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Brilliant. From The Daily Show:

"Fox &Friends" deems it inappropriate for the Obama administration to mention Bush when talking about the wars, economy or oil spill.

...So everything bad that happened during the Bush administration, was Bill Clinton's fault and now, everything bad during the Obama administration, is Bill Clinton's fault.

h/t Crooks and Liars

Remember - HRWATPTRTCITG

Conservative Failure

Bill Clinton Apologizes to Haiti for Effects of Free Trade

The "free trade" craze wiping out Haiti's farmers by flooding the country with cheap American rice. The same this happened in northern Mexico with cheap (heavily subsidized) American corn.

On March 10 Bill Clinton apologized to Haiti. See With cheap food imports, Haiti can't feed itself

[W]orld leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.

They're led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton - now U.N. special envoy to Haiti - who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti's rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.

"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."

Here is how it happened:

Three decades ago things were different. Haiti imported only 19 percent of its food and produced enough rice to export, thanks in part to protective tariffs of 50 percent set by the father-son dictators, Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier.

When their reign ended in 1986, free-market advocates in Washington and Europe pushed Haiti to tear those market barriers down. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, freshly reinstalled to power by Clinton in 1994, cut the rice tariff to 3 percent.

Impoverished farmers unable to compete with the billions of dollars in subsidies paid by the U.S. to its growers abandoned their farms. Others turned to more environmentally destructive crops, such as beans, that are harvested quickly but hasten soil erosion and deadly floods.

This is just one more example of conservative failure. Decisions based on ideology eventually hit a wall of reality. Free trade wiped out American manufacturing. Free market deregulation wiped out our economy. Low taxes wiped out our infrastructure and competitiveness. It's time for progressives to find their voice and vision, stop reacting to conservative nay-saying, and get the country moving in a positive, progressive direction.

It's about time!

The Kings of Deregulation

Did anyone see it coming? The economic crisis that we all face. Remember, one day money was freely flowing and then the next day we were told that the sky was falling.

It seems that Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) saw it coming back in 1999. That's when he voted against the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, named after Sen Phil Gramm. Back then, not only did Republicans support deregulation but Democrats did too. This bill had the full support of President Clinton, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers.

Let's not forget about the Glass-Steagall Act. It was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and many of the protections put in place after the Great Depression. This was all under the watch of Republican Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Many believe that the major cause of the current banking meltdown was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

The Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933, mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking in order to protect depositors from the hazards of risky investment and speculation. It worked fine for fifty years until the banking industry began lobbying for its repeal during the 1980s, the go-go years of Reaganesque market fundamentalism, an outlook embraced wholeheartedly by mainstream Democrats under the rubric "neoliberalism."

This disgraceful bow to the banking industry, eagerly signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1999, bears a major share of responsibility for the current banking crisis.

Sen. Byron Dorgan was recently on The "Rachel Maddow Show" and spoke about those who got deregulation terribly wrong -- and the small handful who saw the disastrous consequences coming a decade ago. Dorgan also spoke of the need for regulation. Watch:

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