The outgoing Democratic administration, with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress for six of the last eight years, launched the opening salvoes against the social wage working people won in mass labor struggles in the 1930s and extended through the civil rights battles of the late 1950s and 1960s. They've deepened the attack on our take-home pay, working conditions, and dignity on and off the job. And they've narrowed our political liberties in anticipation of efforts by working people to defend our social rights--resistance by workers, farmers, and youth that has begun to develop and spread in the United States over the past few years.

This onslaught at home has gone hand in hand with increased military aggression by Washington throughout the world, from Iraq to Yugoslavia to the South China Sea.  
 
'End welfare as we know it'
A central banner of Clinton's election campaign eight years ago was his promise to "end welfare as we know it." In 1996 he fulfilled that reactionary pledge by signing the so-called Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act--a bill adopted with the votes of 230 Republicans and 98 Democrats in the House of Representatives and 53 Republicans and 25 Democrats in the Senate.

The legislation eliminated federally guaranteed Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and cut off food stamps and Medicaid for many working people. The AFDC program had been codified more than 60 years earlier in the Social Security Act, pushed through Congress in 1935 under the pressure of rising labor struggles. In eliminating this program, Clinton and Congress opened the battle to roll back other aspects of working people's Social Security gains as well.

As of early 1999, the White House boasted that welfare rolls were down 44 percent from 1994. Up to half of those denied payments had no jobs and the majority of the rest were employed at makework jobs paying minimum wage with no benefits. Millions more will be cut off when the five-year lifetime limit on receiving welfare comes next year.

This bipartisan opening shot four years ago puts the current election-season debate over Social Security "reform" in its true light. Whatever the differences among the proposals advanced by various Democrats and Republicans, all of them begin to undermine the character of Social Security as a universal entitlement. All involve "supplementing" federally funded pension benefits, even if only to a small degree at first, through private savings accounts that increase individual responsibility for retirement. These schemes are combined with reduced pension benefits, a higher retirement age, and increased employee taxes.

The consequences of the 1996 "welfare reform" are particularly devastating for working-class women--especially among the 10 million raising children on their own. This broadside against women's social rights is often papered over by those who urge support for Clinton by citing his veto of a couple of bills limiting the right to choose abortions.

What's more, while the U.S. rulers have been unable to reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling decriminalizing abortion, access to abortion is more and more differentiated along class lines. As of 1998, some 86 percent of U.S. counties and one-third of U.S. cities had no abortion providers, adding the costs of travel and lodging to other obstacles confronting women.

During the Clinton presidency the percentage of the U.S. population with no health insurance rose to 16 percent in 1999, while among those with medical coverage the amount of money paid out of pocket increased.

Producers on the land have been particularly hard hit by the capitalist debt squeeze during these years, as well. Government agricultural bills favor capitalist agricultural interests at the expense of family farmers, accelerating the number of foreclosures. On top of all this, farmers who are Black face discrimination by government and private lenders, subjecting them to even greater insecurity and ruin.  
 
Assault on democratic rights
Working people will feel the cumulative impact of these social attacks especially sharply with the onset of the next downturn in the capitalist business cycle--something that will come, despite hype by various bourgeois propagandists about a recession-free, internet-powered "new economy" today.

Already, however, working people are feeling more directly the rulers' pressure on democratic rights. The following are just some of the measures taken by the White House, Congress, and the courts:

In the name of the "war on drugs," the 1994 Crime Bill signed by Clinton assaulted Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary search and seizure in private homes. The courts have virtually eliminated such rights in private automobiles.

The Illegal Immigration and Reform Responsibility Act, which Clinton signed into law in 1996, expanded the powers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to seize and deport suspected "illegal" immigrants without the right to judicial review or appeal. The INS, now the largest federal cop agency, has stepped up factory raids and deportations to record numbers.

The 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, among other things, allows the INS to jail immigrants with "secret evidence" and broadens the government's powers to use wiretaps and hold individuals without bail in "prevention detention." Some two dozen people have been jailed so far on the basis of "secret evidence," most of them Muslim and Arab immigrants.

In the name of strengthening the defense of "national security," Clinton is urging Congress to draft a secrecy in government bill--giving greater cover to spying and trampling on constitutional rights--that the president can sign without paying too big a political price. In face of substantial opposition even in bourgeois public opinion, Clinton earlier this month backed off signing a sweeping measure that would have made it a felony to disclose "classified" government information to "unauthorized" persons.

The Clinton-Gore administration financed a record expansion of cops on U.S. streets and stepped up heavier and more deadly arming of police forces. In the name of fighting crime, cops have escalated the number of on-the-street executions and brutalization of working people. The administration set the tone with its deadly 1993 police assault on the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco, Texas, ordered by Attorney General Janet Reno and approved by Clinton. That assault, complete with tanks, resulted in an inferno that took the lives of 86 men, women, and children.

The U.S. prison population has doubled to 2 million since Clinton took office. Meanwhile, appeal and parole rights have been further restricted. Mandatory minimum sentences, longer terms, and the use of prison labor for the "free market" have all been made more common. The total number of people in the United States trapped in the "justice" system--in jail, on parole, or on probation--stands at an all-time high of 6.3 million.

During this period the annual number of executions has tripled, while the number of defendants charged with federal capital offenses has tripled since the adoption of the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994. The 1996 "antiterrorism" law greatly restricts the rights of prisoners to habeas corpus appeals, often the only recourse for inmates sentenced to death.

Even after serving out sentences, working people are seeing their rights permanently curtailed. In 1996 Clinton signed a "sex offenders" law requiring states to publicize the names of persons convicted of a sex offense after their release from prison. And more than 4 million people--some behind bars, others having served their sentences--have been stripped of their right to vote for the rest of their lives, including nearly one-third of all Black men in Florida and Alabama.

