The media's prime time Clinton myth

The Political Wire reports, "A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that, alone among today's major political figures, Clinton is seen in an overwhelmingly positive light, with 56% approving of the former president compared to 21% who disapprove." 

The primary reason for this is that after his impeachment problem, the mass media has been deeply embedded in reconstructing Clinton has some sort of fairy godfather. And even before his impeachment, the media failed repeatedly to report the full Clinton story. 

Here are a few things that got missed along the way:

History News Network - "NPR's This American Life is reporting a story that undermines the claims of success for the Clinton-era reform of welfare. After the legislation was passed by Congress welfare rolls dropped by half in two years. Where did all the people go who were dropped? The assumption at the time was that they found jobs. But NPR reports strong evidence that millions simply moved from welfare to the Social Security disability program. Growth in the program exploded in a few short years. States hired companies to push people from welfare onto the rolls of the disabled to save money. Welfare is jointly paid for by both the states and the federal government. Social Security is paid for entirely by the federal government.

When Clinton took office over 70 of every 100 families in poverty were receiving food stamps. By the time he left, it was down to under 40 of every 100 families in poverty.

Dean Baker - As many former aids have acknowledged, President Clinton had been considering a variety of options for partially privatizing Social Security in the beginning of 1998 when the Lewinsky scandal exploded. With his presidency in jeopardy, Clinton had to rely on his core constituencies -- labor, the African American community, women's organizations -- all groups that would have been infuriated by an effort to privatize Social Security. As a result, Clinton was forced to abandon this effort.

President Clinton also set the economy on a path of bubble led growth, touting the stock market bubble that drove growth in the late 90s. He also pushed for the financial de-regulation that helped clear the way for the abuses of the housing bubble era. In addition, he also actively promoted the high dollar policy that led to the enormous trade deficit, which was another major imbalance distorting the economy's growth path.

Ralph Nader - He pushed through Congress the NAFTA and the World Trade Organization agreements that represented the greatest surrender in our history of local, state and national sovereignty to an autocratic, secretive system of transnational governance. This system subordinated workers, consumers and the environment to the supremacy of globalized commerce.

Between 1996 and 2000, he drove legislation through Congress that concentrated more power in the hands of giant agribusiness, large telecommunications companies and the biggest jackpot - opening the doors to gigantic mergers in the financial industry. The latter so-called "financial modernization law" sowed the permissive seeds for taking vast financial risks with other peoples' money (ie. pensioners and investors) that is now shaking the economy to recession.

The veteran watchdog for Public Citizen of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, said that safety was the worst under Clinton in his twenty nine years of oversight. The auto safety agency abandoned its regulatory oath of office and became a consulting firm to the auto industry. Other agencies were similarly asleep - in job safety railroads, household product safety, antitrust, and corporate crime law enforcement.

Chris Hedges - The Clintons argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, the Clintons argued, to take corporate money and use government to service the needs of the corporations. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal

Clinton's welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single parents, off of the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work

Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill.

Progressive Review, 1999 -  In the mid-1980s, as contaminated blood flowed from Arkansas inmates to other countries, then-Governor W.J. Clinton sat on his hands despite evidence of severe mismanagement in his prison system and its medical operations. . .

Some of the killer blood ended up in Canada where it contributed to the deaths of an unknown number of blood and plasma recipients. An estimated 2,000 Canadian recipients of blood and related products got the AIDS virus between 1980 and 1985. At least 60,000 Canadians were infected with the hepatitis C virus between 1980 and 1990. Arkansas was one of the few sources of bad blood during this period. . .

Other Arkansas plasma was sent to Switzerland, Spain, Japan, and Italy. In a case with strong echoes of the Arkansas scandal, a former premier of France and two of his cabinet colleagues are currently on trial stemming from the wrongful handling of blood supplies. Some of the blood in the French controversy may have come from Arkansas.

A 1992 Newsday report on the French scandal noted that three persons had been convicted for their role in distributing blood they knew was contaminated: "Throughout the 1980s and later, blood was taken from prison donors for use in blood banks despite a series of directives warning against such a practice. According to the report, donations from prisoners accounted for 25 percent of all the contaminated blood products in France. Blood from prisons was 69 times more contaminated that that of the general population of donors."

The scandal provides yet another insight into how the American media misled the public about Clinton during the 1992 campaign. The media ignored a major Clinton scandal despite, for example, 80 articles about it in the Arkansas Democrat in just one four-month period of the mid-80s.

Records set

- The only president ever impeached on grounds of personal malfeasance
- Most number of convictions and guilty pleas by friends and associates
- Most number of cabinet officials to come under criminal investigation
- Most number of witnesses to flee country or refuse to testify
- Most number of witnesses to die suddenly
- First president sued for sexual harassment.
- Second president accused of rape - First first lady to come under criminal investigation
- Largest criminal plea agreement in an illegal campaign contribution case
- First president to establish a legal defense fund.
- First president to be held in contempt of court
- Greatest amount of illegal campaign contributions
- Greatest amount of illegal campaign contributions from abroad
- First president disbarred from the US Supreme Court and a state court


Crime stats

- Number of individuals and businesses associated with the Clinton machine who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes: 47
- Number of these convictions during Clinton's presidency: 33
- Number of indictments/misdemeanor charges: 61
- Number of congressional witnesses who have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, fled the country to avoid testifying, or (in the case of foreign witnesses) refused to be interviewed: 122

Clinton machine crimes for which convictions were obtained
Drug trafficking (3), racketeering, extortion, bribery (4), tax evasion, kickbacks, embezzlement (2), fraud (12), conspiracy (5), fraudulent loans, illegal gifts (1), illegal campaign contributions (5), money laundering (6), perjury, obstruction of justice.

