hi I'm John Green this is crash-course
US history and today we have finally
reached the Clinton years so quit and I
are really quite similar actually we
were both brought up in the south we
both came from broken family lamp no not
actually also I did not attend an Ivy
League university yeah I'm actually
nothing like Bill Clinton well except
for the southern thing and also both of
us are married to women who are smarter
than we are
mr. green mr. green but he was president
whatever I'm still young me from the
past Clinton wasn't even governor of
Arkansas until he was like oh crap he
was 32 I'm finished
so Clinton's presidency was focused on
domestic policy and a sex scandal in
fact his campaign war room famously
featured a sign that read it's the
economy stupid his domestic legacy is
pretty complex though so we're gonna
start with foreign policy the Clinton
years didn't feature as many foreign
policy successes as Bush 41 but couldn't
did have his moments like his
administration achieved a partial
success with the 1993 Oslo Accords when
Israel recognized the legitimacy of the
Palestinian Liberation Organization
however that eventually resulted in the
PLO becoming progressively less powerful
and as you may have noticed it didn't
ultimately achieve peace in the Middle
East
Clinton was more successful in
Yugoslavia where he pushed NATO to
actually do something for once in this
case of bombing sending troops kind of
something now there had been widespread
ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims
before the NATO intervention but the
fighting ended with the Dayton Accords
and then there's the Rwandan genocide
which the Clinton administration did
absolutely nothing to prevent and where
800,000 people died in less than a month
the Rwandan genocide is probably the
international community's greatest
failure in the second half of the 20th
century and while certainly Clinton was
among many people who were complicit to
that including like me you know it's so
far it's not such a good foreign policy
record terrorism also became a bigger
issue during Clinton's presidency the
World Trade Center was bombed for the
first time the USS Cole was attacked
that the most destructive terrorist act
during Clinton's presidency was of
course committed by Americans Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols who blew up
the murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City which brings us to an awkward
transition from domestic terrorism to
domestic policy so Bill Clinton was from
Hope Arkansas and he ran as a centrist
Democrat who wanted to do things
differently he wasn't gonna be inside
the Washington Beltway and it wasn't
gonna be some old-fashioned liberal who
was all about raising taxes and
funneling billions of dollars to
snuffleupagus that centers have made him
very electable but his first you
domestic agenda items faltered like he
tried to end the ban on gay people
entering the military but opposition led
him to compromise with the famous Don't
Ask Don't Tell policy essentially you
were allowed to be homosexual if you
were in the military you just weren't
allowed to acknowledge you and then
there was the 1993 health care
initiative led by Clinton's wife Hillary
which was also a failure by the
- the United States was the last
industrialized nation not to have
universal health care and while Hillary
Clinton's plan would have resulted in
Americans having universal health care
it was too complicated to sell to us
also it faced very powerful opposition
from like drug companies and insurers
and medical device make it lots of
people but at least it had a working
website
what's that Stan there was no web what
did they use like a like a mobile app or
something
there was no apps though we were in
modern history so on the heels of these
failed policy initiatives in 1994
Democrats were swept out of Congress and
Republicans took control of both the
Senate and the house the new Speaker of
the House whose real name was Newt
Gingrich and who would later run for
president despite being named Newt
Gingrich issued something called the
contract with America it promised to cut
government cut taxes cut regulation
overhaul welfare and end affirmative
action and this led to a government
shutdown in 1995 over an inability to
reach a budget agreement between the
Congress and the president which in turn
made all of these new congressional
Republicans very unpopular with the
American people as a whole and played
into Clinton's political strategy of
triangulation his strategy was to
campaign against Radical Republicans
while co-opting some of their ideas the
most obvious example was his declaration
in January 1996 that the era of big
government is over spoiler alert it
wasn't there has been no president since
World War two who decreased the size of
the government and that will change when
never because all of the things that
actually cost the government a lot of
money like Social Security and Medicare
are very popular and both of those
programs benefit old people who vote
disproportionately because they have
nothing to do since Murder She Wrote was
cancelled however Clinton did actually
shrink parts of the government with
policies like the Telecommunications Act
of 1996 which deregulated broadcasting
but couldn't signature economic policy
was welfare reform aka the personal
responsibility and work opportunity Act
of 1996 this law replaced the aid to
families with dependent children program
which had given money directly to poor
mothers so with Clinton's welfare reform
