfare to work were “no longer deadbeats.”
“Now that we’ve said these people are no longer deadbeats—they’re actually out there being productive—how do we keep them there?”
To put it bluntly, Hillary Clinton doesn't care about poor people. She doesn't care how many she has to throw to the wolves to get elected.

Today, she was asked some pointed questions about the emergence of the "gig" economy where wolves like Uber and Taskrabbit take advantage of the desperation of underemployed people with no social benefits. These over-capitalized start-ups are sinking a lot of money into political advertising this year so candidates may be wary of offending them. Her answer, predictably, was a dodge.




The question really wasn't about the ACA. But it's important to emphasize that the "innovation" she doesn't want to stifle is these companies' ability to exploit vulnerable and therefore pliable and cheap labor. That's what the "gig" economy is. And that scheme can't operate if we get too many "deadbeats" running around with no imperative to feed it.
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3 comments:

  1. Nolaresident7:40 PM

    Well, you confused me with "today she was asked" and linked to a HuffPo piece from last week and without seeing the entire question she was asked, I have no idea how she tied in the ACA unless it had to do with "benefits...portable...job to job" and that tying in to the "sharing economy".

    And man...digging back to 2002 for a quote or comment? How have other politicians' positions *evolved* since then:

    Don't Ask Don't Tell
    Gay marriage/civil unions

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  2. jeffrey7:55 PM

    Sorry if it's confusing. "Today she was asked" refers to the tweet with the quote from Hillary. I moved the link to the story about the sharing economy influence on politics over a bit. Maybe that helps.

    2002 (Pretty much yesterday, btw) is relevant because it was a time the sitting Senator could have reconsidered a policy already proving to be a miserable failure.

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  3. bayoustjohndavid10:28 PM

    I'll be curious to see whether you think Sanders deserved because of poor preparation or defective policy. I had a major bone to pick with the Dayen article you linked:

    "But Sanders couldn’t get past his mindset: that if you fix economic
    inequality in America, social justice will naturally follow. Historical
    experience doesn’t show this; Bland was an educated black woman went to
    Texas for a job interview and three days later, was found dead in her
    jail cell. Countries in Europe with high degrees of state spending to
    reduce inequality continue to have racially motivated problems with
    immigrant communities. The critique doesn’t hold."

    Tell that to color of Change and all the other progressive groups that send me emails asking me to support the latest effort to make the 1% .(or at least the comfortable end of the lopsided barbell*) look like the rest of the country. Those emails usually include references to recent injustices, either implying or outright stating that economic equality is a necessary for racial justice.

    *Because even though Progressives continually describe an economy that's turned into a zero sum game for most of us, the best they can usually come with is plans to make the comfortable end of the lopsided barbell look like the uncomfortable end.

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