Workers World July 3, 1997: Clinton at Denver summit

------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the July 3, 1997 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------

Reality check for Clinton at Denver summit

"American model" of attacks on masses meets Euro fear of worker resistance

By Fred Goldstein

There were the usual smiling group photos. But the June 20-22 Denver meeting of the big imperialist powers, known as the G-7, was an unmitigated disaster.

These meetings were originally conceived in 1975 to moderate the financial collisions among the robbers in Wall Street, London, Paris, Bonn, Germany, Tokyo and Rome-and later Ottawa. The goal was imperialist economic stability.

What happened in Denver, however, was a shameless display of arrogance by U.S. imperialism at the expense of its rivals. Most of them, with the exception of its junior partner in the Anglo-Saxon alliance, must have wished they had stayed home.

Washington came all puffed up by the capitalist boom, having left in the dust its principal economic rivals, Ger man and Japanese capitalism. The Clinton administration went to Denver touting the "American model" for Europe and Japan.

The "American model" means ruthless downsizing and technological restructuring, Draconian cutbacks in social spending, union busting, tax giveaways to the bondholders and investors, and deficit reduction-a general attack on the working class and the oppressed.

Clinton had been putting out lecturing statements before the conference. When the others arrived in Denver on June 20, Clinton's aides had already distributed an 11-page packet on how great U.S. capitalism has been doing since 1990 compared to all its rivals.

"At Friday's meetings," reported the June 22 New York Times, "the boasting about America's economic performance among administration officials was growing so pronounced that Clinton cautioned his aides to tone down the unflattering comparisons to Europe and Japan."

A specter hovers over Denver: the French working class

But there was more than just bluster behind Washington's aggressive posture at the so-called Summit of Eight-which included Russia's Boris Yeltsin for the first time. Washington was addressing the biggest and most immediate problem faced by the European capitalists and, ultimately, by the United States and Britain: what to do in the face of growing working-class resistance on the continent, led by the French workers.

Clinton was trying to intimidate the new French government headed by Socialist Party Premier Lionel Jospin into a full-scale retreat from its commitment to the workers. Before the recent election, Jospin promised to create 700,000 jobs, reduce the work week from 39 to 35 hours with no pay cut, stop privatization and protect social benefits.

Clinton was also trying to stiffen the resolve of the entire European bourgeoisie in the struggle against the workers.

In fact, the struggle of the French workers was a major source of tension at the conference itself.

According to the Times, Robert Hormats, vice chair of Goldman Sachs International, said flatly: "Just a few months ago the consensus among the world's leaders seemed to be that there was a right way to guide your economy, and it looked like the American way. ... The consensus that we thought was universal among leaders turns out not to be shared by voters. We are coming to the limits of the political acceptance of these approaches."

Of course, the capitalists of continental Europe would like nothing better than to be able to follow the U.S.-British approach. And they were headed in that direction until the workers dug in their heels.

Hormats from Goldman Sachs understates the issue when he says "the voters" are opposed to austerity. In fact, the victory of the left in the French election was not an isolated, passive parliamentary procedure. It followed a wave of struggle in the streets by millions of workers and youths who engaged in militant disruption.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl does a lot of hard-line blustering about austerity and the need for deficit reduction in order to bring about the common Euro currency agreed to at Maastricht, Netherlands. But when the German ruling class started a broad attack on workers' pensions and retirement, the bosses were firmly rebuffed by mass demonstrations.

Kohl then had to retreat 180 degrees. He made a humiliating attempt to get the German central bank to revalue the gold supply by using a bookkeeping trick to make the deficit look smaller on paper. All this to avoid confronting the masses.

The eyes of the entire working class of Europe are on the French situation. The masses want to see the new-left coalition government stick to its promises.

The workers have been through a previous betrayal by the government of Socialist Party leader Fran‡ois Mitterrand in the 1980s. There is much less trust and more willingness to fight now, should the Jospin government backtrack on its promises.

