Globalizing America: 1992-2008

Chapter Questions

• In what ways did Bill Clinton and the New Democrats transform their party and reshape the federal government?

• How did different Americans experience and respond to economic globalization?

• What was the digital revolution?

• How did George W. Bush's administration respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

• What caused the Great Recession of 2007-2009?

The Jefferson Family Controversy

• In 1998, DNA testing confirmed that President Thomas Jefferson had fathered a son with Sally Hemings.

• This led to controversy within the Jefferson family, reflecting ongoing reckoning with the nation's heritage and legacies of slavery.

• Highlighted the revolutionary power of new technologies to challenge perceptions of reality.

Study Terms

• free trade zone

• Christian Coalition

• supply-side economics

• election of 1980

• deregulation

• make America great again

• Reaganomics

• savings and loan associations

• temps

• evil empire

• Reagan Doctrine

• Beirut barracks bombing

• war on drugs

• New Federalism

• Iran-Contra scandal

• automation

• personal computer

• Vietnam syndrome

• affluence gap

• homeless Americans

• Generation X

• sanctuary movement

• Comprehensive Anti-apartheid Act

• Rainbow Coalition

• Reagan Democrats

• AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power

• culture wars

• attack ads

• Americans with Disabilities Act

• third wave feminism

• Operation Desert Storm

Time Line 1992 - 2008

• 1992: Bill Clinton is elected president

• 1993: Mosaic web browser popularizes the World Wide Web. U.S., Canada, and Mexico sign NAFTA. Waco standoff ends. Al-Qaeda bomb under World Trade Center.

• 1994: Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act bans assault weapons.

• 1995: Anti-government militia bomb federal building in Oklahoma City. World Trade Organization founded.

• 1996: Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act cuts welfare benefits.

• 1998: Federal budget runs surplus for the first time since 1970.

• 1999: Police clash with anti-globalization protesters in Seattle. Joint U.S.-NATO force strikes Serbian military.

• 2000: Dot-com crash. Islamist radicals bomb USS Cole off Yemen coast. George W. Bush is elected president.

• 2001: Federal budget re-enters deficit. Al-Qaeda attacks World Trade Center and Pentagon. UN forces bomb al-Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan.

• 2003: U.S. and allies invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein.

• 2004: Photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib go viral. Facebook goes online.

• 2005: Gay couple legally weds in Massachusetts. Hurricane Katrina ravages Gulf Coast.

• 2007: Great Recession begins as housing and stock markets crash.

• 2008: President Bush secures 700-billion-dollar federal bailout. Barack Obama is elected president.

Policies of Economic Globalization, Deregulation, and Privatization

• Facilitated the flood of computers and the distribution of information.

• Stimulated international collaboration among scientists and scholars.

• Underwrote mass digitization of information and adoption of the Internet and cellular phones.

• Reflected and reinforced patterns of deregulation and privatization.

Consequences of Globalization and Digital Revolution

• Like the Industrial Revolution, economic globalization and the digital revolution proved creative yet destructive.

• American manufacturers left the United States.

• Financial, information, and other services revitalized many American cities in the 1990s.

• The rapid expansion of the Internet promoted the exchange of information and cut business costs.

• Immigration and outsourcing broke down barriers in the U.S. labor market but hastened the decline of older industries.

Impact of 9/11 and the 2008 Recession

• Americans were grappling with the complexities of globalization when terrorists struck on September 11, 2001.

• The foreign wars that followed became the most talked-about issues of the day.

• In 2008, the worst recession since the Great Depression threw millions of Americans out of home and work.

Bill Clinton and the New Democrats

• In 1991, most Americans associated prosperity with the Republicans.

• Some Democrats believed that the party's New Deal liberalism was outmoded.

• A younger generation of Democrats elected Bill Clinton to the presidency.

• The Clinton administration set about promoting globalization, reshaping welfare, and deregulating business.

• The president and the nation faced multiple challenges.

• Gridlock set in when the Republicans won Congress in 1994.

• Homegrown anti-government terrorist groups proliferated, and the United States became a target of Islamist radicals.

