-Caveat Lector-
>From www.mises.org
> The Magical Government Tour
>
> By LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL, JR.
>
> [posted July 9, 1999]
>
> The press puppy-dogged Bill Clinton as he traveled the country
> exploiting the troubles of others to pad his legacy. Oozing the
> compassion that he kept under wraps as he bombed civilians in
> Serbia, Clinton announced that he plans to use the power of the
> federal government to fix up dilapidated housing and schools and
> inspire a renewal of economic growth.
>
> This is political agitprop. Indeed, news clips from his tour to
> troubled spots around the country looked like a Soviet propaganda
> film. America pretends to be wealthy, but look at the squalor and
> suffering kept under wraps! The rich are getting richer, while
> the poor suffer in silence!
>
> The press ate it up. "There was a bit of magic in Mr. Clinton's
> trip," wrote Jeanne Cummings of the Wall Street Journal in a
> story purporting to report the news. But the only magic is that
> anyone takes this nonsense seriously.
>
> Think about Clinton's claim: he and his friends are sure there is
> money to be made in these places. Corporate America, for reasons
> of prejudice or simple stupidity, doesn't understand this. To
> prove his point, he will offer tax incentives and investment
> guarantees for any business that invests in impoverished areas.
>
> But wait a minute. If there are profits to be made, why are
> government investment guarantees and regulatory favors needed? In
> fact, free enterprise has proven itself quite capable of sniffing
> out profit opportunities, while bureaucrats are worse than
> useless at this.
>
> And think about this: Clinton has spent his lifetime in
> government, and knows nothing about business except how to
> regulate it, tax it, and hit up its owners for campaign
> contributions. Here's Clinton on business economics: "If you have
> people who want to go to work and people with money to spend and
> they're both in the same place, it's a good place to invest."
>
> Spoken like a true central planner. Notice, however, that he is
> not committing his own savings; he wants to enlist the public to
> back the investments of other people. And if such favors are
> necessary to bring investment to a place, doesn't that suggest
> that the profits to be had there are marginally more risky than
> elsewhere? Yes it does. And who is going to bear this risk?
> Taxpayers of America, that's where you come in. Your pocketbooks
> are being tapped again to fix up places that politicians, not
> free markets, think are important.
>
> In truth, government never brought prosperity anywhere; only
> unhampered (and unaided) free enterprise does that. Public policy
> only works to redistribute wealth. For evidence, see the previous
> incarnations of Clinton's "New Market Initiative." In the 1960s,
> it was the War on Poverty and Urban Renewal. In the 1970s, it was
> UDAG grants and public housing. In the 1980s, it was Enterprise
> Zones, just as it was Empowerment Zones in the 1990s. It's always
> the same racket: taxpayers are looted in the name of economic
> uplift, resulting in wealth redistribution and poverty
> perpetuation.
>
> Most fundamentally, the underlying assumption behind Clinton's
> tour is all wrong. There is a reason why the areas Clinton
> visited are poor, and it is not because they are being
> irrationally "overlooked" by business. In Kentucky, the labor
> unions destroyed many mining towns. In urban areas, welfare and
> crime conspired to sap these places of economic energy. On Indian
> reservations, look no farther than the socialist governments that
> control these places, thanks to vast and everlasting federal
> subsidies and regulations.
>
> Places like East St. Louis, Watts, rural Mississippi, and the
> Pine Ridge Indian Reservation should be on the National Tour of
> Government Failure. These places aren't "neglected." Their
> problems are largely due to the lavish attention politicians like
> Clinton have paid to them over the years. If there are signs of
> hope, it is due to a handful of brave entrepreneurs, not the
> bureaucrats from HUD and the Agriculture Department that Clinton
> had in tow.
>
> On the ideological front, and true to his political style,
> Clinton wants to have it both ways. He wants to claim that he is
> a friend to free enterprise while calling on the surgical "tools"
> of government to fine-tune the local economy. In this way, he can
> avoid the charge that he is repeating the errors of his
> predecessors.
>
> But while he may not talk about the glories of public housing and
> UDAG grants, his proposals are just welfare in the guise of bank
> credit instead of outright spending. It is no less unsustainable
> than the Great Society. Congress should tell him to let America's
> poor communities alone so that they will have a chance to recover
> from the last ten thousand times politicians tried to help them.