Under the banner of preempting "terrorist" attacks, the Pentagon has established, for the first time, a de facto "homeland defense command"--a step aimed at laying the basis to use U.S. armed forces against working people in this country.

The U.S. rulers have met resistance to stepped-up police violence--including street protests by thousands against the killing of Amadou Diallo in New York and the gunning down of Errol Shaw in Detroit. But the exploiters will be driven to use rougher methods as the class struggle sharpens.  
 
Foreign policy: extension of domestic offensive
The U.S. rulers' foreign policy is an extension of this profit-driven assault on working people at home. Washington's aggressive moves abroad have strengthened its military position in the Balkans and Europe as well as the Middle East relative to its strongest imperialist rivals--those in London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, among others.

Clinton inaugurated his first term in office in January 1993 with several consecutive days of bombings against Iraq--a handoff, in fact, from the prior Republican administration of George Bush. Since then, Washington has kept up constant bombing attacks--sometimes weekly or even daily--against the working people of Iraq.

Washington, together with other imperialist powers, has enforced and even expanded a "no-fly zone" over 60 percent of Iraq, a violation of that nation's sovereignty imposed since the 1991 Gulf War. It has also maintained a criminal economic embargo to try to starve the people of that country into submission.

In reinforcing U.S. imperialist domination in the Middle East, Clinton--while posturing as "peacemaker"--has encouraged Tel Aviv in its intransigence in holding onto East Jerusalem and other territories forcibly occupied during the 1967 war. If anything, Clinton has been the most pro-Israeli U.S. president since Harry Truman, who promoted the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 through the bloody dispossession of the Palestinian people.

In the Balkans, U.S.-led NATO forces have waged murderous bombing campaigns, destroying major industrial centers in Serbia last year, and currently maintain tens of thousands of occupation troops in Yugoslavia. In asserting themselves even more firmly as the dominant military power in Europe, the U.S. rulers have pushed to expand NATO eastward and tighten their encirclement of the workers states in Russia and other former Soviet republics.

On a related front, the Clinton administration has prepared the groundwork for putting in place a missile "defense" system as another step toward a nuclear first-strike capacity for U.S. imperialism. The package the White House is promoting is aimed first and foremost at the workers states in north Korea and above all China. Such a "Star Wars" system is a step the Reagan administration in the 1980s had to back away from.

In addition, Commander-in-Chief Clinton--with bipartisan backing--has deployed troops around the world, from Somalia to Haiti, and last year massively used Marines and marshals to reoccupy the U.S. Navy bombing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony.  
 
Attacks on Cuban revolution
The bipartisan tightening of the squeeze on revolutionary Cuba has been consistent with the U.S. rulers' course at home and abroad.

Beginning with his first presidential bid in 1992, candidate Clinton took the lead in endorsing the misnamed Cuban Democracy Act, which incumbent George Bush then signed. The measure, also known as the Torricelli Act, makes it illegal for foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade with Cuba.

In 1996 the Clinton administration signed into law the "Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act," also known as the Helms-Burton law, which substantially intensified the U.S. embargo. Since then, the White House has enforced the new trade restrictions, targeting companies abroad that invest in Cuba, a policy that has had a palpable effect on the living conditions of the Cuban people.

In an act of imperial arrogance, Clinton signed a law October 28 that--under provisions of the 1996 "antiterrorism law"--authorizes the U.S. government to seize $50 million in Cuban funds it has frozen since the 1960s and award them to the families of three rightists shot down in 1996 by the Cuban air force for provocatively invading Cuba's airspace, despite repeated warnings.

These attacks on Cuba are intertwined with the assault on working people in the United States.

When Elián González was found off the Florida coast last year, for example, the U.S. government attacked Cuba's sovereignty by refusing to return the child to Cuba. At the same time, the Clinton administration used the case as a rationale to advance the U.S. rulers' efforts to refurbish the image of the hated migra and to win federal court rulings that would establish legal precedents upholding the authority of the INS to carry out policies exempt from normal judicial appeal and review--one of their central policy objectives.

The U.S. government used the April 22 commando-style raid by heavily armed INS cops on a home in Miami, where they seized the Cuban six-year-old, to deal a stunning blow to the Fourth Amendment right of all U.S. residents to be safe from unreasonable searches and seizures.

What led to the eventual return of the child to his home in Cuba was not goodwill by Washington but the uncompromising stand taken by the revolutionary government of Cuba and the mobilizations of millions of Cuban working people who took the moral high ground worldwide.

Another measure signed into law by Clinton October 28 was an agricultural appropriations bill with a rider supposedly allowing the sale of food and medicine to Cuba. The legislation, however, not only intensifies the U.S. embargo against the island, it also lines the pockets of wealthy agribusiness interests at the expense of working farmers and deals a blow to the rights of working people by codifying existing U.S. Treasury Department regulations depriving the big majority of U.S. residents of the right to travel to Cuba.  
 

This bipartisan course--one that marks a further rightward shift in the center of bourgeois politics in the United States--is the jumping-off point for the administration that will replace Clinton-Gore this coming January.

The propertied rulers, however, face a growing problem--the rise in resistance by working people to the employers' offensive that has marked the past several years. These struggles range from garment and textile workers fighting to organize a union in New York, Alabama, and North Carolina; to coal miners standing up to employer harassment and the social movement in coal communities to defend lifetime health benefits for miners and their families; to immigrant workers protesting racist attacks by rightists and the INS; and other examples too numerous to list.

The U.S. rulers are laying the basis for more direct confrontations with the working class and its allies among exploited farmers and others.

But as shown by articles throughout the pages of the Militant in recent years, more and more working people are standing our ground. And there will be bigger battles to come.  
 
 
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