For the life of me, I can’t understand the nostalgia some of my Democratic friends proclaim for the Clinton Years. Yes, the economy boomed – at least during the second half of the 90s — fueled by rampant speculation kicked off by Clinton-led deregulation of the financial markets. By 2001, this Dot.Com Gold Rush led to Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco and has now bequeathed us the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

If FDR gave us the New Deal. Clinton gave us “the end of welfare as we know it,” including the elimination of AFDC, the only federal subsidy for children, and creation of Welfare to Work, a shell game that has left the poor in this country worse off than they were before.

If LBJ gave us the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society, Clinton gave us “Sister Soljah” and NAFTA and all its epigones. Promoted with claims that it would create millions of new jobs throughout the hemisphere, it has instead caused the flight of industrial jobs from this country while displacing millions of Mexican and Central Americans from their jobs and farms. Estimates are that the number of undocumented workers who have crossed our southern border over the last 15 years is exactly the same number who lost their livelihoods as a result of NAFTA. The nastiness of the immigration debate, therefore, is a direct legacy of the Clinton Years.

If JFK gave us the Apollo Project, Clinton gave us the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which, in the name of fostering competition, opened the doors to a wave of media consolidation that threatens our very right to be informed. Want a good measure of the Clinton legacy? In 1996, Clear Channel Communications, the scumbag Texas-based corporation with close ties to G.W. Bush, owned 45 radio stations in the southwest. Today, it owns 2,000 all over the country and is busy protecting us from the thought-crimes of The Dixie Chicks and other nemeses to our way of life.