Chapter 32

Question 1

NAFTA

Answer 1

Clinton was a committed advocate of free trade and a proponent of many aspects of what came to be known as globalism. He made that clear through his strong support of a series of new and controversial free-trade agreements. After a long and difficult battle, he won approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (or NAFTA), which eliminated most trade barriers among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Question 2

healthcare reform

Answer 2

The president’s most important and ambitious initiative was a major reform of the nation’s health-care system. Early in 1993, he appointed a task force chaired by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, which proposed a sweeping reform designed to guarantee coverage to every American and hold down the costs of medical care. Substantial opposition
from the right, insurance companies, and Republican leaders in Congress doomed the plan. In September
1994, Congress abandoned the health-care reform effort.

Question 3

welfare reform

Answer 3

Congress passed a welfare reform bill, which President Clinton somewhat reluctantly signed, that marked the most important change in aid to the poor since the Social Security Act of 1935. The bill ended the fifty-year federal
guarantee of assistance to families with dependent children and turned most of the responsibility for allocating federal welfare funds (now greatly reduced) to the states. Most important of all, it shifted the bulk of welfare benefits away from those without jobs and toward support for low-wage workers.

Question 4

Kosovo conflict

Answer 4

In 1999, the president faced the most serious foreign policy
crisis of his presidency, once again in the Balkans. This time, the conflict involved a province of Serbian-dominated
Yugoslavia—Kosovo—most of whose residents were Albanian Muslims. A long-simmering conflict between the Serbian government of Yugoslavia and Kosovo separatists erupted into a savage civil war in 1998. In May 1999, NATO forces—dominated and led by the United States—began a bombing campaign against the Serbians, which after little more than a week led the leader of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, to agree to a cease-fire. Serbian troops withdrew from Kosovo. They were replaced by NATO peacekeeping
forces. A precarious peace returned to the region.

Question 5

2000 election

Answer 5

The 2000 presidential election was one of the most extraordinary in American history—not because of the campaign that preceded it, but because of the sensational controversy over its results.

George W. Bush—a Republican, a son of the former president, and a second-term governor of Texas—and Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, easily won the nominations of their parties. Both men ran cautious, centrist campaigns. Polls showed an exceptionally tight race right up to the end. In the congressional races, Republicans maintained control of the House of Representatives by five seats, while the Senate split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. (Among the victors in the Senate was First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who won a highly publicized race in New York.) In the presidential race, Gore won the national popular vote by about 540,000 votes out of about 100 million cast (or. 05%). But on election night, both candidates remained short of the 270 electoral votes needed for victory because no one could determine who had won the electoral votes of Florida. After a mandatory recount over the next two days, Bush led Gore in the state by fewer than 300 votes.

In a number of Florida counties, including some of the most
heavily Democratic ones, votes were cast by notoriously inaccurate punch-card ballots, which were then counted by machines. Many voters failed fully to punch out the appropriate holes, leaving the machines unable to read them. Into this morass, the Gore campaign moved quickly with a demand—sanctioned by Florida law—for hand recounts of punch-card ballots in three critical counties.
When a court-ordered deadline arrived, the recount was not yet complete. The Florida secretary of state, a Republican, then certified Bush the winner in Florida by a little more than 500 votes. The Gore campaign immediately contested the results. In the meantime, the Bush campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Late on December 12, the Court issued a controversial decision. In a 5-to-4 vote, divided sharply along party and ideological lines, the
conservative majority overruled the Florida Supreme Court and insisted that any revised recount order be completed by December 12 (an obviously impossible demand, since the Court issued its ruling late at night on the 12th). The Court had decided the election. Absent a recount, the certification of Bush’s victory stood.

Question 6

Bush tax cuts

Answer 6

Bush’s principal campaign promise had been that he would
use the predicted budget surplus to finance a massive tax reduction. By relying on his own party’s control of
both houses of Congress, he narrowly won passage of the largest tax cut in American history—$1.35 trillion over several years.

