The Nineties

pictures --->

Berlin Wall suddenly opened Nov. 9, 1989
"The startingly abrupt end of European Communism revolutionized international politics."
"capitalism was once again truly a world system."
"But the power and pervasiveness of capitalist consumer culture hardly eliminated the search for ethnic, racial, and linguistic identity"
Solidarity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin
"The Cold War was over, brought to a close not by the missiles and tanks of the principal protagonists, but by the collective courage and will power of ordinary men and women."

"traditional upper-class conservative"
1988 Willie Horton TV ad helped Bush/Quayle and white south defeat Dukakis/Bentsen
"new world order" dominated by America
Russia withdrew from Afghanistan, Nicaragua
Nelson Mandela and ANC ended apartheid in Africa
troops sent against Manuel Noriega in Panama Dec. 1989, against Saddam Hussein in Persian Gulf Jan. 1991
the "silent depression" 1990-92 and white collar downsizing, 2 million jobs lost
Wall Street bull market 1991-1999
"simultaneous sense of productivity accomplishment and economic insecurity"
"biggest merger wave in nearly a century"
devaluation of dollar helped increase U.S. exports
automation, telecommunications and computer revolutions

Bush was passive, status quo, caretaker president who "saw his domestic policy goals in largely negative terms"
New Democrat Clinton, New Right Buchanan, new populist Ross Perot
Hillary and "The Year of the Woman"

reform 1993-4, then backlash by conservative Republicans
polarization, fiscal conservatism, isolationism
Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Dayton settlement, Kosovo
Robert Rubin and NAFTA
"the Clinton health program was the most ambitious and progressive effort to expand the American welfare state in three decades" but opposed by low-wage corporations and the "crisis of confidence in all levels of government greatly strengthened the right-wing critique."
Republicans won Congress in 1994 and Newt Gingrich "embodied a dramatic transformation within the Republican party, whose legislative leadership now shifted from the old Midwest to the deep South"
1996 limit of 5 years aid to families with dependent children to break the welfare "cycle of dependency"
California Prop 187 denied aid to illegal immigrants in 1994, Civil Rights Initiative banned affirmative action in state colleges and agencies in 1996, a "color-blind society" without racism, but Clinton said "mend it, don't end it"
In the 1996 election, Clinton/Gore won Latino and union vote to defeat Dole and Perot

John Sweeney of Service Employees International Union led insurgent revolt replacing "dumb, stupid, organized labor" leadership of AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland
Richard Trumka of UMW and Linda Chavez-Thompson from Texas
reformers built new coalitions with feminists, civil rightists, ecologists, academics, clergy
recruited students in "union summer" efforts
Teamsters "remarkable transformation" by TDU and Ron Carey, won United Parcel strike August 1997, but Carey replaced by James P. Hoffa
revitalized labor helped minimum wage increase of 1996, defeat Clinton's "fast-track" NAFTA authority in 1997, defeat Prop 226 in California limiting PACs in 1997, defeat of Republicans in 1998 mid-term elections
full employment "had a radically beneficial impact on the lives of the poorest Americans," helped raise "living wages" above poverty line
"For the first time since the 1940s, the unions maintained a firm alliance with most other liberals"
Seattle demonstrations against WTO in Nov. 1999, "Teamsters and Turtles: Together at Last"
Washington DC demonstrations against IMF April 2000

Clarence Thomas "high-tech lynching" in 1991 "cast a long shadow"
"Thomas symbolized the emergence of an articulate, conservative black minority who challenged civil rights liberalism" and "the Thomas-Hill confrontation before an all-male committee put the issue of sexual harassment and its meaning at the forefront of public debate."
"Television played a key role" in the Rodney King beating of 1991 and the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995
Million-Man March of Louis Farrakhan, white male evangelical Promise Keepers
Branch Dividians of David Koresh at Waco 1993
Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols

Whitewater, Robert Fiske, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky
Clinton represented "all that conservative moralists found intolerable in contemporary American life"
Kenneth Starr represented "a vast right-wing conspiracy"
Gingrich resigned after Republicans lost California and 1998 midterm elections
House voted 5 counts of impeachment Dec. 1998, but acquitted by Senate Feb. 12, 1999

revised 12/6/00 by Schoenherr