The Clinton deception
The 1996 U.S. elections is proving to be even duller than these things usually are. Public opinion polls put Bill Clinton ahead by twenty percentage points. Strange, considering that the man who is almost certainly to be re-elected president did not carry out his campaign pledges of four years ago. Instead he secured passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement despite majority sentiment opposing it, and slashed government spendingexcept for the military budget. Dianne Feeley THE TWO MOST PROGRESSIVES ACTS CLINTON shepherded through Congress were the Medical and Family Leave Act, which granted workers the right to take "short, unpaid leaves" for childbirth or other family reasons, and a raise in the minimum wage.
The $4.25 an hour minimum wagewhich had been in effect for five yearshas just been raised to $4.60. Next year it will go to $5.15. This is hardly a living wage even for a single person.
None of the anti-union legislation from the Reagan-Bush era—including a striker "replacement" bill—was dismantled during
Clinton developed quite an anti-labor record while governor of Arkansas (an anti-union "right-to-work" state). Yet the AFLCIO endorsed him in the 1992 election. Then he used every resource at his disposal to get the votes necessary to pass NAFTA. At the time, labor leaders proclaimed that at reelection time they would oppose every politician who supported NAFTA. Yet the truth of the matter is that the seventy international presidents who govern the AFL-CIO endorsed Clinton earlier than they had ever endorsed a presidential candidate beforewith only one abstention, Teamster president Ron Carey. And while there were more union member delegates at the 1996 Democratic convention than ever, there was not even a token effort to produce a pro-labor platform.
Except over abortion, the Republican challenger, Bob Dole, has trouble distinguishing his positions from Clinton. One of the Republicans biggest criticisms of Clinton, in fact, is that he has stolen their campaign themes. Be it crime, welfare benefits or reducing the deficit, Clinton has embraced the Republican's platform Agreement between Clinton and Dole includes the following points: • Federally-mandated cash assistance to poor women and their children should no longer be a guarantee ending a 70-year program, which constituted 1% of the federal budget and no more than 3% of the budgets of the individual states. The bill limits women and their children to benefits lasting no more than two years, with a lifetime maximum of five. • Medicare and Medicaid [health care programs available to the poor, the disabled and the elderly should be cut. • The private market is recognized as the only way to reform health care. • The number of guards at the U.S-Mexican border should be doubled and fences should be constructed in order to reduce the number of people crossing without documents. • Legal immigrants, including tens of thousands who have lived in the U.S. for decades, are to be second-class residents, excluded from social service benefits. • The annual $167 billion in corporate welfare should go untouched and the military budget-already more than $250 billionshould be increased. • The death penalty should be expanded and jails should continue to fill with nonviolent drug offenders and those ensnared in "three strikes, you're out" laws. • Civil liberties should be sacrificed to fight "terrorism." Newly passed legislation includes the deportation of non-citizens suspected of terrorism on the basis of secret evidence not subject to scrutiny. • Free trade should come before the interests of workers.
USA * WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAYANS ANYWAY? I THINK IT WAS FREE TRADE SPAIN... • Gays and lesbians should be denied the right of legally recognized marriage, spousal Social Security and pension benefits, immigration rights, visitation rights, etc. • Replacing the Delaney Clause, a forty-year regulation which banned carcinogens in processed food, to one which allows panels of scientists working for the food industry to set "risk assessment" standards that allow for an "acceptable" annual rate of people dying from cancer. • The Endangered Species Act is too strong and the timber and mining industries have "rights" to "extract " in national forests at subsidized prices. • The current system of election laws and private campaign funding works just fine • In foreign policy Clinton and Dole are on the same wave length. They support bills such as the Helms-Burton bill, which attempt to penalize any government that does business with Cuba.
Clinton's inauguration four years ago was conducted with much fanfare. He was the first Democrat after twelve years of rule by the right wing of the Republican Party. Although he was clearly in the right wing of the Democratic Party, Clinton sounded as if he wanted to be a new Roosevelt. Specifically he called for creating jobs through rebuilding the country's infrastructure, for a universal health care system—and he was the first president who could say "gay rights" without a sneer.