Question 7

new business practices (1970s-90s)

Answer 7

In the face of the sluggish growth and persistent inflation of those years, however, many American corporations began
making important changes in the way they ran their businesses—changes that contributed to both the prosperity of the last decades of the twentieth century and the growing inequality that accompanied it. Businesses invested heavily in new technology, to make themselves more efficient and productive. Corporations began to
consider mergers to provide themselves with a more diversified basis for growth. Many enterprises— responding to the energy crises of the 1970s—created more energy-efficient plants and offices. Perhaps most important of all, American businesses sought to reduce their labor costs, which were among the highest in the world and which many economists and business leaders believed
had made the United States uncompetitive against the many emerging economies that relied on low-wage workers.

Businesses cut labor costs in many ways. They took a much harder line against unions. Nonunion companies became more successful in staving off unionization drives. Companies already unionized won important concessions from their union members on wages and benefits in exchange for preserving jobs. Some companies moved their operations to areas of the country where unions were weak and wages low—the American South and Midwest in particular. And many companies moved much of their production out of the United States entirely, to such nations as Mexico and China, where there were large available pools of cheaper labor.

Question 8

“technology industries”

Answer 8

Another important driver of the new economy was the
growth of technology industries. Digital technology made possible an enormous range of new products: computers, the Internet, cellular phones, digital music, video, and cameras, personal digital assistants, and many other products. The technology industries created many new jobs and produced new consumer needs and appetites. But they did not create as many jobs as older industrial sectors had.

Question 9

tech bubble

Answer 9

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, warned in 1999 of the “irrational exuberance” with
which Americans were pursuing profits in the stock market. A few months later, the market vindicated his concerns when, in April 2001, there was a sudden and disastrous collapse of a booming new “dot.com” sector of the
economy, made up of start-up companies and new, profitable businesses making use of the Internet.

At first, the bursting of the “tech bubble” seemed to have
few effects on the larger economy. But by the beginning of 2001, the stock market—a great engine of growth over the previous decade—began a substantial decline, which continued for almost a year. Even when it recovered, beginning in 2002, it could not match the booming growth of the 1990s. In the fall of 2001, the economy as a whole slipped into a recession. The recovery in 2002 kept stock market growth relatively slow.

Question 10

“two-tiered economy”

Answer 10

Although the American economy revived from the sluggishness that had characterized it in the 1970s and early 1980s, the benefits of the new economy were less widely shared than those of earlier boom times. The increasing abundance of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries created enormous new wealth that enriched those talented, or lucky, enough to profit from the areas of booming growth. The rewards for education—particularly in such areas as science and engineering—
increased substantially. Between 1980 and 2005, the average family incomes of the wealthiest 20 percent of the population grew by nearly 20 percent (to over $100,000 a year); the average family income of the next 20 percent of the population grew by more than 8 percent. Incomes remained flat for most of the remaining 60 percent of the public, and actually declined for many in the bottom 20 percent.

The jarring changes in America’s relationship to the world
economy that had begun in the 1970s—the loss of cheap and easy access to raw materials, the penetration of the American market by foreign competitors, the restructuring of American heavy industry so that it produced fewer jobs and paid lower wages—continued and in some respects accelerated in the following decades. Poverty in America had declined steadily and at times dramatically in the years after World War II, so that by the end of the 1970s the percentage of people living in poverty had fallen to 12 percent (from about 20 percent in preceding decades). But the decline in poverty did not continue. By 2010, 14.3 percent of the population, or 43.6 million people, lived in poverty.

Question 11

globalization

Answer 11

Perhaps the most important economic change was what became known as the “globalization” of the economy. The
great prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s had rested on, among other things, the relative insulation of the United States from the pressures of international competition. As late as 1970, international trade still played a relatively small role in the American economy as a whole, which thrived on the basis of the huge domestic market in North America.