>
> Notice that Washington, D.C., wasn't on his Magical Government
> Tour. And yet there are few places in the country with more
> squalor, criminality, drugs, illiteracy, and poverty. A resident
> knows that he can attend a glorious reception at a fancy
> government embassy, leave and walk a few blocks, and find himself
> in what looks like a third-world country. This is a place where
> taking the wrong exit off the highway can land you in the hands
> of gangs that would rather highjack your car than take your tax
> credit.
>
> Why doesn't Clinton try some of his magic in his own backyard?
> Once he turns D.C., the imperial capital of the world, into a
> bright and shining City on a Hill (instead of a slum in a swamp)
> we can talk about the rest of the country.
>
> And yet Washington still gives us blather about a new plan for
> "community renewal" that is "the product of a concerted,
> four-year effort to construct a new model of revitalization"
> based on "a public-private partnership to give people in
> currently low-income areas new hope and opportunity as we enter
> the 21st century."
>
> The trouble is this: that quotation is not from Bill Clinton;
> it's from Dennis Hastert, the Republican House Speaker who
> believes, like the man he pretends to oppose, that government is
> the source of hope and happiness.
>
> Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises
> Institute in Auburn, Alabama.
>
> ^ Top of Page
>
>
>
> 518 W. Magnolia Avenue
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> In six decades of teaching and writing, Ludwig von Mises
> (1881-1973) reconstructed economics on a sound basis of
> individual human action, and showed that government intervention
> is always destructive, whether through welfare, inflation,
> taxation, regulation, or war. His vision of the free and
> prosperous commonwealth is carried forward by the Ludwig von
> Mises Institute.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Same subject, albeit a different perspective
> WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
>
> Clinton's "anti-poverty" tour covers up deepening social
> polarization
>
> By Martin McLaughlin
> 10 July 1999
>
> Back to screen version
>
> It is difficult to decide whether nausea or derision is the more
> appropriate response to President Clinton's four-day tour of some
> of the poorest areas of the United States and his appeals to
> thousands of impoverished working people and unemployed to put
> their faith in the profit system.
>
> The six locations which Clinton visited are among the most
> devastated in America—Appalachia, the Delta region of the state
> of Mississippi, East St. Louis, Pine Ridge Indian reservation,
> south Phoenix, and Watts in south-central Los Angeles. The
> responsibility for the conditions which prevail there lies, not
> with the impoverished residents, but with the social system based
> on private profit. Yet Clinton's prescription for the mass
> poverty, deprivation and utter hopelessness caused by capitalism
> is ... more capitalism! It is as though the US president had
> decided to take a tour of bomb-ravaged Belgrade in which he
> announced to the Serbian people that all they needed to make
> things right was a few more NATO air strikes.
>
> Clinton was the first president to visit Appalachia since Lyndon
> Johnson, the first to pay an official visit to an Indian
> reservation since Calvin Coolidge. This only demonstrates how
> consistently the American ruling class has shunned any contact
> with the poorest of the poor, through all the alternations of
> Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, in
> political office.
>
> Clinton was not travelling to these areas to announce any major
> government initiative. He began his tour in Hazard, Kentucky,
> where Lyndon Johnson launched his abortive "war on poverty" in
> 1965. But the tiny scale of the programs which he proposed—$1.5
> million for housing, $8 million for training, and tax incentives
> for corporations—only underscored the vast shift to the right in
> big business politics over the past three decades. Clinton made
> his tour, not to praise the war on poverty, but to bury it.
>
> At each location Clinton commiserated with those facing poverty
> and unemployment while portraying their conditions as the
> unfinished business of an otherwise universally prosperous
> nation. "This is a time to bring more jobs and investment and
> hope to the areas of our country that have not fully participated
> in this economic recovery," he said in Kentucky.
>
> "I came here in the hope that with the help of the business
> leaders here, we could say to every corporate leader in America:
> Take a look at investing in rural and inner-city America. It's
> good for business, good for America's growth, and it's the right
> thing to do."
>
> Clinton suggested that corporations were not building factories
> and shopping centers in poor areas because of a misunderstanding.
> He cited an HUD report that retailers were "missing major
> profit-making opportunities" by failing to operate in communities
> like East St. Louis and Watts where the residents have
> substantial purchasing power.