That was Clinton the candidate. the president replaced any pongress about the federal govemmen the economy by an obse
* USA deficit. Borrowing from the Republican Party, Clinton made speech after speech about how the federal government had become bloated and inefficient. Social programs that had been drastically defunded under the Reagan and Bush administrations were cut even further. Everything except the military budget was fair game for cuts. From the beginning then, the Clinton agenda was, at all times, framed by the interests of the rich and powerful.
In the early days of the administration Clinton opposed the military's policy of discharging those who openly declared a samesex sexual preference. But almost immediately Clinton caved in to right-wing criticism, switching to a policy of "don't ask, don't tell." At the time his aides attempted to convince the gay movement they should be satisfied with the deal. Recently Clinton signed the reactionary Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to prohibit recognition of same-sex marriage.
Clinton's spinelessness is not confined to gay issues. Within six weeks of assuming the Clinton's war on American children
The welfare "reform" bill signed by Clinton will make more than one million additional children poor (mostly from working families). This will increase child poverty nationwide by 12 percent. It will reduce the incomes of one-fifth of all families with children, by an average of $1300 per year. • It replaces the federal guarantee of cash assistance for poor children and families with a flat block grant that cannot respond to inevitable economic downturns. It further reduces resources by allowing states to withdraw $38 billion from their own contributions to cash assistance and work support over six years. • It will make 14 million low-income children and their families hungrier, by cutting $27 billion from Tood stamps over six years. • It denies cash assistance to more than 300,000 children with disabilities, some of whom will also lose Medicaid coverage. • It fails to protect children who need child care by forcing a mother with a child of six or older to work, even when child care is unavailable. • It abandons legal immigrants, denying not just cash assistance and food stamps, but even aid to the disabled and Medicaid coverage. • There is not enough money in the bill for states to provide work activities or child care. Parents who are not teens will find it virtually impossible to get training for a stable or family- supporting job. * Source: How the New Welfare Law Profoundly Harms Children, by the Children's Defense Fund 25 E Street NW, Washington DC 20001, Tel. (202) 628-8787). 30 International Viewpoint presidency, Clinton set up a Health Care Task Force to study how to implement a costeffective, universal health care plan. However the only plan that could have worked—a single-payer plan that Canada and much of Western Europe have had for years—was ruled out from the beginning because it meant challenging the health care business.
Given that private funding fuels U.S. election campaigns, Clinton delivered the votes on NAFTA but not on a universal health care system. One-third of his judicial nominations are millionaires. This is a higher proportion than Ronald Reagan (24%), or the last Democratic President, Jimmy Carter (4%)
Although Clinton's two-faced approach is particularly interesting to track, the fact is that both Democrats and Republicans spend their campaign period attempting to fool enough people into electing them, and then pursue their own agenda, which given their financial backers, must be corporate interests. Of course, capital does not have one united interest, and therefore there are "liberal" and "conservative" faces. But given the constraints of an economy which is making the rich richer, eroding the living standards of the working class and paupering the poor, even the liberal face supports NAFTA and
Additionally, the fundamentalist, Christian right now constitutes a quarter of the Republican Party stalwarts. These people can be helpful foot-soldiers in furthering a conservative agenda, but they are a bit too headstrong for Republican bosses. The Party was willing to have them write the platform—although Bob Dole made it perfectly clear he did not intend to be bound by it.
Since election laws and financing make it extremely difficult for any third-party alternative to meet ballot requirements (unless the candidate, like Ross Perot, is a billionaire), progressives have a tendency in U.S. elections to vote for the lesser of the two evils (almost always the Democratic Party candidates). That is how the social democrats and the Communist Party have justified their support for Democrats over the last fifty years, and how they justify their support for Clinton today. Jesse Jackson, arguing for the entire Black political establishment, makes
"I know the disappointment associated with the Clinton White House. One of four children in this rich country—and one of two African-American children—is born to poverty. The President's capitulation [over) welfare repeal is indefensible, a shameful act that places millions of children at risk. His embrace of the conservative corporate economic consensus-from NAFTA to deficit posturing to tight money-continues the country down the wrong path. Politically I know firsthand the divisive push-off politics perfected by the White House. And yet I urge you to engage, not withdraw."