Washington fully knows that fear of the class struggle is behind the resistance to the so-called "American model." But Wall Street wants European governments to put a stop to the new counter-offensive by the workers.

Which, of course, is a lot easier said than done.

Inter-imperialist conflicts

There were many other points at which the United States asserted its unequivocal domination of the imperialist camp. Washington is bringing its newly bourgeois clients-Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic-into NATO. But it flatly vetoed attempts by France and Italy to bring in their clients-Romania and Slovenia. This, said a French official quoted in the June 21 New York Times, was "fundamentally imperial."

"When exactly did the Americans go from leadership to hegemony?" asked another official.

The U.S. delegation came to Denver fresh from driving the French imperialists out of their position as dominant exploiters of Central Africa-particularly in Congo/Zaire and Rwanda. Antagonism flared when French President Jacques Chirac called for giving aid to Africa and the United States took the position that only investment and markets should play a role. The United States prevailed.

Clinton invited Boris Yeltsin without consulting the Japanese government. This strengthened Washington's European puppet against Asia. The Japanese were quick to ask why China, a major Japanese trading partner with a giant economy, was not included.

Yeltsin was invited for atmospheric considerations. The United States got him to agree to the expansion of NATO. Now Washington wants Russia to sign the Start II treaty, which would begin Russia's nuclear disarmament-a measure that even Yeltsin cannot agree to right now.

And the United States wants to stabilize the capitalist counter-revolution to clear the road for capitalist investment and robbing Russian natural resources, especially oil and natural gas.

Yeltsin was invited to strengthen him politically at home. But the invitation means very little, since the G-7 is not an organization. It has no standing existence and is mainly an annual talk shop and occasion for multilateral negotiations, which could be carried out by other means.

Capitalism and world devastation

The devastation that the world capitalist system has brought the masses, including the workers in the imperialist countries themselves, was not discussed at the conference.

The group that met in Denver presides over $16 trillion in annual production of goods and services-almost 70 percent of world production. Their bankers control the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization-the global institutions of world capital.

As a ruling class they have been responsible for the economic life of most of the planet since the collapse of the USSR. How has the world fared under the leadership of this exploiting "free-market" capitalist system?

Probably no one brought to Denver the Human Development Report for 1997 put out by the United Nations. But here are some of the gross performance statistics of the "American model" on a world scale. They could form the ironclad basis of a criminal indictment.

The assets of 358 billionaires equal the incomes of countries encompassing 45 percent of the world's population.

About 1.3 billion people live on less than a dollar a day each.

In sub-Saharan Africa 220 million people live in poverty.

In Latin America and the Carib bean 110 million people live in poverty.

Eastern Europe and the former republics of the USSR have seen the greatest income deterioration in the past decade. Poverty has spread from a small part of the population to about one-third--120 million people, who live below the level of $4 a day.

In the industrial countries more than 100 million people live below the poverty level. Thirty-seven million are jobless.

Nearly a billion people are illiterate. Over a billion lack access to safe water.

In the past 15-20 years more than 100 developing and transition countries have suffered disastrous failures in growth, with a more prolonged drop in living standards than anything experienced in the industrial countries during the Great Depression of the 1930s. As a result the incomes of more than a billion people have fallen below levels first reached 10, 20 and sometimes 30 years ago.

This is the flip side of the statistics about profit growth in the imperialist countries. One look at these statistics and it is plain that the group meeting in Denver and all their capitalist hangers-on around the world are criminals.

Their "free market" system is not free at all but a prison for billions of people, including the workers and the oppressed right here at home. The wealth they steal from the colonial peoples of the world is used to build more prisons, hire more cops, buy more judges, more technology to intensify exploitation, more media to spread propaganda in favor of their inhuman system.

The name G-7 is a prettified term for the ruthless heads of world imperialism. Their model, the capitalist model, must be destroyed. A world socialist order that operates to enhance human existence and not exploit it must be put in its place.

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