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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 8, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Welfare Bill

Clinton Drops Bomb On Poor

By Deirdre Griswold

A terrorist bomb has been dropped on the poor of this country. It is called welfare reform.

President Bill Clinton announced July 31 that he intended to sign the Republican bill before Congress that will put an end to the federal welfare system. It was his most cowardly and treacherous political act to date, in an administration full of broken promises and capitulations to the right.

Many studies have been made, some by the Clinton administration itself, on the impact this will have. The Republicans, and now the Democrats too, argue that making block grant funds available to the states in place of federal assistance will get people out of the "trap" of welfare. But the studies show that about 1.5 million children will be thrown into dire poverty, along with hundreds of thousands of adults, mostly mothers.

If, as these projections show, some 5 million people are eventually dropped from welfare, how will this affect society as a whole? There can be no doubt. Having a large pool of desperately poor people will drag down the wages of those who have jobs. The number of working poor will drastically increase.

The welfare "crisis" is a sham. The real crisis is unemployment. The inability of millions of workers to find full-time, steady jobs that pay enough to live on, at a time when the economy is continuing to expand, leads inevitably to the growth of every index of misery.

The fault lies not in the working class, but in the system of capitalism that relentlessly attacks workers in the never-ending search for higher profits.

Clinton's capitulation to the right on welfare makes it crystal clear that workers can gain nothing by supporting the Democratic Party. That only whets the appetite of the capitalist class for greater concessions.

The reaction of those fighting for the rights of the poor was swift and militant. Said Pat Gowans of Welfare Warriors in Milwaukee: "We're not giving up. We won't accept it. Clinton hopes to escape responsibility by letting the governors launch their Frankenstein experiments on the people.

"But Clinton's name will go down in history as destroying a support program we've had since 1935. I hope that all the hundreds of thousands who have been out on the streets will be 10 times angrier than before."

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