By the end of the 1970s, however, the world had intruded on the American economy in profound ways, and that intrusion increased unabated into the twenty-first century. Exports rose from just under $43 billion in 1970 to over $1 trillion in 2006. But imports rose even more dramatically: from just over $40 billion in 1970 to over $1.8 trillion in 2006. Most American products, in other words, now faced foreign competition inside the United States. The first American trade imbalance in the postwar era occurred in 1971; only twice since then, in 1973 and 1975, has the balance been favorable.

Question 12

“new economy”

Answer 12

The “new economy” that emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was driven by dramatic new scientific and technological discoveries that had profound effects on the way Americans—and peoples throughout the world—lived.

Question 13

microprocessor

Answer 13

Among the most significant innovations that contributed to
the digital revolution was the development of the microprocessor, first introduced in 1971 by Intel, which represented a notable advance in the technology of integrated circuitry. A microprocessor miniaturized the central processing unit of a computer, making it possible for a small machine to perform calculations that in the past only very large machines could do.

Question 14

World Wide Web

Answer 14

As the amount of information on the Internet proliferated,
without any central direction, new forms of software emerged to make it possible for individual users to navigate through the vast number of Internet sites. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at a laboratory in
Geneva, introduced the World Wide Web, through which individual users could publish information for the Internet. It helped establish an orderly system for both the distribution and retrieval of electronic information.

Question 15

Human Genome Project

Answer 15

Little by little, scientists began to identify specific genes in
humans and other living things that determine particular traits, and to learn how to alter or reproduce them. But the identification of genes was painfully slow. In 1989, the federal government appropriated $3 billion to fund the
National Center for the Human Genome, to accelerate the mapping of human genes. The Human Genome Project identified all of the more than 100,000 genes by 2003.

Question 16

immigration in the 1990s-2000s

Answer 16

The slowing growth of the native-born population, and the
workforce shortages it has helped to create, is one reason for the rapid growth of immigration. In 2010, the number of foreignborn residents of the United States was the highest in American history—more than 36 million people, over 12 percent of the total population. These immigrants came from a wider variety of backgrounds than ever before, as a result of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which eliminated national origins as a criterion for admission. The growing presence of the foreign-born contributed to a significant drop in the percentage of white residents in the United States—from 90percent in 1965 (the year of the Immigration Reform Act) to 79 in 2010. Latinos and Asians were by far the largest groups of immigrants in these years. But others came in significant numbers from Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and eastern Europe.

Question 17

“underclass”

Answer 17

despite significant economic progress for African Americans, there were many other African Americans whom the economic growth and the liberal programs of the 1960s and beyond had never reached. These impoverished people—sometimes described as the “underclass”—made up as much as a third of the nation’s black population. Many of them lived in isolated, decaying, and desperately poor inner-city neighborhoods. As more successful blacks
moved out of the inner cities, the poor were left behind in their decaying neighborhoods. Less than half of young inner-city blacks finished high school in 2006; more
than 60 percent were unemployed. The black family structure suffered as well from the dislocations of urban poverty. There was a radical increase in the number of single-parent, female headed black households. In 1970, only 59 percent of all black children under 18 lived with both their parents (already down from 70 percent a decade earlier). In 2010, only 35 percent of black children lived in such households, while 74 percent of white children did.

Question 18

AIDS epidemic

Answer 18

The drug epidemic was related to another scourge of the late twentieth century: the epidemic spread of a new and often lethal disease first documented in 1981 and soon named AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). AIDS is the product of the HIV virus, which is transmitted by the
exchange of bodily fluids (blood or semen). The virus gradually destroys the body’s immune system and makes its victims highly vulnerable to a number of diseases (particularly to various forms of cancer and pneumonia) to which they would otherwise have a natural resistance. Those infected with the virus (i.e., HIV positive) can live
for a long time without developing AIDS, but for many years
those who became ill were almost certain to die. The first
American victims of AIDS (and for many years the group
among whom cases remained the most numerous) were homosexual men. But by the late 1980s, as the gay community began to take preventive measures, the most rapid increase in the spread of the disease occurred among heterosexuals, many of them intravenous drug users, who spread the virus by sharing contaminated hypodermic needles.

