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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 8, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Clinton's Role in the Attack on Welfare

By Scott Scheffer

Of all the very right-wing, anti-people things the Clinton administration has carried out or taken part in, the most significant is the attack on welfare now under way.

Republicans, Democrats and the Clinton administration itself all want desperately to slash the welfare budget. But there are squabbles--over questions like how cautious do they have to be? Will people fight back?

Will the class peace they have enjoyed and profited from for so long be shattered if they go too far?

Worries about heightening the working-class struggle have moved President Clinton to lurch from extremely right-wing proposals to ever-so-slightly less extremely right-wing proposals.

Last September, Clinton promised to sign a Republican welfare bill that was expected to cut a million children off assistance. New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan--known as a liberal Democrat but actually one of the originators of the war on welfare recipients--criticized the president for supporting that bill.

Moynihan released a report that predicted children would be sleeping on grates in cities in the United States if Clinton signed the bill. So the president backed down.

It was an embarrassment for the administration when a couple of months later it came out that the number of children thrown off welfare would have been 1.5 million-half a million more than they originally thought.

Then, earlier this summer, Clinton endorsed Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson's welfare initiative--the harshest of all the harsh and inhumane plans that have surfaced in the last couple of years. A couple weeks later, Clinton seemed to back off again.

Republicans have twice put forth proposals that Clinton has vetoed for fear of antagonizing the workers. But at this point he seems eager to move the welfare attack forward so that it will be a right-wing feather in his cap. He's hedging on whether he'll sign the new bill, but he has only minor objections to it.

In mid-July Clinton ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to draft new welfare regulations that would limit payments of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the main cash-assistance program, to two years per family. With this maneuver, Clinton used the power of the presidency to pre-empt Congress as a legislative bargaining chip against the Republicans.

Even if they can't reach agreement, Clinton can still brag to the ruling class that he slashed welfare.

Attack on the Working Class

The Congressional bill would end the 60-year-old federal guarantee of cash aid for the poor. Vice President Al Gore said the federal-entitlement issue is "a little bit overstated in its importance anyway."

Not to families who need it to survive.

Most Democrats in Congress, with a few notable exceptions including most members of the Congressional Black Caucus, now support ending the entitlement--ending the program that acknowledges that people impoverished by capitalism are entitled to government aid to live. So this monumental attack on a major part of entitlement programs is now not even part of the debate.

The cut will amount to some $60 billion over six years.

Instead of the federal guarantee of aid, the bill would provide each state a lump sum of money to operate its own program of assistance for the poor, with no federal requirement to provide any aid at all.

Poorer states will get less money in some cases. According to Harvard School of Government Professor David Ellwood, for some states like Mississippi and Arkansas, the grants for child care, job training, cash assistance and workfare combined would be less than $15 per child per week.

States would be permitted to lower benefits as they see fit. More than 700,000 people would be cut from food stamps. Everyone would be cut off after two years unless they meet work requirements. There would be a five-year lifetime limit on benefits.

These work requirements would fall disproportionately on African American women. Even though approximately equal numbers of Black and white women receive AFDC, African American women are less likely to have had decent job and skills training, less likely to be able to secure a job in this racist society, and less likely to have relatives or friends who can afford to help them out of a bind.

Teenage mothers will lose benefits. States may be given cash rewards for lowering welfare recipients' birth rates-even though welfare recipients' birth rates now match the national average. A new variety of racist eugenics--this time, by starvation.

States may also refuse to provide additional benefits to women who have children while collecting any form of welfare payment.

Three hundred thousand disabled children from poor families will lose cash benefits. Five hundred thousand disabled, blind, and aged "legal" immigrants will lose SSI benefits.

A million legal immigrants will lose food stamps.

The Reagan-Bush-Clinton Era

All in all, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that about 5 million people will be thrown off the welfare rolls.

No doubt, a huge portion of the ruling class is drunk on the successes of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era. They must be toasting this Democratic president who is presiding over a host of reactionary moves that go far beyond anything either Reagan or Bush dared try.

They want to cut welfare not to lower the federal deficit, but to lower the general standard of living so they can pay workers lowered wages as well. That means billions of dollars to the corporate bourgeoisie.

Whether Clinton signs this bill as it is or signs another one slightly less horrible, it's likely that he is thinking about the class struggles that created the welfare programs in the first place. The lurches back and forth reflect fear and squabbling within the ruling class.

They remember what happened in the 1930s.

The right to have some kind of income when you are out of work wasn't just a gift arising out of a great idea of President Franklin Roosevelt's. All of the entitlement programs came about because millions of workers were mobilizing.

The wave of militant strikes, plant occupations, union organizing, street demonstrations and so on scared the hell out of the ruling class. People fought the police and died in the streets to demand their rights as workers. The communist movement played a big role in all of it.

Franklin Roosevelt, a rich patrician who had been a sort of centrist Democrat when he was first elected, suddenly started acting very concerned about the plight of the poor and the workers. The ruling class ended up hating him for spending what they saw as their money--but Roosevelt essentially saved capitalism in 1935-36 by instituting the programs that entitled people to unemployment, Social Security, and welfare benefits.

Today, some progressives defend Bill Clinton as he joins the effort to push tens of thousands of impoverished, unemployed women workers and their children into homelessness and starvation. They say he's doing what he can to hold back the tide of an even worse right-wing assault.

But Workers World Party, with its campaign running Monica Moorehead for president and Gloria La Riva for Vice President, condemns Clinton as the complete puppet of the rich ruling class and its right wing. The working class doesn't need more "friends" like Bill Clinton. In fact, what's needed is a fight to push him and all the other bigbusiness politicians back.

That's why WWP campaign organizers are in the streets, patiently talking to workers and oppressed people, exposing the capitalist system and all its dirty tricks. Socialists know that the workers will begin to act in their own interests, either gradually or suddenly.

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