Reinventing the Democratic Party: The Election of 1992

• Democratic prospects in the 1992 presidential election seemed dim.

• Many Americans credited Republican leadership with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

• Arkansas governor Bill Clinton sensed an opportunity in the spiraling federal deficit.

• As a leading member of New Democrats, Clinton advocated centrist policies.

• New Democrats combined liberal cultural policies with conservative economic positions.

• New Democrats also took a conservative approach to criminal justice.

• Clinton announced his candidacy in October 1991.

• Clinton also insisted that the welfare system should promote self-responsibility.

• Clinton consolidated support among Southern and Midwestern voters.

• Republicans cast their lot with George H. W. Bush.

• Many Republicans were drawn to H. Ross Perot, a Texas tech billionaire.

• In an effort to mobilize conservatives, Bush tarred the Democratic nominee as a liberal.

• Clinton deflected the attacks.

• Clinton's speeches stayed focused on the economic issues.

• Clinton carried the election.

New Democrats in Government

• Clinton entered office determined to change both government and the Democratic Party.

• Clinton appointed more women and minorities to cabinet positions than any previous president.

• Madeleine K. Albright served as the nation's first female secretary of state, and Janet Reno became the first female attorney general.

• Clinton also appointed to the cabinet three Blacks and the first Asian American.

• Clinton pushed through an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-wage earners.

• Clinton also scored a victory when Congress approved NAFTA in 1993.

• Clinton's other top priority was eliminating the $4.4 trillion dollar budget deficit.

• In his first four years, the president pushed through new taxes and steep spending cuts.

• By the time Clinton left office in 2000, he had turned the national deficit into a surplus.

• In the arena of women's rights, the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) authorized unpaid leave, while the Violence Against Women Act (1994) funded rape crisis centers.

• Clinton's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994) imposed the death penalty for crimes such as large-scale drug running.

• However, health care reform failed miserably.

• First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton headed a campaign to make health care available to all working Americans.

Funding Crime Control and Law Enforcement

• Over 9.6 billion dollars flowed into new prison construction.

• Another 8.8 billion dollars was spent on hiring one hundred thousand new police officers.

• The law authorized the government to spend an unprecedented 30 billion dollars on criminal justice.

Congressional Battle Lines

• In November 1994, Republicans won a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years.

• Clinton and the New Democrats had achieved major spending cuts, but the Republican agenda went much further.

• Gingrich's Contract with America promised to produce balanced budgets, low taxes, welfare reform, tort reform, and congressional term limits.

• Republicans also sought to overturn gun control laws, expand prisons, roll back affirmative action, and cut both Social Security and Medicare.

• The centerpiece of the "contract" was a constitutional amendment that would have required Congress and the president to balance the federal budget.

• The constitutional amendment failed, but the Republicans passed other bills.

• When President Clinton vetoed the proposed budget, House Republicans withheld emergency funding.

• Although lawmakers blamed Clinton for the closures, most voters held Congress responsible.

• The Republican leadership dropped its insistence on cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

• President Clinton also softened his position, as he conceded in January 1996 that the "era of big government is over."

• He signed the revised budget.

• Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996).

• Critically, the law also shifted to state government the power to make decisions concerning the distribution of many welfare benefits.

• The impact on the poor was immediate.

Clinton's Second Term: Gridlock and Scandal

• Buoyed by the rebounding economy, Clinton easily won re-election in 1996.

• The Republicans held on to majorities in the House and the Senate.

• The next four years would be characterized by political deadlock and a White House scandal.

• In 1994, Congress had appointed Kenneth Starr to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton's involvement in Whitewater.

• In 1998, Starr resolved to pursue rumors about the president and Monica Lewinsky.

• After initially declaring that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman," the president eventually admitted that he had had "inappropriate intimate contact" with Lewinsky.

• Starr wrote a report to Congress and recommended impeachment charges against the president.

• Several prominent Democrats condemned Clinton's behavior.

• Starr's report seemed destined to ensure Clinton's removal from office.

• House Republicans voted to impeach Clinton.

