The big-business media portrays the current wrangling in Washington as a sharp ideological face-off, with Bill Clinton in one corner defending Medicare and the Republican- led Congress in the other corner fighting for a "balanced budget." But the theatrical presidential vetoes and shutdown of government services are a charade. The Democratic White House and the Republicans have exactly the same goal. As loyal representatives of the superrich, they are both pressing to erode many of the fundamental social gains of working people.
The Clinton administration made its priorities clear when Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin took emergency steps - tapping federal employees' retirement funds - to circumvent the national debt ceiling in order to pay $25 billion in interest to multimillionaire bondholders. Interest payments are the third biggest item in the federal budget, but for Democrats and Republicans the capitalist bondholders are sacred.
Because of their historically sagging profit rates, the U.S. employers are compelled today to try to roll back the social entitlements workers have won through decades of struggle, such as Medicare, unemployment benefits, workers' compensation, and Social Security. Clinton, like the Republicans in Congress, is proposing to slash hundreds of billions from Medicare and other programs.
The debate in Washington is strictly on tactics, not fundamentals: how far and how fast can they get away with cutting social programs. The big obstacle facing the employers is that the working class considers these basic social rights, and both Republicans and Democrats are nervous about sparking widespread opposition to such attacks. But attack they must, so their probes against the social wage will continue.
Today there is a modest but palpable resistance by working people to the employers' onslaught on wages and living standards. It is evident in the strikes by tens of thousands of unionists at Boeing, the Detroit newspapers, and Caterpillar, among others. Workers in these three fights have stood their ground for weeks or months. The determination displayed by 32,000 Boeing strikers in protecting their health-care benefits and other hard-earned gains does not go unnoticed. These are real factors the capitalist rulers must take into account in deciding how hard they can press their assault.
These labor fights, the recent demonstrations in defense of affirmative action, and similar struggles by working people and youth are the most effective way to resist today's assault on our rights by the employers and their bipartisan gang in Washington.