COMMENT
Comment A Democratic Triumph GALE 'Mr. President, how did it get to be reform to slash nutrition programs that are so important in making sure that children have an adequate diet? How dare you...
...English at Our Command The English-only crowd is at it again...
...Back to Baghdad During the Gulf War, U.S...
...So much for the judge and jury...
...they are making it worse...
...Clinton, whose respect for civil liberties has been nonexistent, tried to legalize such invasions of privacy in the counterterrorism bill last spring but was outvoted in Congress...
...If they still can't find work after their five-year allotment is up, too bad...
...That would be meddlesome enough...
...He was ostensibly writing a news story, but it was actually a piece of promo for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which had just awarded a credit package to Venezuela...
...To hell with the evidence, was the gist of what they said...
...The issue isn't even documentation...
...The response by the American press to the TWA explosion was no better...
...resolution allowing Iraq to sell $2 billion of oil every six months so it could purchase food, medicine, and other basic items...
...In Wisconsin during the month of June, 1,200 participants in a small-scale welfare-reform experiment were cut off welfare and had their food stamps reduced to $10 a month because they missed an appointment with a caseworker or a job-trainer...
...But to read the Times, you wouldn't know any of that...
...We've been killing Iraqis ever since...
...He is taking $28 billion in food assistance from poor women and their children...
...Other states now will no doubt follow the Wisconsifli' example, tossing people into the street for failing to clear the most minor administrative hurdles...
...Now he's back...
...That is a cruel hoax...
...There seem to be a lot of people with itchy fingers these days—in the editorial rooms of The New York Times and The Washington Post...
...This bill does not end poverty...
...The explosion of TWA Flight 800 has just given Clinton another excuse to trample on our rights...
...The jobs that are available for most people currently on welfare do not pay a living wage...
...Certainly not Bill Clinton...
...I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima...
...Stifling the Truth In the July 13 issue of The New York Times, Paul Lewis applauded "Venezuela's plans to create an open, market-oriented economy, free of the stifling controls and regulations that once characterized virtually all the countries of Latin America...
...But this lack of evidence didn't frustrate The Washington Post editorialists...
...But it would at least be something...
...Bill Clinton is consigning a million poor children to poverty...
...But it's not like his Administration hasn't already been snooping around: The Clinton Administration is already spying on Americans at a rate twice that of the Bush Administration and two-and-a-half times that of the Reagan Administration...
...Although the Senate bill remains tied up in committee, the House approved the measure on August 1. The Republican members of the House Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee, who overwhelmingly supported the bill, presented it as—surprise!—another piece of liberating legislation...
...Similarly," the Post went on, "intentional validation before the act of punishment would be the best way to go, but if that is not feasible, a national decision by the injured party, the United States, ought to suffice...
...First, he allowed forty-one states to obtain federal waivers to tamper with the way they administered their federal welfare dollars...
...A few months ago on 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl interviewed Madeleine Albright, U.S...
...And, you know, is the price worth it...
...Social-service agencies in Milwaukee report a rise in homelessness and hunger as a result of the cutoffs...
...And they are permitted to cut the amount they spend on the poor by 25 percent from the 1994 level...
...The engineers of terror can no longer be permitted to live beyond the reach of American military retaliation...
...Lewis mentions Chile only as the first Latin-American country to institute the shiny, happy, I.M.F.-supported reforms...
...This passes for compassion in 1996...
...Why is he doing this...
...But when a Democratic candidate ran on that pledge, many liberals cheered—or comforted themselves with the fiction that Clinton didn't really mean what he said...
...The new system gives states broad powers to administer welfare programs as they see fit, but gives them less money to do it with...
...Cunningham told Representative Martin Martinez, a Democrat from California who opposes the bill, that giving people access to documents written in their native tongues is keeping them from succeeding...
...He has an uncanny knack for knowing what's right, and doing what's wrong...
...Suharto seized power in 1965 by overthrowing the country's legitimate, progressive government...