By 2010, an estimated 1 million Americans were living with
the AIDS virus. But the United States represented only a tiny proportion of the worldwide total of people afflicted with HIV, an estimated 35 million people in 2010. Over two-thirds (approximately 25 million) of those cases were concentrated in Africa. Governments and private groups, in the meantime, began promoting AIDS awareness in increasingly visible and graphic ways—urging young people, in particular, to avoid “unsafe sex” through abstinence or the use of latex condoms. The
success of that effort in the United States was suggested by the drop in new cases from 70,000 in 1995 to approximately 56,000 in 2010.

In the mid-1990s, AIDS researchers, after years of frustration, began discovering effective treatments for the disease. By taking a combination of powerful drugs on a rigorous schedule, even people with advanced cases of AIDS experienced dramatic improvement—so much so that in many cases there were no measurable quantities of the virus left in their bloodstreams. The new drugs gave promise for the first time of dramatically extending the lives of people with AIDS, perhaps to normal life spans. But the drugs were very expensive and difficult to administer; poorer AIDS patients often could not obtain access to
them. And the drugs remained scarce in Africa and other less affluent parts of the world where the epidemic was rampant. The United Nations, many philanthropic organizations, and a number of governments, including the United States, committed significant funds to fight the AIDS crisis in Africa in the 2000s, but progress remained slow.

Question 19

Right to Life vs. Pro-Choice movements

Answer 19

The right-to-life movement, as it called itself, found its most fervent supporters among Catholics; and indeed, the
Catholic Church itself lent its institutional authority to the battle against legalized abortion. Religious doctrine also motivated the anti-abortion stance of many Mormons, evangelical Christians, and other groups. The opposition of some other anti-abortion activists had less to do with religion than with their commitment to traditional notions of family and gender relations. To them, abortion was part of a much larger assault by feminists on the role of women as wives and mothers. It was also, many foes contended, a form of murder. Fetuses, they claimed, were human beings who had a “right to life” from the moment of conception.

Although the right-to-life movement was persistent in its demand for a reversal of Roe v. Wade or, barring that, a constitutional amendment banning abortion, it also attacked abortion in more limited ways, at its most vulnerable points. Starting in the late 1970s, Congress and many state legislatures began barring the use of public funds to pay for abortions, thus making them almost inaccessible for many poor women in some states. The Reagan and the two Bush administrations imposed further restrictions on federal funding and even on the right of
doctors in federally funded clinics to give patients any information on abortion. Extremists in the right-to-life movement began picketing, occupying, and at times bombing abortion clinics. Several anti-abortion activists murdered doctors who performed abortions; other physicians were subject to campaigns of terrorism and harassment. The changing composition of the Supreme Court between 1981 and 2010 (during which time new conservative justices were appointed to the Court) renewed the right-to-life movement’s hopes for a reversal of Roe v. Wade.

The changing judicial climate of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries mobilized defenders of abortion as never before. They called themselves the “pro-choice” movement, because they were defending not so much abortion itself as every woman’s right to choose whether and when to bear a child. The pro-choice movement was in many parts of the country at least as strong as, and in some areas much stronger than, the right-to-life movement. With the election of President Clinton in 1992, a supporter of “choice,” the immediate threat to Roe v. Wade seemed to fade. Clinton’s reelection in 1996 was, among other things, evidence that the pro-choice movement maintained considerable political strength. But abortion rights remained highly vulnerable. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, openly opposed abortion. Barack Obama supported the right to abortion when he became president.

Question 20

Kyoto Protocols

Answer 20

1997, representatives of the major industrial nations met in Kyoto, Japan, and agreed to a broad treaty establishing steps toward reducing carbon emissions and thus slowing or reversing global warming. Opposition to the treaty from
Republicans in Congress prevented President Clinton from winning ratification of the treaty. In March 2001, President
George W. Bush denounced the treaty for placing too great a burden on the United States and withdrew it from consideration. And Barack Obama in his first years as president did little to advance the goal. The Kyoto treaty was opposed by the Chinese government, and many environmentalists consider the treaty dead.