>
> He hailed the participation of corporate executives and
> government officials in his tour of poverty areas, saying that as
> a result, "There is a much higher level of awareness among
> American business leaders that there is money to be made and a
> better society to be made at the same time in these
> neighborhoods."
>
> The argument which Clinton was advancing has been developed for
> the White House by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who in January
> launched a campaign to pressure Wall Street firms to support
> greater investment in poor areas. The basic premise is to urge
> corporate America to look upon these regions as it does the
> export-processing zones set up in Third World countries to
> exploit the cheap labor available there. As one local businessman
> in eastern Kentucky pleaded, “For the same reason industries are
> looking at Mexico, they need to look at us. We can provide it
> here.”
>
> The top White House economic adviser, Gene Sperling, chairman of
> the National Economic Council, declared that no one should
> confuse the Clinton anti-poverty tour with a return to 1960s
> liberalism. “This is not a matter of social justice, but of
> economics,” he said.
>
> Poverty is not an exception
>
>
> The poverty tour was a lie on many levels. Most brazen was
> Clinton's claim that the rest of America, the entire country
> outside of these desperate “pockets of poverty,” is enjoying
> remarkable prosperity. This presentation, uncritically echoed by
> the media, denies the reality of growing social polarization in
> America. While Wall Street booms, the living standards, not only
> of the poorest Americans, but of broad layers of working people,
> are declining or stagnant.
>
> A report by the Census Bureau released Friday suggests the
> dimensions of the deepening social crisis in America. It found
> that 49 million people had difficulty paying important
> bills—rent, mortgage, utilities, food or medical care—during
> 1995. While these included most of those in the bottom 20 percent
> of income, more than eight million people with incomes above
> $45,000 had difficulty paying for essentials at one time or
> another.
>
> Even Clinton's description of the six poor areas themselves is
> grossly distorted.
>
> Far from representing isolated exceptions, it would be more
> accurate to describe these blighted areas as the visible
> manifestations of an entire nation of the poor which goes
> entirely unmentioned and unnoticed by the media.
>
> The conditions in these six areas are certainly terrible. The
> Pine Ridge reservation is in America's poorest county, with an
> official unemployment rate of 73 percent, plagued by alcoholism,
> with a male life expectancy of only 45 years. The poverty rate in
> East St. Louis is 40 percent, in Clarksdale in the Mississippi
> delta region, 37.4 percent. The per capita income in Watts is
> only $5,000, compared to $18,000 in surrounding Los Angeles
> County. In the six areas as a whole, 60 percent of all young
> people are neither working nor in school.
>
> But Clinton did not have to board a jet plane or a Marine Corps
> helicopter to find such dire poverty. It exists only a few blocks
> from the White House—and it is only that far away because the
> Washington DC police have cleared the homeless from Lafayette
> Park. Every major American city has its blighted neighborhoods,
> where unemployment, poverty, drug abuse and other social evils
> rage unabated.
>
> Twenty percent of all US children live in poverty, and their
> conditions have worsened in recent years, with the cutoff of
> welfare programs and the widening gap between rich and poor.
> According to one study, the number of people living in extreme
> poverty has actually risen from 13.9 million in 1995 to 14.6
> million 1997, despite the booming economy. The government defines
> "extreme poverty" as an income less than half the official
> poverty level, or about $6,750 in annual income for a family of
> three.
>
> This is an enormous number of people living at the bare margin of
> existence. If these 14.6 million in extreme poverty were a state,
> they would be the fourth largest, following only California,
> Texas and New York. Yet their very existence goes virtually
> unnoticed in media, government and corporate circles.
>
> What Clinton offered to these poverty-stricken millions was also
> a lie. He claimed that the answer to mass unemployment and
> poverty was to encourage private business investment in blighted
> areas through a "New Markets Initiative" which the administration
> is proposing to the Republican Congress.
>
> The federal government would offer $890 million in tax credits
> for corporations and businesses which made investments in the
> poorest city neighborhoods and rural areas, a program which, even
> if fully subscribed by private industry—something which no
> political or business analyst expects—would still represent only
> a drop in the bucket, about $6 billion in a $10 trillion economy.
