Consortium News: 23-10-2025,
Democrats may be denouncing the current assaults on social programs, writes Norman Solomon. But three decades ago Bill Clinton’s embrace of the private sector began clearing the path for Trump’s wrecking crew.
Former President Bill Clinton, on right, in 2000 at Trump Tower, shaking hands with future 45th and 47th president, Donald Trump. (Ralph Alswang, Office of the President – Clinton Presidential Library/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
By Norman Solomon
TomDispatch.com
The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?
Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.
While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.
“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out.