Question 21

anti-globalization protests

Answer 21

The opponents of globalization were mostly agreed on the
targets of their discontent: not just free-trade agreements, but also the multinational institutions that policed and advanced the global economy. Among them were the World Trade Organization, which monitored the enforcement of the GATT treaties of the 1990s; the International Monetary Fund, which controlled international credit and exchange rates; and the World Bank, which made money available for development projects in many countries. In November 1999, when the leaders
of the seven leading industrial nations (and the leader of Russia) gathered for their annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, tens of thousands of protesters—most of them
peaceful, but some of them violent—clashed with police,
smashed store windows, and all but paralyzed the city. A few months later, a smaller but still substantial demonstration disrupted meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington. And in July 2001, at a meeting of the same leaders in Genoa, Italy, an estimated 50,000 demonstrators clashed violently with police in a melee that left one protester dead and several hundred injured. The participants in the meeting responded to the demonstrations by pledging $1.2 billion to fight the
AIDS epidemic in developing countries, and also by deciding to hold future meetings in remote locations far from major cities.age 904). McGraw-Hill Higher Education -A. Kindle Edition.

Question 22

rise of Islamic fundamentalism

Answer 22

In some parts of the nonindustrialized world—particularly in some of the Islamic nations of the Middle East—the increasing reach of globalization created additional grievances, rooted not just in economics but also in religion and culture. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which orthodox Muslims ousted a despotic government whose leaders had embraced many aspects of modern Western culture, was one of the first large and visible manifestations of a phenomenon that would eventually reach across much of the Islamic world and threaten the stability of the globe. In one Islamic nation after another, waves of fundamentalist orthodoxy emerged to defend traditional culture against incursions from the West. One product of these resentments was a growing resort to violence as a way to fight the influence of the West. Militants in various parts of the world used isolated incidents of violence and mayhem, designed to disrupt societies and governments and to create fear among their peoples. Such tactics are known
to the world as terrorism.

Question 23

9/11/01 attacks

Answer 23

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, government intelligence indicated, had been
planned and orchestrated by Middle Eastern agents of a powerful terrorist network known as Al Qaeda. Its
leader, Osama Bin Laden—until 2001 little known outside the Arab world—quickly became one of the most notorious figures in the world.

Question 24

Guantanamo Bay

Answer 24

American forces in Afghanistan rounded up several hundred people suspected of connections to the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the aftermath of the fighting and eventually moved these prisoners to a facility at the American base in Guantanamo, Cuba. They were among the first suspected terrorists to be handled under the new laws created by the federal government to deal
with terrorism after September 11, 2001. The Patriot Act of 2001 was the most important of these new laws. The post–September 11 laws and policies made it possible for suspected terrorists to be held for months, and in many cases years, without access to lawyers, without facing formal charges, subjected to intensive interrogation
and torture. They became examples to many critics of the dangers to basic civil liberties they believed the war on terror had created.

Several Supreme Court rulings, including one in 2008, dismissed the Bush administration’s argument that detainees in Guantanamo were outside the reach of American law. But the administration was slow to comply. Before his election in 2008, Barack Obama promised to close the Guantanamo prison, which had become a symbol to many people of unfair treatment. But once in office, Obama found it difficult to keep this promise because of popular opposition to moving prisoners into facilities in the United States.