...But the IMF also imposes draconian social policies on the people of the Third World...
...This summer's protests, extraordinary for Indonesia, began when police occupied the headquarters of Suharto's opposition, the Indonesian Democratic Party...
...government is in the midst of approving sales to Suharto of twenty F-16s...
...The government then announced that the military would shoot protesters on sight...
...In this era of tight state budgets, most will probably do so...
...And if there is a recession or a depression, they will still be out of luck...
...It requires governments that accept an IMF loan to devalue the currency and abolish subsidies on such basic items as food and gasoline...
...That is not reform...
...Today, the U.S...
...Only the most dire of emergencies were accepted as legitimate reasons for an absence...
...in fact, it would come to less than twenty-five cents per Iraqi per day...
...Only a nominally Democratic President could have scored such a devastating victory...
...Sanctions are killing them, literally, and by the hundreds of thousands...
...The bill slashes $55 billion in welfare spending over the next six years...
...Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times said "our increased vulnerability" to "an unknown terrorist is what really characterizes this new age," adding that the TWA flight would "no doubt" be pegged to terrorists, though there were plenty of doubts around when he banged those words out on his computer...
...States like Wisconsin, which has already begun purging people from the rolls, are not solving the problem of poverty...
...As a result, the exemption for the oil sale is now in question, and the people of Iraq continue to starve...
...He knew back then that a majority of the American public, feeding on racial stereotypes, resented people on welfare...
...By signing the bill that will destroy our nation's sixty-year-old welfare system...
...It simply ends welfare...
...Our Suharto The people of Indonesia are rebelling against their government...
...A.M...
...It insists on export-oriented growth strategies to bring in hard currency so that the country can pay back Western banks...
...How did it get to be reform to essentially eliminate all of the assistance for legal immigrants, people who pay taxes and work...
...The credit, Lewis said, "serves as a seal of approval on the country's economic reform package...
...They were born inside the borders of a country that Washington chooses to strangle...
...When Suharto murdered his own people, the United States supported him...
...Such an assault on the poor would never have occurred under a Republican President...
...Hoagland ordered the retaliation five days before his paper ran a story headlined: "Lack of Bomb Evidence Frustrates FBI Probers...
...Well, it turns out he meant it...
...It is the mean season...
...Stahl's question: "We have heard that a half million children have died...
...Half of these families have incomes under $6,300 a year...
...But who looks to that seal of approval...
...Suharto lets U.S...
...The government has also accused the leader of Indonesia's largest independent labor union of masterminding the entire thing...
...And, no, he said, he's not just going after immigrants...
...One of the clearest examples of these connections is found in Chile, where General Augusto Pinochet's brutal military government seized power in 1973, murdered thousands, and instituted painful free-market economic policies ultimately subsidized by the IMF...
...And it insists on lowering a country's barriers to Western investors...
...IMF loans are often accompanied by repressive political measures designed to prevent opposition to the reforms...
...At present, there are four million poor parents on welfare—the vast majority are single women—and nine million children...
...As Paul Lewis has demonstrated, it's hard to find the truth about the IMF in the pages of the Times...
...Wimar Witoelar, whose talk show was recently banned from Indonesian television, summed up the gap in understanding...
...Our economy does not have enough jobs for everyone...
...The new program called Wisconsin Works will leave 75 percent of participants with less money than they have now, according to an analysis by the bipartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau...
...The IMF, dominated by the United States, coerces countries like Venezuela to adopt policies that serve U.S...
...Now for the executioner...
...Like any demagogue, he played on those sentiments...
...In 1975, Suharto's forces invaded the independent nation of East Timor, where they murdered 200,000 people—a third of that country's population...
...The Indonesian people are no longer tolerating the many abuses of Suharto's illegitimate regime...
...Park Service brochures, social-security papers, and Internal Revenue Service forms...
...and has already approved $60 million in weapons sales to the military government...
...a trend in this country for American citizens not knowing English, which inhibits their ability to improve themselves and prepare themselves for the twenty-first century," said Randy (Duke) Cunningham, Republican of California...