The "push-off politics" he is talking about include the Clinton administration's abandoning two African-American nominees, Lani Guinier for Assistant Attorney General, and Henry Foster for Surgeon-General, after they were attacked by the tar nght. The nght orchestrated vicious campaigns against the two: Guinier, because she wrote about the need for election law reform and Foster, because he held a mildly proabortion position. Clinton never launched an effective counter-campaign, but meekly withdrew the nominations. He also sacked Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, an outspoken African American woman, for suggesting that teenage masturbation was "normal" and "harmless, " which horrifying the right wing.
Jackson presents Clinton as the only option opposing the social devastation that would inevitably follow Dole's election. He remains silent about Clinton's capitulation to the right and maintains that this election is a referendum on the anti-people, pro-corporate, antigovernment, radical-right Gingrich/Dole agenda." Likewise, the Communist Party states "Clinton is the vehicle for defeating the far-right in the presidential race, there is no other option..."
The Communist Party is dead wrong. in 1996 there is more interest and activity around third party formations than there has been since World War II. These include Green Party and Socialist Party candidates at the state and local levels, as well as Ralph Nader's campaign for president. Nader is on the ballot in 20 states and an official write-in candidate in another 25.
Probably no other U.S. citizen is as well known for opposing corporate interests as Nader. His book, Unsafe at Any Speed led to the Vehicle Safety and Highway Safety Acts in 1966 and he has been working on health and safety issues ever since. He has been involved in campaigns for union democracy in both the Teamsters and mine workers, and notes "the ability to organize an industrial union is almost impossible in this country because of the way the labor laws and the implementation of them are rigged in favor of the employer." Nader has worked to establish more than fifty non- profit organizations, including the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, in order to expose corporate crime and track government handouts to the corporations.
Nader's presidential campaign has some interesting points:
• "we want to move in the direction of
"Concord Principles" .... tools of democracy that extend the power of workers, consumers, shareholders, votercitizens, and taxpayers and do it virtually without any taxpayer money. Then to facilitate the banding together of people." • "We want to help galvanize a new generation of activists who want to reform politics and channel their energies into more productive and just pathways."
• "This is a message to the Democrats and
Republicans that the days are over when they can tell millions of disaffected
Americans that they've got nowhere to go politically."
Nader doesn't have a chance of winning
But Democratic Party strategists like James Carville are worried that Nader will siphon votes away from Clinton in key states like California. For this reason the Democrats were determined that Nader would participate in none of the televised debates. When boring Bob Dole met blustering Bill Clinton, the first presidential debate got the lowest TV rating ever.
Nader's campaign is primarily focused on how U.S. democracy is being dismantled by the major corporations, who control the government and its assets. Nader spotlights this stranglehold as the fundamental reason for injustice, rather than focusing on the comprehensive, broad-based platform of the Green Party. This might be weakening his campaign since many people want to know where the candidate stands on many of the burning issue of the day, including affirmative action, immigration policies and the right of women to have access to abortion and family planning services.
Clearly Nader campaign for president as a concrete challenge to the "duopoly" of the Democrats and Republicans. In his acceptance speech at the Green Party convention, Nader remarked, "What we're doing is building for the future. The Greens and other progressives are in the early building stages of a people-first future years Political movement for
The low public interest in the presidential elections is the direct result of the U.S. public's awareness that they are dominated by huge corporate money and special lobbying financing. Yet so long as the prevailing consensus is that nothing can, or will, be done about it, the already high level of apathy and Notes The author is an editor of Against the Current and a member of the Political Committee of the revolutionary socialist group Solidarity, which endorsed the Nader campaign for president as "an important opportunity to promote the idea of an anticorporate, pro-working class alternative to capitalist politics in the 1996 election." 1.("Voting Right," Nation, 9/23/96) 2. (Defeat the Far-Right's Contract on Michigan Workers, brochure from the Michigan District, Communist Party)
Michel Mill [Paris] On Monday October 7, we were informed of the sudden death from a heart attack in the USA (where he was on a family visit, of our comrade from Montreal, Quebec: Michel Mill. It is difficult to convey in a few words the great shock and deep sorrow that all those who knew Michel felt at hearing the sad news.