states received block grants that came
with strings attached including work
requirements and time limits for total
benefits well
rolls plummeted and many economists see
this as the rare bipartisan victory in
the 1990s but it's still controversial
in many liberal people felt that Bill
Clinton had betrayed them but couldn't
still remain popular through much of his
presidency largely because it really is
the economy stupid and the economy got
better in fact by the time Clinton left
office unemployment was below 4% which
hadn't happened since the 1960s that
meant there should have been inflation
but somehow there wasn't possibly
because of increased global competition
that kept wages down and also energy
prices that were remarkably low as
worldwide oil production increase
microchips made it possible to develop
loads of new products like personal
computers and DVD players and video
games and cell phones and crash-course
and computers completely transformed the
American workplace I mean until the 90s
people would go to work and they would
sit in their offices at their desks and
they would I don't know what they did
because they didn't have computers how
does anything get done before computers
I mean how were books written how was
the Godfather edited how was this globe
man I mean did some individual human
hands sculpt it from clay so no wonder
the economy got better we'd stumbled on
the biggest innovation since like wheels
and during the Clinton administration we
didn't just have computers we had
computers that began to connect to each
other I'm referring of course to the
internet which might have remained like
a military communications network if
computer scientists and entrepreneurs
hadn't worked out how to use it to sell
things this was the beginning of the
e-commerce boom which would be followed
by an ecommerce bust but then another
ecommerce boom which would eventually
give us web sites where you can buy
crash course DVDs like dftba.com and
also lesser-known ecommerce sites like
eBay and Amazon oh it's time for the
mystery document the rules here are
simple I read the mystery document I
either get the author correct or I get
shocked okay here we go
the information highway will extend the
electronic marketplace and make it the
ultimate go between the universal
middleman often the only humans involved
in a transaction will be the actual
buyer and the seller all the goods for
sale in the world will be available for
you to examine compare and often
customize when you want to buy something
you'll be able to tell your computer to
find it for you at the best price
offered by any acceptable source or ask
your computer to haggle with
the computers of various sellers
information about vendors and their
products and services will be available
to any computer connected to the highway
servers distributed worldwide will
accept bids resolve offers into
completed transactions control
authentication and security and handle
all other aspects of the marketplace
including the transfer of funds this
will carry us into a new world of low
friction low overhead capitalism in
which market information will be
plentiful and transaction costs low it
will be a Shoppers heaven Stan that
sounds like something that Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos would say no dang it
Bill Gates we tell you much I enjoy this
none ah the information superhighway it
made all of this possible including my
shock pen now one of the lessons of
history is that good news for someone is
almost always bad news for someone else
and that was certainly the case with the
longest period of economic expansion in
American history increased use of
information technology facilitated the
globalization of manufacturing and the
pressure to manufacture cheaply pushed
wages down and encouraged companies to
locate factories in countries with lower
environmental regulations and also lower
wages that's great for companies it's
good for prices arguably good for
workers in the developing world not so
great for the environment or for
American workers the deregulation of
Finance also contributed to global
growth capital could flow more easily
anywhere in the world but this also
meant that it could flow out easily
making financial crises more likely and
more widespread the growth of free
flowing capital in the 1990s created a
world in which the crash of 2008 was
more or less inevitable but before that
we had the crash of 2000 as money flowed
into the stock market bubbles developed
and in some ways this was more
problematic than it used to be because a
much greater percentage of Americans had
become investors in stocks an actual
majority of them by the year 2000 and
many of these investors were buying into
these hot new dot-com stocks in fact the
tech-heavy nasdaq exchange soared in
1998 in 1999 and then it lost 80% of its
value in 2000 when the bubble burst it
turns out that the pets.com business
model of selling you dog food at a loss
is not a sustainable business model
although to be fair
Amazon's been selling stuff at a loss
now for 20 years and they're still at it
so you know maybe I'm wrong so during
this period real wages grew but the
gains were very unequal like when you
adjust for inflation wages of
non-supervisory workers remained below
what they were in the 1970s and for the
poor it was even worse
our old friend Eric Foner reports that
average after-tax income of the poorest
one-fifth of Americans fell 12 percent
and that of the middle one-fifth
decreased by 3 percent meanwhile the
