Bill Clinton destroyed poor people's lives while empowering bankers
The nostalgia for the Clinton years, the ignorance and amnesia about Bill Clinton's presidency, continues to confound me. I wonder how the 2000 elections would have turned out if Clinton hadn't helped imprison and disenfranchise potential African-American voters with this bill.
Bill Clinton's crime bill destroyed lives, and there's no point denying it | Thomas Frank (the Guardian)
All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare isn’t real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president.
...The reason the 1994 crime bill upsets people is not because they stupidly believe Bill Clinton invented these things; it is because they know he encouraged them. Because the Democrats’ capitulation to the rightwing incarceration agenda was a turning point in its own right.