(A shorter version of
this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East
Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)
Bill de Blasio’s Bill
Clinton Connection
In 1996 most anti-war and anti-corporate activists on the
Lower East Side pretty much agreed with how Charles Lewis and the Center for
Public Integrity characterized former Arkansas governor and then-U.S. president
Bill Clinton and his wife—former Wal-Mart corporate board member and Rose
corporate law firm partner and then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton—in the
1996 book The Buying of The President:
“There is probably no case more instructive of the
intersection of private and public interest and the incestuousness of Arkansas
business and political elites than that somewhat complicated affair known as
Whitewater…The point of Whitewater and Bill Clinton’s public service career in
Arkansas is that long before the presidential election of 1992, his political
identity as an accommodator of the largest most powerful monied interests was
well established. While he was governor, millions of dollars in private favors
at public expenses accrued to various companies and individuals, and Clinton ’s professional career as a politician was
supported by the Arkansas
financial and political elites…
“…From 1983 until he resigned as governor in order to seek
his party’s nomination for president, Clinton never really threatened the
interests of the business elite, in some cases directly servicing them…Tyson
Foods received roughly $12 million in tax breaks during the years Clinton was
governor.
“In 1984 and in subsequent races, Tyson backed Clinton , not only at
election time, but by allowing the governor to travel frequently on the Tyson
corporate jet, picking up the tab on expensive meals, among other favors.
“For her part, Hillary Rodham Clinton was ensconced in the
old, established Little Rock Rose law firm, which represented Tyson and other
important corporate and financial interests in the state, including Stephens
Inc., and Wal-Mart, among others. It was Tyson’s attorney, James Blair, who
helped her make close to a 10,000 percent return on a $1,000 play in
commodities training…Clinton and his inner circle of advisers…exempted
themselves from…conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements…Meanwhile, he and
his administration were notably laggard and unaggressive in halting Tyson’s
polluting of rivers and streams…
“In 1991, a year after promising he would serve a full
four-year term as governor if reelected, Clinton
announced his candidacy for president of the United States …
“Banking and financial interests were not bashful about
supporting the Arkansas
governor. In 1992, candidate Clinton received at least $853,295 in campaign
contributions from the financial sector…And the company that produced more than
$100,000 and the largest number of individual contributors was the New
York-based securities firm Goldman Sachs…The Clinton administration has pursued
and served the American business community more aggressively and more
systematically than any previous administration…”
Yet Bill de Blasio—who, along with former Clinton White
House Senior Advisor George Stephanapoulos, was chosen to be a Truman Scholar
by the secretive Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation in the early
1980s--still agreed to serve the Clintons as Bill Clinton’s New York campaign
director during Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential re-election campaign; and
during Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, “the Democratic Party accepted
so many contributions of questionable origin that it ultimately was forced to
return at least $2.8 million in illegal or improper donations,” according to
Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity’s book The Buying of The President 2000. But—apparently as a reward for
being Bill Clinton’s New York campaign director in 1996—de Blasio was then
given a high-salaried, publicly-funded job as Regional Director for the Clinton
Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD], which uses
federal funds to provide lucrative corporate welfare subsidies to big private
real estate developers and landlords who agree to build or rent
privately-owned, but federally-subsidized, housing units for “moderate”-income,
elderly and—sometimes--low-income tenants—on a generally for-profit basis.
So, not surprisingly, as recently as late September 2013,
when asked by The New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick to indicate “what sort
of mayor” of the Big Apple he would be, de Blasio “pointed to Bill Clinton, in
whose administration he served, pointing out that the former president
had…governed effectively,” according an article by John Cassidy that appeared
in the Sept. 27, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.
(end of part 2)