• Starr's efforts to remove Clinton ultimately stalled in the Senate.

The New Extremism

• Although Clinton was relatively popular, anti-government extremism mushroomed during his tenure.

• Indeed, whereas violent crime decreased in the 1990s, domestic terrorism increased.

• A minority of discontented citizens joined armed militias.

• Convinced that the UN would take over the country, many began stockpiling weapons.

• To these militias, the passage in 1993 of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was proof of the coming crackdown.

• Some took the words of Thomas Jefferson out of context.

• In 1993, ATF agents learned that an armed religious cult in Waco, Texas, had been stockpiling weapons.

• ATF agents swooped in on the Waco compound, sparking a gunfight.

• After a tense, seven-week standoff, the attorney general ordered federal agents to clear the compound.

• A conflagration erupted, claiming the lives of fifty adults and twenty-five children.

• Extremist militias blamed the federal government.

• On the two-year anniversary of the Waco siege, militia members used a massive fertilizer bomb to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

• The Oklahoma City bombing had been plotted and carried out by Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier.

• Nongovernmental entities were also subject to politically motivated violence.

• Abortion clinics and their personnel became the targets of extreme anti-abortionists.

• Mass shootings escalated despite the tough new gun control and crime prevention laws.

• The 1990s saw twenty-three armed rampages.

• In 1999, two heavily armed teens shot and killed twelve schoolmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado.

Globalization and Its Critics

• Relatively few Americans were familiar with the term globalization at the beginning of President Clinton's first term.

• By 2000, however, the majority understood the concept to mean free-flowing trade and investment among nations.

• Globalization accelerated dramatically in the 1990s.

• In the United States, NAFTA sped the process on a regional level.

• Both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton promoted globalization and supported NAFTA.

• The most powerful champion of economic globalization was the World Trade Organization (WTO), which the United States and other advanced industrial nations jointly founded in 1995.

• The new organization successfully negotiated the opening of formerly protected economies to large-scale investment and trade.

• The WTO's vision of the post-Cold War world was essentially the same neoliberal vision that conservative economists had been promoting since the 1940s.

• The goal was a single global market, freed from costly constraints.

• WTO leaders worked closely with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and corporations.

• The dissolution of trade and investment barriers proved a boon to U.S. corporations.

• McDonald's multiplied its franchises worldwide.

• The Walt Disney Company opened Euro Disney in Paris in 1992.

• National economies, such as those of India and Vietnam, flourished.

• As manufacturing shifted to the less developed world, the prices of consumer electronics dropped in the United States.

• Economic globalization also compounded the inequality between the wealthiest elites and the world's poorest.

• In many regions, it helped deliver natural resources into the hands of U.S. and European megacorporations.

• Local elites often benefited from such deals.

• In the United States, the auto industry moved their plants to other countries.

• Battling industrial hubs, such as Detroit and Cleveland, lost more jobs.

The Value of Garbage

*Garbage has long been a valuable resource.

*Cities' "night soil" (human waste) was sold to farmers for use as fertilizer.

*Until the introduction of sewers and toilets in the late nineteenth century.

*Environmentalism, the privatization of city sanitation services, and deregulation transformed trash into a billion-dollar-a-year industry.

*1987: The widely reported story of the Mobro 4000 trash barge awakened Americans to the fact that their society was producing far more trash than it could absorb.

*The EPA listed waste prevention and recycling as top priorities.

• Three-quarters of the states passed recycling laws.

*The EPA's new standards for landfills closed hundreds of small landfill businesses.

*EPA standards for garbage trucks squeezed smaller operators out of business.

*Citizens learned to interpret recycling codes (numbered 1-7) on the bottom of plastics and separated paper from plastic, glass, and cans.

*Monetary value of garbage increased.

*recycling programs generated a constant supply of bottles, tin, paper, and plastic.

*1992: The Chicago Board of Trade opened the first Recyclables Exchange, in which millions of dollars of garbage are bought and sold daily.

*Thriving export trade emerged and by 2010, scrap and trash had become the nation's top export.