Michel was still in the full bloom of life, in his early fifties. He was the true model of both a 'high liver and a fighter, enjoying life and strongly determined. You could not fail to notice his presence wherever he was. Michel always displayed a lot of energy, when arguing politics, and in his special way of telling (funny) stories from his militant career.
And stories he had! Michel started to be active politically at a very early stage in his life. He was linked to the Fourth International for more than thirty years. One of the most prominent Fl leaders in North America, he went through all the factional fights around the US SWP. He withdrew for a while from active politics, probably tired of the internal feuding. Several years ago he re-joined our Canadian section, Gauche Socialiste/Socialist Challenge, with renewed energy immediately recovering his role as one of its key leaders.
Michel, like the rest of us, was deeply atflicted by the untimely death in 1993 of Francois Moreau, another key leader of our Quebec/ Canada organization. Michel felt it a personal duty to increase his commitment to building the section even more, in order to compensate for the major loss which Francois' death represented.
Michel was very enthusiastic about the prospects opened by the merge of Gauche Socialiste as an organized section into the larger Parti de la Démocratie Socialiste (PDS) of Quebec. He often contributed to our press, usually under the pen name of Michel Lafitte.
Our comrades in Quebec and Canada will undoubtedly need our solidarity to face this second heavy blow they suffer in three years. To them and to comrade Katherine Beeman, Michel's companion, we extend our deepest sympathy. We shall always miss Michel. Salah Jaber, on behalf of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International We will publish a biography of Michel in the next issue of International Viewpoint.
USA * Georg Scheur VenGer Scheuer became a revolutionary Marxist the hard way. He joined the Communist Youth Organisation when he realised that Austrias social democrats were unable to fight the growing fascist movement. He remained a member when the party was banned in 1934. participating in a Comintern meeting in Paris. Refusing to accept that Communists should do nothing to weaken the prestige of the Soviet Union, he sought out the Viennese Trotskyists, to try to understand what was going so terribly wrong in the movement. Georg became a founder member of the (underground) Austrian Revolutionary Communists (RKO). As he later explained, "for us Trotsky was the preserver of the world revolution.. But this does not mean that we always agreed with him. We called ourselves Trotskyists' with reservation, and out of spite," In the 1936 Trotskyist-trial (Trotskistenproced), he was sentenced to five years imprisonment. After his release, Georg escaped to CzechoSlovakia only hours before the Nazis seized power in Austria. At the 1938 conference which founded the Fourth International, Georg argued that the international situation was not as revolutionary as Trotsky claimed, and spoke against the proclamation of the Fourth International. He stayed in France during the war, joining an independent left resistance group. After the liberation, he became the Paris correspondent of various left newspapers. He visited Algeria during the war of independence, and reported on French torture and atrocities. In the 1950s he published an analysis of Bolshevik "shortcomings," characterising the Russian revolution as a "putsch" He contributed regularly to the Austrian Fourth Internationalist newspaper Die Linke, debating Trotsky's faults and the failures of the Fourth International. He was a true revolutionary intellectual, working with the far left, Communists and left Social Democrats. He was regularly seen on demonstrations and at public meetings. In his later years, Georg was increasingly concerned with the growth of far right forces across Europe. He was pleased to hear about the unity discussions between Fourth Internationalists, the Communist Party, and the local "Militant" group Waltern Kanelutti, on behalf of Sozialistische Alternative(SOAL)
November 1996 #282 31