COMMENT
Comment Let Them Eat Values Things can't get much worse than the House Republicans' welfare plan. In the "Personal Responsibility Act," the new House leaders declare that no one—no matter how...
...Certainly there was no democratic groundswell for GATT...
...But laughing at violence behind bars won't make any of us safer...
...Then Jesse Helms, Rush Limbaugh, John McLaughlin, and Oliver North would have tarred and feathered us...
...Clinton by law will need to find $25 billion in cuts to offset these additional expenditures, and you can bet he won't hack away at the Pentagon...
...It's all the rage to make life as grim as possible for prisoners, as if that will actually make a dent in crime...
...If the suffering that follows is great enough to appall voters, maybe they'll vote for four more years of compromise...
...Yet, according to The New York Times, the Personal Responsibility Act has a better chance of passing than any of its myriad welfare-reform competitors in Congress...
...Last March alone, during Salvador's election race, the brutal forces there killed at least thirty-three leftists...
...Indeed, Clinton's decision in the 1992 Presidential campaign to pledge "an end to welfare as we know it" was a compromise that led naturally to the draconian Republican alternative—ending welfare without any of the job-training and other forms of support Clinton promised would ease the transition...
...He'll spin whichever way the wind pushes him...
...It will just make us smaller...
...Here's a little-known fact: Some 40 percent of all world trade is not between different countries or even different companies: It's among branches of the same companies...
...Surely it is...
...John McLaughlin has invited soldiers to disobey Clinton's orders during the Haiti occupation...
...This is the empire's assignment...
...He was not sentenced to death...
...But his spinning can have awful consequences, as Salvadoran refugees are finding out right now...
...No, GATT was a product of the big-business lobby, pure and simple, and Clinton railroaded it through Congress on a special fast track...
...For the first time, the Federal Government would also cap spending on Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled, as well as housing assistance and AFDC...
...GATT is NAFTA The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance calls | it "an accident in progress...
...The American people were not lobbying for GATT...
...We don't really know, after all, how many welfare recipients are simply incapable of working...
...Now GATT will ensure the lowering of these standards...
...No one can demonstrate...
...In 1975, with a wink from President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, it annexed the independent nation of East Timor and systematically wiped out one-third of its population, killing 200,000 Timorese...
...Clinton's words were fine—he urged the Indonesian government to ease its repression...
...With a straight face, Kaus suggests, "Clinton must compromise," as if he hasn't compromised enough already...
...By boosting GATT, Clinton was simply promoting the agenda of the most powerful members of our society...
...investment in Indonesia...
...Then he warned that Clinton better watch out and bring a bodyguard if he ever visits Helms's home state of North Carolina...
...All across the country, politicians who know zip about welfare reform are rallying to Senator Phil Gramm's cry to get those bums out of the wagon and tell them to help push.' the madness and savagery of this effort should be self-evident...
...In the 1980s, with U.S...
...Said one former Oak Ridge employee, who is now a member of the alliance: "They've got a nuclear pipe bomb in their backyard there...
...The dirty little secret that Jeffrey Dahmer's death reveals is the brutality of our prisons...
...It will cause an enormous amount of suffering for no reason at all...
...And no kind of justice was served in the murder of Jeffrey Dahmer—or the murder, let's not forget, of the other prisoner, Jesse Anderson, who was bludgeoned to death along with Dahmer...
...Welfare recipients have become the official national scapegoats...
...Nor is consistency...
...The Clinton Administration says it will make no effort to renew that status...
...Stunned by the Republican triumph on November 8, he is stumbling around, uncertain about what to do, unclear about what to advocate, and unwilling to fight for what is right...
...It doesn't matter how hideous Dahmer's crimes were...
...There's nothing funny about the murder of the notorious serial killer behind bars in Wisconsin in late November...
...Clinton and the Joint Chiefs have a different definition of readiness, however...
...Indonesia has one of the worst human-rights records in the world...
...Nuts at the Helms Jesse Helms is off his rocker...
...In 1990, Congress granted Salvadoran refugees temporary status in the United States, but that status runs out on December 31...
...Routinely, male prisoners are beaten or raped behind bars by other inmates...
...Now are they going to tar and feather themselves...
...And Bill Clinton is more than willing to carry it out...
...A more repressive country would be hard to find...
...Then Clinton will have a chance to advance his own, somewhat less destructive plans...
...Blood Money How much are human rights worth...
...Surrounded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clinton justified this ridiculous bloating of the already bloated Pentagon by saying it was necessary to improve readiness...
...They define readiness as the capability to fight two major conflicts at once...
...On the crassest political level, Kraus thinks this is a good idea...
