Bill Clinton: "All These Economically Insecure White People Are Scared To Death"

Americans need to learn that voting against other ordinary Americans and their life styles is what keeps the thieves and scoundrels in government when government cannot legislate "morality." That simple truth has been apparent to many of us for years. It certainly has been evident with race relations in this country.

In spite of what some would have us believe, government can regulate runaway corporations (talk about evil on a stick) and pass laws that help keep the huge gap we are now seeing between the "haves and have-nots" from occurring and growing. We should all vote for legislators and presidents who will help with that disaster, as it is a recipe for the total breakdown of society, as more and more people learn they can no longer trust their institutions.

However, Americans can also vote with their money these days, dealing badly behaving corporations a death blow, if they band together.

There are two major obstacles to democracy in America and two solutions which Americans must demand:

Elections: There is little doubt now that election theft has been rampant for the last 8 years. There should be national laws to fix this. There should also be public campaign finance for all national elections, period. Americans should examine very closely, in primaries, who is contributing to whom. If you find a candidates contributors to be of the criminal variety or simply essence stinker in their business affairs, pass the word and vote for someone else.

Corporate Influence: Outlaw lobbyist who work for corporations and foreign governments, period. If a group of citizens care enough about an issue to send a lobbyist to their state government for redress or to the nation's legislators, that should be honored. If a group of citizens care that much about an issue, it must be important.

All lobbying should be transparent. When corporations hire lobbyists, it is usually out of corporate greed and has nothing to do with issues of great importance to the citizens.

The very idea of foreign lobbyist should offend every American for obvious reasons.

Demand that the government break up these huge corporate monsters which have grown out of the Clinton years. Markets will never work as long as they exist because there is no real competition no matter what the Bushites say. Markets won't work as long as Americans are not told the truth about them by corporate watchdogs. As of now, the news media is, for the most part, owned by the very huge corporations I'm talking about and are hardly going to rat out themselves or other corporate monsters. So, for now, we need citizen watchdogs. There are some on the internet. Pay attention and spread the word.

Americans must learn to fight back and not wait for a government of scoundrels with a vested interest in the status quo to take care of them, because that isn't going to happen. It isn't going to happen until our "public servants" are answerable to us and not big money.

As the rumination continues over Barack Obama's comments about economically-depressed small town voters, statements made by Bill Clinton on the same topic -- uttered while he was running for president in 1991 -- have now surfaced.

"The reason (George H. W. Bush's tactic) works so well now is that you have all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death," Clinton was quoted saying by the Los Angeles Times in September 1991.

A couple months later, Joe Klein, writing for the Sunday Times, reported that Clinton made the following remarks:

"You know, he [Bush] wants to divide us over race. I'm from the South. I understand this. This quota deal they're gonna pull in the next election is the same old scam they've been pulling on us for decade after decade after decade. When their economic policies fail, when the country's coming apart rather than coming together, what do they do? They find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them. They know if they can keep us looking at each other across a racial divide, if I can look at Bobby Rush and think, Bobby wants my job, my promotion, then neither of us can look at George Bush and say, 'What happened to everybody's job? What happened to everybody's income? What ... have ... you ... done ... to ... our ... country?'"

For comparison's sake, here is Obama's statement, reported by Mayhill Fowler for Huffington Post's OffTheBus:

Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter). [...]

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

What do you think -- are they similar?

Update: Jason Linkins notes a statement from Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol to Talking Points Memo, which reads in part:

I have been in meetings with the Clintons and their advisors where very clinical things were said in a very-detached tone about unwillingness of working class voters to trust government -- and Bill Clinton -- and about their unfortunate (from a Clinton perspective) proclivity to vote on life-style rather than economic issues. To see Hillary going absolutely over the top to smash Obama for making clearly more humanly sympathetic observations in this vein, is just amazing.

More here.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.