>
> Contradictions of capitalism
>
>
> Clinton denied any social contradictions in America between rich
> and poor, declaring, in his last speech of the tour, “Every time
> we hire a young person off the streets in Watts, we are helping
> people who live in the ritziest suburbs in America to continue to
> enjoy a rising stock market.” How so?
>
> The stock market boom is directly related to the conditions in
> Watts in two ways: the boom has coincided with low inflation,
> i.e., the suppression of wages struggles and a steady
> deterioration in living standards for the working class, and
> especially its poorest layers. It is a well-known feature of the
> stock market that lower unemployment numbers are considered a
> negative for Wall Street, while higher unemployment is considered
> a positive.
>
> In current media discussions of the US economy, the tight labor
> market is invariably cited as a major worry for investors, who
> are concerned precisely that the “young person off the streets in
> Watts” will no longer be exerting a downward pressure on wages.
>
> Moreover, the stock market boom has coincided with social
> policies which deliberately worsened the conditions of the
> poorest sections of the working class in order to finance tax
> cuts for the wealthy. Clinton and the Republican Congress have
> joined forces both to terminate federal welfare programs and
> enact a huge cut in the capital gains tax.
>
> The areas visited by Clinton are themselves monuments to the
> reality of class contradictions in America. Appalachia is a
> region, not of “natural” poverty, but of great mineral wealth.
> Billions in profits were extracted from the coal fields of West
> Virginia, Kentucky and other Appalachian states, feeding some of
> the great fortunes of the 19th century, and continuing to enrich
> corporate America in the 20th. But what do the children and
> grandchildren of the coal miners have to show for it?
>
> The delta region of Mississippi is a rich agricultural area, but
> the conditions of life for those who labor in the fields and in
> food processing industries are abysmal. Watts too was the center
> of a large industrial area during the decades which followed
> World War II, before the closure of auto, rubber and steel
> plants.
>
> The entire premise of the anti-poverty effort is bogus. In
> portraying severe poverty as though it was an aberration, in
> which isolated areas have unaccountably failed to share in a
> national bonanza, Clinton denies what is understood, not only by
> socialists, but by all serious and conscientious analysts of the
> growing social polarization in America. Poverty is not an
> accident or a mistake, but an inevitable byproduct of the
> operation of capitalism as a social system, a result of the vast
> transfer of wealth from the working people, society's producers,
> into the pockets of the corporate elite.
>
> -------
>
> Copyright 1998-99
> World Socialist Web Site
> All rights reserved
>
>
Of course there are rationalisations at all levels -- including
the $Billions spent on taming (and keeping tamed) Slobo -- as to
*why* these kinds of things occur. Senator Wellstone (D-MN)
made an interesting observation the other day, roughly: "What
was wrong with the past six years as far as travelling to these
locales? Dealing with their (American) problems?" While the
top layers have reaped many benefits from the stock market and
other investment vehicles, the worst off have continued to
languish hoping for that "trickle down" effect to touch them. A
problem occurs with those at the bottom having last pick at
anything, if something's left over. It occurs to me that
perhaps the pyramid might be inverted to allow greater freedom
of choice at the bottom (at least for a while) and let the
existing 'top' suffice with the gains they've made previously.
Of course, there are a lot of social and political hurdles to
overcome but 'feeling your pain' doesn't put pride and
initiative in gear, not to mention putting the meat and taters
on the table.
I say it's time to come home to the U.S. and take care of OUR
people. As a matter of economics, I would suggest OUR people
should have a greater need and opportunity to contribute to and
participate in the American "dream" than the Albanians
(Kosovarians and nationals) or some of the other groups draining
away $$$ (a national resource) from those who are certainly more
entitled to same (i.e., Americans).
But anyway, so much for the "Great Society Tour '99" ... I agree
with Senator Wellstone (as I recollect the specificity of his
statements): a little sooner might have made a great deal of
difference. I guess what's most irritating is these problems
have been around for decades and NOW they make news.
And with the drain on jobs via NAFTA -- and Buchanan railing
against this -- there are even more, greater depressing
influences at work. Interesting observation I've made (for my
self) is how factions at seemingly opposite ends of the
political spectrum are identifying the same deficiencies and
problems ... kinda like the Democrats and Republicans
Democrans/Republicrats) being on the same side of the issues.
A<>E<>R
A<>E<>R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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