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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 13, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Behind the bipartisan rhetoric

Clinton/Gingrich cuts intensify racism

By Shelley Ettinger

Tresident Bill Clinton says things are going pretty well. They'll get better as the millennium approaches, thanks in large part to the Internet.

That about sums up Clinton's message in his State of the Union address. If such a glib approach to the reality of life for most people in this country seems to reach new heights of surface skimming, it's no accident.

Clinton, his Democrats and the Republicans are proceeding with their program of shifting more and more of the workers' wealth into the capitalists' pockets. They've got to do their best to keep covering up the effects on the working class.

But the effects are real.

Steadily falling workers' wages. Impoverishment of women and their children forced off welfare.

More and more people without health insurance. The coming cuts in Medicaid and Medicare, the pending larceny of Social Security funds by Wall Street.

A disproportionate burden of all these attacks is borne by the Black, Latino, Native and Asian communities.

In fact, racism and the rise in racist inequality is the biggest unmentionable lurking behind the Clinton-Gingrich program of administering the ruling-class assault on the workers and oppressed. Yet racism and a calculated effort to promote divisions in the working class are key to their strategy.

It's the thread running from Clinton's crime law hiring more cops and building more prisons, to the "anti-terrorism" law stigmatizing immigrants, to the welfare "reform" starving the poor and victimizing immigrants.

This is what Clinton can't say. Neither, of course, can the Republicans. In fact, they'd rather just ignore the whole topic of racism, implying instead that it's all working itself out in the magic of the marketplace.

The absurdity of that angle was highlighted by the timing of Clinton's speech. At that same hour, much of the country was waiting to hear the verdict in the civil trial of O.J. Simpson. The Simpson case and the media's use of it to foment divisions have certainly exposed how central the question of racism remains at this stage in U.S. history.

But all Clinton wants to talk about is how the Internet is the bridge to the 21^st century. If the president were honest, he'd admit that his job is to help the capitalist bosses use the most oppressed as the bridge-to walk over, on their way to a new era of ever greater riches.

But the millennium isn't here yet. If the racist bourgeoisie had any respect for history, they'd know that the workers and oppressed have a way of rising up and exploding the bosses' best-laid plans.

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