Critics of Globalization

• Globalization's side effects faced mounting criticism in the mid-1990s.

• Some critics opposed economic globalization outright.

• French farmer José Bovée declared, "The world is not for sale!"

• In Chiapas, Mexico, peasants formed the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

• In the United States, most critics called not for an end to globalization but for a different kind of globalization.

• Billionaire philanthropist George Soros condemned what he called the reigning "market fundamentalism."

• Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz added that current policies gave big business a free hand.

• Both men called for regulation and a more transparent system of decision making.

• Upwards of forty thousand Americans reinforced such criticisms when they converged on the Seattle meeting of the WTO in November 1999.

• Smaller, more radical groups vandalized symbols of global corporate capitalism.

• Overwhelmed by the crowd's size, police began teargasing and beating protesters.

• This "Battle of Seattle" delayed the start of the WTO sessions.

The United States in a Globalizing World

• Beyond the spheres of international trade and investment, the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world remained uncertain at the start of Clinton's presidency.

• Like Jimmy Carter, Clinton envisioned the United States as a protector of human rights.

• Balancing these aspirations against other U.S. interests, however, proved challenging.

• In 1992, President George H. W. Bush had dispatched U.S. troops to Somalia.

• Tribal warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid killed fifty UN peacekeepers in 1993.

• President Clinton immediately deployed marines against Aidid.

• The United States withdrew from Somalia soon after.

• Within months, another human rights crisis erupted in ethnically divided Rwanda.

• In 1994, the majority Hutu population rose up against the nation's Tutsi minority.

• Although the United Nations had a peacekeeping force in Rwanda, the United States was reluctant to participate directly.

• President Clinton opted not to commit U.S. forces.

• Revelations of the Rwandan genocide persuaded Clinton to intervene in another ethic conflict, this time in Europe.

• In ethnically diverse Bosnia, the Orthodox Christian Serb population relentlessly attacked Muslim citizens.

• Clinton authorized air strikes against the Serbs.

• Clinton again ordered U.S.-NATO air strikes against the Serbs.

• Peacemaking was high on Clinton's foreign policy agenda.

• The president traveled to Ireland to broker a settlement between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

• Progress was also made in the Middle East in 1993, when Clinton orchestrated a historic meeting between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Conflicting Faiths & The Rise of al-Qaeda

*During the 1980s, new strains of extremism had emerged in Afghanistan, where Muslim fighters had fought a war to repel the Soviet invasion

*Young Muslim men flocked to Afghanistan to join the fight.

*Once the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the Taliban formed a government, many Saudi Arabian fighters returned home.

*When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden offered the Saudi government the use of his fighters to protect the nation's oil fields.

*The Saudi government rejected the offer and instead provided facilities for the U.S. forces.

*Enraged that the Saudis had invited non-Muslim forces onto their soil, al-Qaeda plotted revenge against the United States.

*Al-Qaeda's network expanded in the 1990s to include radical Islamist operatives.

*Overseas, terrorists targeted Americans as well.

*The most daring attack came in 2000 in Yemen, where a small, bomb-carrying boat exploded, and seventeen U.S. servicemembers died.

Al-Qaeda's Global Reach

*The few Americans who had heard of al-Qaeda in 2000 tended to think of the organization as nothing more than a motley crew of religious fanatics.

*Far from being old-fashioned, al-Qaeda was using global networks to recruit followers and wage war.

Brave New Culture

• The Internet spread like wildfire across the nation and the world in the 1990s.

• By mid-decade, tens of millions were going online each day.

• The Internet sped the emergence of a postindustrial economy.

• At the same time, breakthroughs in medical and biological science remade the conventional understanding of life.

• Technological innovation and demographic mobility were breaking down boundaries.

The Digital Revolution

• Digitization was not a new technology in the 1990s.

• Computers dated back to the 1950s.

• In the 1990s, computing and electronic manufacturers used digitization to transform work, leisure, and social relations.

• Two new kinds of digital networks began changing everyday life in the 1990s: cellular phone service and the Internet.

• Between 1992 and 2000, the number of cell phone subscribers increased tenfold.