...It's a message that muffles any pious talk about human rights...
...they weren't given enough information even to understand the agreement...
...Look at how it became law...
...No matter that such an amendment runs absolutely counter to the separation of church and state, which is so central to our democracy...
...And the prison failed to do its job in seeing that the sentence of the court was carried out...
...Just days after the election, Clinton gave the first signal that he was ready to be rolled when he declared his interest in a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to prayer in public schools—long a Republican rallying cry...
...Is our military not ready to defend the United States from attack...
...Multinationals rule the world...
...Market Uber Alles Now that the GATT's out of the bag, do you want to know what this trade agreement is really about...
...In addition, multinationals want the lowest environmental and labor standards, which they consider mere costs of production...
...And it appears that, even in the face of this drastic new measure, they are going to keep it up...
...El Salvador still has a horrendous human-rights record...
...It's not about high-minded concepts like free trade...
...Clinton was forced to confront the Indonesian human-rights issue after protesters demonstrated in East Timor and at the U.S...
...Now Clinton is preparing to ship them back...
...Welfare is a hot-button issue, Mickey Kaus declares in a recent cover story on the elections in The New Republic, because of the (mistaken) perception that mostly African-American, inner-city residents receive it: "Welfare may or may not have caused this underclass, but welfare is clearly what sustains it...
...But by cashing in on anti-welfare sentiment in his own campaign, Clinton helped clear the way for the poor-house-and-orphanage era...
...And Rush Limbaugh regularly smears Clinton's credentials with any filth he has available...
...The argument that the Republicans' plan will save money is particularly repellent since the programs they propose to cut—while essential to the survival of millions of poor Americans, mainly women and children—represent only 3 percent of the Federal budget...
...To escape the horror, some 200,000 Salvadoran refugees fled to the United States...
...We don't know the extent to which cutting off unwed mothers will encourage marriage, and the extent to which it will simply produce homelessness," Kaus writes...
...no one went knocking on doors to rally support...
...Clinton's political advisers seem to believe that the only way to win over the struggling middle class is to deliver tangible benefits— tax cuts, job training, health insurance," Kaus writes...
...Helms is not alone, of course...
...The elimination of trade barries also enables them to crush small competitors, which rely on tariffs and subsidies to stay in business...
...States will be required to spend the money "saved" in this way to set up orphanages, group homes, and programs that exhort women to stop having babies out of wedlock...
...This is cruel and unusual punishment...
...Many refugees that are shipped back to El Salvador will face reprisals...
...Clinton's a human weather vane...
...The outrageous comments from the unreconstructed Senator from North Carolina show precisely how brazen the right-wing is getting these days...
...Yet Bill Clinton agreed to participate in the trade conference in Indonesia in mid-November, the first American President to visit there since Gerald Ford gave the green light to the invasion of East Timor nineteen years ago...
...When it comes to welfare, bigotry and opportunism vanquish the facts...
...The second signal came on December 1, when Clinton went out into the Rose Garden to unveil a proposal to increase Pentagon spending by $25 billion over the next six years...
...For several months, uranium has been seeping from an old nuclear reactor into a filter pipe, risking an uncontrollable nuclear reaction...
...Spare us the Jeffrey Dahmer jokes...
...An unelected, unaccountable group of bureaucrats in Switzerland will have the power to judge whether our laws represent barriers to trade...
...Deprived of a livelihood, these farmers will have no choice but to flock to overcrowded Third-World metropolises...
...Winking at evil is the New Democrats' style...
...Instead, it singles out for neglect the most vulnerable members of our society—most of them children...
...GATT was undemocratic from start to finish...
...Is the Department of Energy going to clean up its act, or is it going to wait until one of these pipe bombs goes off...
...If you think there are no more nuclear weapons threatening America, think again—then duck...
...Not to worry, says the Department of Energy, the problem is being taken care of...
...aid, the brutal government of El Salvador killed tens of thousands of its own citizens...
...Peace dividend be damned...
...As Ralph Nader has pointed out, GATT is a dire threat to our labor, environmental, and consumer-protection laws...
...No matter that it is an offense to civil liberties...
...The lesson of the nasty House Republican welfare plan, according to Kaus and other self-described New Democrats, is that President Clinton must push the idea that he, too, is tough on blacks, single mothers, and poor people...
...Now that's something we really need...
...Clinton's original proposals were not nearly as damaging as the plans now on the table in Congress and in a number of states...
...Nothing could be more destructive...
...But another way to appeal to the struggling, underpaid workers is to honor their work—by dishonoring the non-work of those who stay on the dole...
