BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
Cutting Medicare and other social programs under the pretext of balancing the federal budget.

Endorsing Republican-sponsored legislation that will undermine overtime pay for workers.

An "action plan" for education, endorsed by many liberals, that will widen class differentiation and police control of the already overcrowded and understaffed public schools.

That's what seeped through the carefully staged address to a joint session of Congress by U.S. President William Clinton on February 4. The Democratic president gave his annual State of the Union speech two days before unveiling his budget proposal to the House of Representatives and Senate.

"The prospects that President Clinton and Congress will finally clinch a deal this year to balance the federal budget are better than ever," said a front-page article in the February 3 Wall Street Journal. Republican leaders - who assigned Rep. J.C. Watts, a 39-year-old congressman from Oklahoma who is Black, to give the traditional rebuttal to Clinton - announced the next day they are ready to forgo drafting their own budget plan and instead work with the president's proposals.

"This time he's [Clinton] starting on our ground," stated Michele Davis, spokeswoman for Rep. Richard Armey, a Republican from Texas and the House majority leader. "So why counter something that's already on our playing field?"

Tactical differences between the two parties of big business over how far and fast to push the assault on the social wage remain, however. The day after the State of the Union speech, the Republican majority in the Senate brought to the floor for debate their constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget, which Clinton opposed in his address the previous night.

At the beginning of his speech, Clinton bragged about the changes to the welfare law he signed last summer. "Over the last four years, we moved a record two and a quarter million people off the welfare rolls. Then last year we enacted landmark welfare reform, demanding that able-bodied recipients assume the responsibility of moving from welfare to work," he said.

In his address, Clinton called for "tax credits and other incentives to businesses that hire people off welfare." Reports in the media said the president will propose more than $3 billion in such credits to employers, which will simply fatten the profits of those companies.

The welfare law affects most of the 13 million workers and farmers who were receiving cash assistance and the 25 million receiving food stamps. An estimated 1 million immigrants with residence papers will be cut off from food stamps. And hundreds of thousands are excluded from Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low income families, and Supplemental Social Security Income - regardless of the wages they are bringing home from a boss. More than 40 percent of the cuts resulting from "welfare reform" come from restrictions on social services to immigrants with proper documents.

In his address, Clinton said the federal government should "do something both Republican and Democratic governors have asked us to do: restore basic health and disability benefits when misfortune strikes immigrants who came to this country legally."

Clinton was referring to the annual gathering of the National Governors' Association, which concluded its conference in Washington, D.C., February 2. The big- business press had speculated for days that a bipartisan majority among the governors would ask Congress to alter the new federal welfare law and restore relief to documented immigrants.

The governors, however, rejected any idea of reopening the Welfare Reform Act and adopted a statement simply urging Congress to "meet the needs of aged and disabled legal immigrants who cannot naturalize and whose benefits may be affected," a relatively small group of immigrants.

The U.S. President reiterated his previous proposals for "modernizing" Medicare, under the pretext of saving the federal trust fund for the program from imminent bankruptcy. This is a code word for slashing this social entitlement that provides health coverage for the elderly and disabled. In January, Clinton had announced he will seek $138 billion in Medicare cuts over six years. He had also stated he is open to introducing a form of means testing the benefits, by raising the monthly premiums for recipients with income over a certain level.

Under the pretext of helping working families have more flexible hours, Clinton urged passage of a "flextime" bill. The proposed legislation would give employers the option of not paying workers time and a half for overtime. Workers would instead accrue points for extra hours, not higher pay, and would be compensated by getting time off after notifying the boss 30 days in advance.

Union officials have objected to the bill. "We don't see where in the bill there is a guarantee that you could keep a 40-hour standard and get overtime pay," said Karen Nussbaum, director of the AFL-CIO's working women project, in a February 4 interview.

Clinton also presented a 10-point action plan supposedly to improve education. The White House offered just $5 billion "to finance $20 billion" in construction of new school facilities, in face of the soaring problem of overcrowded classrooms across the country.

Other proposals included creating 3,000 charter schools by the year 2000, seven times more than today. These schools mostly benefit students in predominantly middle- class or rich areas. They get federal funds but set their own rules and can normally hire teachers without collective bargaining. In some states they are run by private companies.

To address the problem of widespread functional illiteracy, the president did not propose hiring more teachers and cutting class sizes. Instead, he proposed "to build a citizen army of one million volunteer tutors." He said 60 college presidents have pledged that thousands of their work-study students will be asked to serve for one year as reading tutors.

The foreign policy outlined by the president was but an extension of the war against labor at home. Clinton began with a thinly veiled threat against the socialist revolution in Cuba. "Every nation in our hemisphere but one" lives under democracy, he stated, "and its day too will come."

Clinton pledged to expand the imperialist NATO alliance to Eastern and Central Europe by 1999. He called for trade treaties that would open up new markets for U.S. goods. "America is once again the most competitive nation and the No. 1 exporter in the world.... We can out-compete anyone." And he bragged that Washington pocketed half a billion profit from the recent "bailout" of the Mexican peso.

The U.S. government "must increase funding for weapons modernization," Clinton said and use "new intensity, to combat terrorists."

The day after his speech, the Associated Press published a secret presidential directive Clinton had signed on June 21, 1995. The order says Washington will use force to arrest "terrorists" held in other countries that refuse to cooperate with U.S. extradition requests.

"If we do not receive adequate cooperation from a state that harbors a terrorist whose extradition we are seeking, we shall take appropriate measures to induce cooperation," the directive states. "Return of suspects by force may be effected without the cooperation of the host government."  
 
 
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