Fred Prouser / Reuters
North Carolina has until Tuesday to vote its controversial Amendment 1 up or down -- and now, the Associated Press reports that former President Bill Clinton is chiming in with a decided thumbs-down.
He recorded an audio advertisement against the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions. Starting Monday, thousands of North Carolina residents will hear this robo-call:
Hello, this is President Bill Clinton. I’m calling to urge you to vote against Amendment One on Tuesday May 8. If it passes, it won’t change North Carolina’s law on marriage. What it will change is North Carolina’s ability to keep good businesses, attract new jobs, and attract and keep talented entrepreneurs. If it passes, your ability to keep those businesses, get those jobs, and get those talented entrepreneurs will be weakened.
And losing even one job to Amendment One is too big of a risk. Its passage will also take away health insurance from children and could even take away domestic violence protections from women. So the real effect of the law is not to keep the traditional definition of marriage, you’ve already done that.
The real effect of the law will be to hurt families and drive away jobs. North Carolina can do better. Again, this is Bill Clinton asking you to please vote against Amendment One. Thanks.
With this robo-call, Clinton is taking an interesting approach. Rather than focus on the issues of discrimination and marriage equality, the former President instead focuses the indirect economic underpinnings, calling on voters to weigh a cost/benefit analysis on the issue rather than vote blindly out of moral conviction.
But real talk: is that something voters, in North Carolina or anywhere, will buy?
Clinton signed the "Defense of Marriage Act" into law in 1996, federally defining marriage as between a man and a woman. He also enacted "Don't Ask Don't Tell" three years before that as a compromise for gays and lesbians to serve in the military. It wasn't until 2009 that he come out in support of gay rights. Since his change of heart, he has advocated for gay marriage rights for New York State, and now it seems, North Carolina.
Now, whether Clinton's robo-call is merely an political or humanitarian ploy, who knows? The important thing is, he's using his clout. He's already appeared in the now-infamous campaign ad that touted Obama's role in the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. With the President's re-election campaign having just officially begun today, this may be just the start of Clinton using his electoral clout in 2012.
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Melissa - love your show. As a gay attorney I encourage you to read the books of Malcolm Boyd who was a gay cleric and led many white gay men to join the Freedom Rides long ago. LONG before HRC and other groups, GLBT men and women of ALL colors and creeds joined the early civil rights movement...
This is a perverse insentive - achieving something different than you intended.
Clinton is brilliant.
Apart from Reagan, unemployment increased under every Republican presidents and dropped under every Democrat presidents for about 100 years because of perverse insentives.
US Department of Labor Statistics provides this information. Average unemployment is 0.9% better for each Democrat presidential term and about 1.5% worse for each Republican presidential term.
The last depression occurred during the Republican presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. We are in another depression.
Why?
Three reasons: education, immigration, and banking.
First: education.
Apart from Reagan, every Republican president has reduced education funding. The decline corresponds with the War on Drugs.
The War on Drugs, which spent $1 trillion while education funds were being reduced.
Declining education is linked with unemployment because the average bachelors degree doubles income and reduces unemployment risk by half. Bachelors degree reduces incarceration risk by 95% by providing steady income.
Education is also known as human-capitol development.
Second: immigration.
Half of wealth of the US exists as real estate, and wealth increases while the population increases.
Apart from Reagan, every Republican president has blocked immigration to "protect American jobs for Americans" despite the fact that immigrants dominate farm labor where almost no US citizens are employed.
US citizen birth rate is 2.1, which cannot sustain growth due to deaths before workforce entry. Our economic growth depends on immigration.
More than 1 million undocumented immigrants left the US starting in 2007 creating hundreds of thousands of abandoned dwellings by 2009.
This population decline occurred after the revised Patriot Act that legalized state and local discrimination for undocumented workers involving drivers licenses, public school enrollment, health care, and rent.
Bank failures and unemployment peaked in 2010 due to mortgage payment failures resulting from dwelling abandonment.
The Great Depression occurred during Mexican Repatriation, which is the only other time US population has declined in the past 100 years.
Third: bank policies.
Apart from Clinton, every Democrat president has maintained financial protections created during the Great Depression.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 created 3 different finance industries by prohibiting commingling of funds between banking, stock exchange, and insurance funds. This is the reason the Great Depression was not repeated from 1947 until 2006.
The Gram-Leachy-Bliley of 1999 legalized the co-mingling of funds between bank, security, and insurance industries. Banks are prohibited from participating in sub-prime mortgage lending, but this makes that practice legal in 2003, and this undermines the authority of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 allows mortgages to be bundled and sold as stock on the New York Stock Exchange. This allows banks to begin purchasing sub-prime mortgage "derivatives" in 2003, and this undermines the trust of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The Responsible Lending Act of 2003 allows lenders to create sub-prime mortgages. This also allows banks to grow enormous by crossing state and international borders, and this quickly undermines the capacity of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. As much as 5 million unaffordable loans are created annually from 2003 until 2009.
These laws create financial dynamite by allowing banks to rapidly inflate real estate value by pumping savings through the New York Stock Exchange to produce over $1 trillion of mortgages for borrowers that can't pay. This works as long as the population is increasing.
The Patriot Act lit the fuse on the dynamite by collapsing the undocumented immigrant population from 2007 through 2009.
George Bush authorized border protections that were applied to California and Arizona where economic collapse has been the worst.
Texas avoided the worst impact of the economic by encouraging immigration.