...In the "Personal Responsibility Act," the new House leaders declare that no one—no matter how desperate—is legally entitled to aid from the Government...
...Clinton saw school prayer as a bone to throw conservatives...
...When the Department of Energy shut down some of its nuclear reactors over the years, it made no long-term plan to dispose of the radioactive material, The New York Times notes...
...Imagine if we here at The Progressive had dared to suggest that Ronald Reagan or George Bush should visit our home state of Wisconsin only under heavy guard...
...These companies want the lowest tariffs possible in every country, so that when they trade among their subsidiaries in far off places, they can do so at no extra cost...
...At the very time Clinton was chiding the Indonesian government, he was sealing a deal with that government allowing massive U.S...
...And the underclass, in turn, drives the crime problem, the race problem, the 'urban crisis,' and the general sense of social decay ('twelve-year-olds having babies, fifteen-year-olds killing each other...
...Nobody can speak...
...The same repression they fled...
...This hodgepodge of stereotypes demands that we starve the poor...
...What bothers him is losing popularity, and he knows that there's an ill wind blowing on the issue of immigration...
...embassy...
...Our prevailing military doctrine requires the United States to be able to fight not one but two wars outside our borders...
...he was sentenced to life in prison...
...People feel the pressure of the military all the time.' But this doesn't seem to bother Clinton...
...Furthermore, the Personal Responsibility Act does nothing to address the economic crisis facing a growing number of families in this country...
...But it will hurt the least powerful at home and abroad...
...It's about carving up the globe for multinationals, and it's about forcing nations to bend and bow before these giants...
...Among the programs the Republican plan would repeal are the Food Stamp Act of 1977, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the National School Lunch Act of 1946, and the Emergency Food Assistance Act of 1983...
...GATT intrudes on our sovereignty, and on the sovereignty of any Third World country that wants to control the affairs of its own economy and society...
...But words are cheap...
...Nuclear Terror Seems there's a little problem at the Oak Ridge nuclear lab in Tennessee...
...Evidently, civilian control of the military is not one of the traditional values the right-wing holds dear...
...As a result, tons of old uranium fuel pipes are leaking and rusting across the land...
...the radiation level there is so high that work will now have to be done by remote control...
...What's even scarier is that we've got nuclear pipe bombs all over America...
...Don't count on it...
...The Indonesian government got that message—loud and clear...
...That's right...
...What's the Punch Line...
...Under GATT, small farmers around the world will have no way to compete against giant agribusiness companies, which will be able to undersell them with ease...
...As a result, the Salvadorans will be forced to return home...
...Marie Antoinette advanced a similar line of reasoning 200 years ago...
...Instead of food and shelter, the hungry and homeless will get seminars on morality...
...But just to be sure, the employees who worked near the pipe have been removed from the site...
...Frequently, female prisoners are sexually assaulted by guards...
...When the money runs out, it would be up to the states to decide whether to reduce benefits or simply turn people away...
...Beginning with the inverted premise that welfare causes poverty, and that poor people cause economic hard times, the welfare-reform argument has devolved into the tragic absurdity of the House Republican proposal: Neglect the poor and hope they go away...
...What readiness...
...This is the kind of logic that got us where we are today...
...it is unconstitutional, and it's a scandal...
...So let the Republicans do their worst, these New Democrats say...
...Something less than $40 billion, according to Bill Clinton...
...Empire's Assignment Bill Clinton is dazed and confused...
...Of course, when liberals squawked, Clinton backed and heaved— his form of daily exercise...
...Medicaid, child immunizations, school lunch and breakfast programs, maternal and child health care, and a number of other programs would no longer be | available to millions of poor people who fall into the excluded groups...
...Welcome to the new age...
...In particular, the bill excludes non-citizens (even if they're in this country legally), children whose paternity hasn't been officially established, and the children of unmarried teenaged mothers from programs that alleviate hunger, homelessness, and disease...
...And what will they find there...
...The answers won't come from the study of the mincing, incremental reforms that have been tried...
...First he said President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief...
...Refuge No More You'd think that Salvadoran refugees had suffered enough, but evidently Bill Clinton doesn't think so...
...In this staggered state, Clinton is unwisely heeding the advice of pundits and aides, who are urging him to try even harder to sound like the Republicans...
...Oliver North has made similar disparaging comments about Clinton's fitness as Commander-in-Chief...
...Where I come from," Clinton said, "$40 billion is still real money—and we're grateful for the business...
...Today, it still occupies the tiny nation, and it also represses any hint of labor organizing in Indonesia itself...
...Somehow, that's not reassuring...
Vol. 59 • January 1995 • No. 1