Other matters investigated by special prosecutors and congress, or reported in the media

Bank and mail fraud, violations of campaign finance laws, illegal foreign campaign funding, improper exports of sensitive technology, physical violence and threats of violence, solicitation of perjury, intimidation of witnesses, bribery of witnesses, attempted intimidation of prosecutors, perjury before congressional committees, lying in statements to federal investigators and regulatory officials, flight of witnesses, obstruction of justice, bribery of cabinet members, real estate fraud, tax fraud, drug trafficking, failure to investigate drug trafficking, bribery of state officials, use of state police for personal purposes, exchange of promotions or benefits for sexual favors, using state police to provide false court testimony, laundering of drug money through a state agency, false reports by medical examiners and others investigating suspicious deaths, the firing of the RTC and FBI director when these agencies were investigating Clinton and his associates, failure to conduct autopsies in suspicious deaths, providing jobs in return for silence by witnesses, drug abuse, improper acquisition and use of 900 FBI files, improper futures trading, murder, sexual abuse of employees, false testimony before a federal judge, shredding of documents, withholding and concealment of subpoenaed documents, fabricated charges against (and improper firing of) White House employees, inviting drug traffickers, foreign agents and participants in organized crime to the White House.

Arkansas Alzheimer's

Number of times that Clinton figures who testified in court or before Congress said that they didn't remember, didn't know, or something similar.

Bill Kennedy 116
Harold Ickes 148
Ricki Seidman 160
Bruce Lindsey 161
Bill Burton 191
Mark Gearan 221
Mack McLarty 233
Neil Egglseston 250
Hillary Clinton 250
John Podesta 264
Jennifer O'Connor 343
Dwight Holton 348
Patsy Thomasson 420
Jeff Eller 697

Washinton Times: In the portions of President Clinton's Jan. 17 deposition that have been made public in the Paula Jones case, his memory failed him 267 times. This is a list of his answers and how many times he gave each one.

Arkansas sudden death syndrome

- Number of persons in the Clinton machine orbit who are alleged to have committed suicide: 9
- Number known to have been murdered: 12
- Number who died in plane crashes: 6
- Number who died in single car automobile accidents: 3
- Number of one-person skiing fatalities: 1
- Number of key witnesses who have died of heart attacks while in federal custody under questionable circumstances: 1
- Number of unexplained deaths: 4
- Number of northern Mafia killings during peak years of 1968-78: 30
- Number of Dixie Mafia killings during same period: 156

Arkansas money management

- Amount of an alleged electronic transfer from the Arkansas Development Financial Authority to a bank in the Cayman Islands during 1980s: $50 million
- Grand Cayman's population: 18,000
- Number of commercial banks: 570
- Number of bank regulators: 1
- Amount Arkansas state pension fund invested in high-risk repos in the mid-80s in one purchase in April 1985: $52 million through the Worthen Bank.
- Number of days thereafter that the state's brokerage firm went belly up: 3
- Amount Arkansas pension fund dropped overnight as a result: 15%
- Percent of Worthen bank that Mochtar Riady bought over the next four months to bail out the bank and the then governor, Bill Clinton: 40%.
- Percent of purchasers from the Clintons and McDougals of resort lots who lost the land because of the sleazy financing provisions: over 50%

Friends of Bill

- Number of times John Huang took the 5th Amendment in answer to questions during a Judicial Watch deposition: 1,000
- Visits made to the White House by investigation subjects Johnny Chung, James Riady, John Huang, and Charlie Trie. 160
- Number of campaign contributors who got overnights at the White House in the two years before the 1996 election: 577
- Number of members of Thomas Boggs's law firm who have held top positions in the Clinton administration. 18
- Number of times John Huang was briefed by CIA: 37
- Number of calls Huang made from Commerce Department to Lippo banks: 261
- Number of intelligence reports Huang read while at Commerce Department: 500

Unexplained phenomena

- FBI files misappropriated by the White House: c. 900
- Estimated number of witnesses quoted in FBI files misappropriated by the White House: 18,000
- Number of witnesses who developed medical problems at critical points in Clinton scandals investigation (Tucker, Hale, both McDougals, Lindsey): 5
- Problem areas listed in a memo by Clinton's own lawyer in preparation for the president's defense: 40
- Number of witnesses and critics of Clinton subjected to IRS audit: 45
- Number of names placed in a White House secret database without the knowledge of those named: c. 200,000
- Number of women involved with Clinton who claim to have been physically threatened (Sally Perdue, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Juantia Broaddrick): 6
- Number of men involved in the Clinton scandals who have been beaten up or claimed to have been intimidated: 10