I’ve always liked Bill Clinton more than I liked his policies. But as time wears on, either I am getting grumpier, or the rather obvious deficiencies to his policies are glowering more fiercely. One of the more painful is his performance in Haiti. As Jeremy Scahill put it, he was”Named New UN Envoy to ‘Stabilize’ Haiti, a Country He Helped Destabilize;” if you want to read the full depths of bitterness some Haitians feel toward Clinton, I recommend Ezili Dantò. Wear asbestos.
Clinton’s recent appearance on BookTV brought home to me just how weak Clinton’s vision is. He was interviewed by his daughter, one of those ridiculous violations of common-sense conflict-of-interest bans that is only possible in Imperial-Going-on-Comical America. One of his big new ideas is Infrastructure Development bonds. The basic sales pitch is that other countries do not fund their infrastructure purely through government, so we should follow their lead. We should seed an Infrastructure Development Bank with government funds, then let private industry issue bonds to actually build projects.
Now, here’s the fundamental difference: either government issues the bonds at the low interest rates that the government enjoys, or private industry issues the bonds at higher interest rates and collecting a fee for issuing them. By issuing the bonds, private industry can impose things like tolls or user fees, or otherwise multiply their profits. And best of all, poor districts, with their poor credit ratings, would enjoy the highest of interest rates. Either way, private companies build the infrastructure. So, if you want to load the burdens onto the poor and make the rich even richer, an Infrastructure Development Bank is the way to go. Now really: except for 1) cases of obvious corruption, like the Bridge to Nowhere, and 2) Army Corps of Engineers projects, is there anything that the federal government has built that is really a bad deal? Contrast that with state/local Industrial Development Bonds, one of the most corrupt, pernicious and wasteful forms of corporate socialism. Think of re-locating BMW production to South Carolina at taxpayer expense. This is one of those problems that is solved by cleaning up corruption and incompetence, both of which are worse in the private sector.
Now, I’m sure Bill Clinton has the best of intentions. Washington is gridlocked, the Congress isn’t even funding infrastructure that’s essential to the national defense (or whatever one calls what the military does), so how to keep things moving? But the idea he is pushing, especially in conservative hands, is pure poison.
If that were the only place where one can see flaws in his thinking, I wouldn’t be writing this post. But I heard 50 minutes of wooly blather. Another example: in his critique of schools, he did not mention the considerable problems with charter schools (one of the ideas he pushed on the nation) or the fact that a major reason that public schools fail is because they receive on average worse funding than private schools, considering that they are not able to skim off children with no disabilities or use near-slave labor (like the parochial schools). He continues to talk about public schools as if they have some kind of fundamental problem (other than parents who care more about football than scholastics, fundamentalists screwing with textbooks, and expensive administrators imposed by corrupt local political apparatus).
Understanding Bill Clinton’s success at rhetoric (one might, if grumpy enough, even say “demagoguery”) is that 1) he is self-effacing, 2) he starts from the position that all sides in a debate have something valuable to say, 3) he uses examples of successes as razzle-dazzle to distract from the failures, 4) he has a seemingly comprehensive grasp of the facts which he rattles off very quickly so you won’t notice which ones are missing, and 5) he projects an earnest desire for everyone to come out of it feeling happy and virtuous. If he would let go of the razzle-dazzle and frankly confess the failures and shortcomings, he’d have a far more difficult time convincing people to follow him. He also would be a much better leader.
Needless to say, I won’t be buying his book.
