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Feeling Your Pain  by  James Bovard  

Review by Mark Webster  

          I hate to admit it, but it is slowly dawning on me that I do not live in the country I thought I lived in.  I have always thought of the United States as the home of the free and the land of the brave.  After reading Bovard’s Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years, I now believe I live in a warren of saps and suckers.  As Bovard puts it, America has become an Attention Deficit Democracy because citizens pay little attention to the predatory nature of their government.  This book is similar to Bovard’s other books, such as Freedom in Chains, Shakedown, and Lost Rights.  His books are not fun reading, because the governmental abuses he describes are so depressing and disappointing, especially for readers with a great love of the idea of republican government and the protections of personal rights against Federal intrusions set forth by the Founding Fathers in the constitution.  Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson would recognize the government they created; many twentieth century European despots would.  

          In a way, the book is a misnomer.  Of course the phrase “feeling your pain” comes from Clinton’s phony but successful attempts to make an empathetic connection with voters.  The more accurate phrase would be “causing your pain.”  Likewise, many of the governmental actions started long before Clinton-Gore.   At any rate,  the President treats voter “pain” as an excuse to administer the coercive power of the state to cure whatever ails the public.  The end result of eight years of “feeling” is 25,000 new regulations, new tax burdens, and new limits on personal liberty.  Yet Clinton remained a popular president who would have easily been elected to a third term had he not been subject to term limits.  This speaks volumes about us. 

          Bovard demonstrates the explosion and abuse of government power by examining Americorp, the IRS, affirmative action, FEMA , the War on Drugs, the erosions of freedom from illegal search and seizure, forfeiture, fair trade, HUD, Farm Fraud, the ADA, EPA, gun control , Waco, Ruby Ridge, the FBI-DOJ, and Kosovo.  Ironically, I finished the book on the day Attorney General Ashcroft postponed the McVeigh execution because of the FBI’s serious mishandling of the largest domestic anti-terrorism case in the nation’s history.  Bovard is bound to have started a sequel already. 

          Here’s how the pain game is played: First, Clinton takes a poll to see what is bothering the voters.  Next he announces at a press conference he has the cure in the form of another government program.  Parasites in the form of politicians, businesses, and individuals see that they can acquire money, power, and celebrity status by hopping on board the pain train.  Some kind of program is created.  The program fails.  Politicians deny the failure and seek additional funding.  The taxpayer  pays the bill without protest.  The cycle begins again. 

          I have picked just two small examples from the book to illustrate the process.  Clinton perceived that citizens were in pain about crime and decided that local police could not fight crime alone, despite the fact that crime was actually decreasing.  A 1994 crime bill sought to put 100,000 more police on the street.  Despite $9 billion in federal spending, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) actually placed few cops on the beat.  In Little Rock 40 of the 82 “new” cops were actually not humans at all, only laptop computers.  The government claimed the new computers and technology created labor savings equal to 40 real cops.  The same thing occurred with 72.8 cops in Omaha and over 700 cops in D. C. Even a 1999 Department of Justice report concluded that 40,000 cops were created this way.  78% of the police department who received money under the program could not show that additional cops were placed on the street.  Most police departments did what you would expect: substitute federal funds for local spending.  Municipal governments did the same thing with federal money for snow removal and flood control.  94% of the police departments failed to submit financial reports, thus making crime fighting agencies criminals. When it was obvious the goal of 100,000 cops on the street could not be met, bureaucrats then insisted the goal all along was to have grant applications for 100,000 cops, not the actual cops.  Not a dime was ever spent to quantify the original assumption that more cops actually resulted in less crime. 

          The second example involves HUD, the poster child of government ineptitude.  Despite decades of HUD’s failure to provide decent housing for the poor, the agency received over $200 billion from Congress during Clinton’s presidency.  Part of this money funded an elaborate hoax.  Clinton made an unverified claim that loan companies practiced racial discrimination in their lending practices.  In Fort Worth $100,000 was earmarked to send out three pairs of testers to a loan company to find racism.  The first two pair of testers detected no problem.  However the last pair detected a problem in that a white male tester spent an hour with a female tester while a Hispanic tester spent only twenty minutes with a white male loan officer, who had the temerity to take a short bathroom break.  HUD maintained the difference in time constituted discrimination and put the screws to the company to enter into a “ settlement.”  The company ultimately made no admission of any crime.  The Human Rights Commission waived the right to sue the company.  The only payment the company agreed to was a $5,000 payment to the Fort Worth Human Relations Commission for education and outreach programs.  The loan company agreed to make certain levels of loans to minorities over five years, subject to the availability of qualified borrowers and the discretion of the loan company.  The agreement contained no penalty clause if the loans weren’t made.  Nevertheless, on Martin Luther King Day 1999 Clinton announced that under the settlement the loan company would offer $6.5 billion in home mortgages to 70,000 minority home purchasers.  The numbers were a complete fabrication.  Even the loan company was shocked by the announcement.  Clinton used the hoax to gull citizens into believing America suffered from endemic racism that only government could cure. 

          Bovard’s book is tough going.  There are dozens of examples like the two above.  I wished he had gone into even more detail.  He emphasizes that if any citizen even so much as doubts the good intention of the government, the fault is placed on the citizen and not the other way around.  As Bovard puts it, “[F]ear of a government agent with a machine gun is now a symptom of mental illness.”  Despite use of excess force in little known cases as well as the better known cases of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Gonzalez case, the Clinton administration sought to de-legitimize fear of government and replace it with an addiction to governmental “solutions” to problems.  It worked.  In November of 2000 99.99% of the voters who made it to the polls and cast a countable ballot voted in favor of big government.  In Bush-Cheney they will receive more of the same.