Question 25

“axis of evil” speech

Answer 25

In his State of the Union Address to Congress in January 2002, President Bush spoke of an “axis of evil,” which included the nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—all nations with anti American regimes, all nations that either possessed or were thought to be trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Although President Bush did not say so at the time, many people around the world interpreted these words to mean that the United States would soon try to topple the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Question 26

Iraq invasion

Answer 26

For over a year after that, the Bush administration slowly built a public case for invading Iraq. Much of that case rested on two claims. One was that Iraq was supporting terrorist groups that were hostile to the United States. The other, and eventually the more important, was that Iraq either had or was developing what came to be known as “weapons of mass destruction,” which included nuclear weapons and agents of chemical and biological warfare. Less central to these arguments, at least in the United States, was the charge that the Hussein government was responsible for major violations of human rights. Except for the last, none of these claims turned out to be accurate.

In March 2003, American and British troops, with scant
support from other countries and partial authorization from
the United Nations, invaded Iraq and quickly toppled the
Hussein regime. Hussein himself went into hiding but was
eventually captured in December 2003 and executed in 2006. In May 2003, shortly after the American capture of Baghdad, President Bush made a dramatic appearance on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California, where, standing in front of a large sign reading “Mission Accomplished,” he declared victory in the Iraq War. In fact, the war in Iraq continued for six more years, during which 3,600 soldiers were killed (out of just over 4,200 in total).

Support for the war in the United States steadily declined in the first months of the war, especially when it became clear that the “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq turned out not to exist. Reports of torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers increased the unpopularity of the war.

Question 27

2007 financial crisis

Answer 27

series of financial problems that began in mid-2007, grew slowly worse in the first months of 2008, and reached
crisis level over the summer and early fall. An important factor in the growth of the financial crisis was a significant
downturn in the housing market, which in turn triggered a
mortgage crisis. For years, financial institutions had been
developing new credit instruments intended to make borrowing easier and cheaper, and which lured millions of people into taking on large mortgages—often much larger than would traditionally have seemed safe—on very low short term rates, many of which escalated sharply after the first few years. Unable to pay their mortgages, which were often worth more than the market value of their homes, millions of defaulters abandoned their houses. At first, the defaults affected mostly companies that specialized in home mortgages, but since most mortgages were quickly sold, and often resold several times, the bad debts spread throughout a widening swath of the financial world. Over the summer, some of the nation’s most important economic institutions began to fail. Some were rescued (and effectively taken over) by the federal government. Others were bought up at very low prices by larger institutions, and a few—including Lehman Brothers, one of the oldest and most prestigious investment banks in America—collapsed altogether.

Question 28

bank bailout

Answer 28

By mid-September, the financial crisis showed signs of spiraling out of control. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, supported by other economic leaders, proposed a massive appropriation of federal funds to help the government bail out the banks. Despite considerable
popular opposition to the plan, the administration won congressional approval for a $750 billion package to be used to shore up tottering financial institutions. The bailout kept the financial institutions from collapsing, but the credit markets remained constricted, and economic activity by both producers and consumers began to decline.

Question 29

Obama’s health care bill

Answer 29

His most important, and perhaps his most controversial
achievement, was the passage of a bill that had been the hope of many Americans since at least the 1930s: universal health care. Obama’s bill, like any health-care bill, was very complicated and very expensive (although part of the program was designed to reduce medical costs significantly over several decades). Some supporters of health-care legislation were disappointed by the absence of a “public option”—health care provided by the government at low rates that would set a yardstick for private insurers. Opponents of the health-care bill attacked it as “government takeover,” even though the legislation
relies primarily on private insurers. The bill was passed by a
narrow margin in the House of Representatives and an even narrower margin in the Senate. Only one Republican—a member of the House of Representatives in Louisiana—voted for the bill.

Question 30

Tea Party Movement

Answer 30

A growing number of dissident Americans launched what became known as the “Tea Party” movement, which rallied around such issues as deficit reduction, tax reduction, and smaller government. The movement also attracted supporters with widely disparate views, ranging from moderate proposals to very extreme ones. Supporters of
the Tea Party began in late 2009 to organize campaigns for
Congress, governorships, and other public offices. Many of the Tea Party candidates had little previous political experience, and some of them campaigned in very unorthodox and sometimes extreme ways. But they contributed significantly to the energy and enthusiasm of Republican voters.