income of the top fifth increased by 38
percent now of course this trend toward
economic inequality and the majority of
jobs being created in low-wage insecure
service industries would continue into
the 21st century but the economic and
political pictures that we've sought to
paint only tell half the story of the
1990s because it was also a decade
characterized by what has been called
the culture wars a big part of this was
immigration which rose enormous Lee
after immigration reform in 1965 between
1965 and 2000 the u.s. saw almost 24
million immigrants arrived compared with
27 million during the peak immigration
period between 1880 and 1924 fully half
of the new immigrants came from Latin
America and the Caribbean 35 percent
came from Asia only 10 percent came from
Europe and most of them were from the
former USSR in the Balkans as it always
been the case most immigrants were
attracted by labour opportunities but
now more were highly educated in fact 40
percent had college education let's go
to the thought-bubble
Latinos were the largest immigrant group
by far with Mexicans making up the
largest contingent and by 2007 Latinos
would replace African Americans as the
second largest ethnic group Latinos
suffered disproportionate poverty and
despite significant economic gains
during the 1990s African Americans still
found their economic opportunities
limited according to Eric Foner in 2007
the total assets of the median white
family stood at 87 thousand dollars for
black families the figure was fifty four
hundred dollars diversity also increased
in other ways like single-parent
families became more accepted which was
essential as 50 percent of marriages
ended in divorce out of wedlock births
declined primarily because teenagers
were practicing safer sex and teens and
adults were cohabitating before or
instead of marriage eventually the mom
dad and two point four kids standard
and household became only one of a
number of accepted options for families
gay and trans people became increasingly
visible in the national consciousness as
a result of the GLBT rights movement and
there was becoming safer for people to
come out of the closet on the other hand
the AIDS epidemic which
disproportionately affected the GLBT
community was disastrous by 2000 400,000
Americans had died of AIDS
then there's the depressing rise in
imprisonment politicians competed with
each other to see who could be tougher
on crime and as the war on drugs
continued many state legislatures passed
three strikes laws meaning that people
who were convicted of three felonies
would go to prison for life the number
of Americans in prison skyrocketed by
2008 it was 2.3 million one quarter of
the total number of inmates on planet
Earth thanks thought-bubble
although i have to say i thought this
was gonna be a happy one i mean the
economy is growing things are getting
better for people in the GLBTQ community
and then boom boom boom boom boom it's
all terrible I don't want to underplay
the many benefits of our increased
prosperity and diversity but all of this
multiculturalism and change made for a
very tense political atmosphere to some
people it seemed like the open
freewheeling liberalism of the 60s had
run amuck and those people really
started to hate the Clintons but among
Bill Clinton's many flaws facelessness
cigar-smoking his biggest was his
inability to stop cheating on his wife
Clinton had dodged accusations of
extramarital skoodilypooping while
running for the presidential nomination
which contributed to his unfortunate
Slick Willy moniker but while he was
President Clinton's former employee
Paula Jones sued him for sexual
harassment that had occurred allegedly
occurred I guess it probably occurred
legit allegedly occurred while he was
governor of Arkansas while gathering
evidence for that lawsuit investigators
discovered that the President had
carried on a sexual relationship with a
young intern named Monica Lewinsky the
president denied having sexual relations
with Monica Lewinsky which was a lie
unless you are President Bill Clinton
and have a very narrow definition of
sexual relations that lied to a Justice
Department official was the basis for
articles of impeachment for perjury and
obstruction of justice and so it was
that the President of the United States
was impeached for saying that he didn't
have sex with a woman that he
have sex with unless of course you
define sex very narrowly and it all
depends on what your definition of is is
and etc in early 1999 Clinton was
acquitted of these charges in a
Congressional vote that went right down
party lines and he served out the
remainder of his term but he was
significantly weakened also he served
out the remainder of his presidency
sleeping on the couch
so the nineties were a really pivotal
decade to the world that we live in
right now a globalized multicultural
Instagram filtered world but as we
became more globally connected political
divisions grew within the United States
and this became especially problematic
because with the growth of the internet
it was easier than ever to only hear
voices that you already know you agree
with to live inside of an echo chamber
where your news doesn't necessarily
resemble your neighbors news in some
ways Bill Clinton directed these changes
but in most ways they directed him but
that's what I find so fascinating about
history even the fancy people who get
their heads on the chalkboard even they
are subject to historical forces thanks
for watching I'll see you next week
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