...The costs of child care will take a huge chunk out of that measly paycheck, so mothers and their children will be worse off than they were under the old system...
...He urged Congress to pass legislation that would allow the government vast new authority for wiretapping and other snoopery...
...That has not a thing to do with reform.' —Senator Paul Welistone For all those who still cling to the idea that it's vital to have a Democrat in the White House, consider the Democrat who lives there now, and the assault on the poor he is waging...
...Under the new block-grant system, states will get a lump sum to dole out pretty much as they please...
...This is mean-spirited no matter how you camouflage it...
...Even before any hard evidence was in, the pundits took to their perches...
...Lewis really loaded the dice with the adjective "stifling...
...Who Needs Proof...
...This May, after many entreaties by the international community, the United States finally signed on to a U.N...
...The United States made its approval clear again when Suharto invaded East Timor...
...Ambassador Albright's response: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it...
...Bill Clinton and the Republicans who goaded him claim that dismantling welfare will be good for the people on welfare...
...How does Bill Clinton sleep at night...
...These are the people who will suffer...
...Because he suffers from a tragic flaw—opportunism...
...He will immediately cut off disability aid and food stamps to hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants...
...Stopping terrorism means standing ready to retaliate militarily against the sponsors of terrorism...
...Once a month, they will receive a lumpsum grant as payment for forty hours of work, but the amount of that lump sum turns out to be less than the minimum wage...
...government," he concluded, "has a moral and political obligation to prevent known killers from sitting comfortably in Benghazi, Libya, or Damascus, Syria, and benefiting from having shed American blood...
...business interests...
...What did these 600,000 children do to deserve this fate...
...Bill Clinton got the nasty welfare ball rolling when he ran for President in 1992...
...How does Hillary Rodham Clinton, formerly of the Children's Defense Fund, sleep at night...
...The issue is that we're trying to empower people...
...The Democrats in Congress, and liberals around the country, would have been up in arms...
...He writes that Pinochet "set his country firmly on the road toward economic liberalism...
...There will now be a five-year lifetime limit for welfare recipients...
...What are you going to do to the Statue of Liberty, erase the words on it?' —£ (Kika) Garza, Democrat of Texas, on the English-only bill said it best when Clinton and his cabinet shook hands with Suharto in October 1995: "He's our kind of guy...
...They would have exerted so much pressure that the Republicans would have had to back down...
...The result: a level of desperation and need we have not seen in this country since the early 1930s, when the crisis of mass poverty caused the government to institute the welfare system in the first place...
...We cannot fool ourselves about how expensive and difficult achieving greater security is going to be.' —Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post c omment 'This bill is making us the laughingstock of the whole world...
...that has always endeared him to Washington...
...He is depriving hundreds of thousands of disabled children of the supplemental-security income they rely on...
...Hurting" is putting it mildly...
...Feisal Tanjung, the head of Indonesia's repressive military, blamed the country's worst uprising in decades on "irresponsible groups and people...
...That is the height of callousness...
...Suharto's military killed hundreds of thousands of Indonesians in the ensuing months—the body count may have been as high as one million...
...Rosenthal of the Times also rushed to the terrorism conclusion, and demanded retribution...
...Well before any definitive answer was in on the cause of the explosion of TWA Flight 800, there was Clinton demanding more power to infringe on our civil liberties...
...The folks who want to make English the official language of the United States have introduced two bills that would ban the use of languages other than English in government documents such as U.S...
...Everyone is growing much more aware, much more politically educated," he said, "except those in power...
...The United Nations estimates that 600,000 Iraqi children have died since August 1990 as a result of the sanctions, which have brought startling levels of malnutrition and massive outbreaks of preventable diseases...
...Ambassador to the U.N., about Washington's responsibility for the suffering in Iraq...
...There is...
...If you want to keep your people in a barrio, if you want to keep them restricted in little tight communities so only you can communicate with them and we can't in English, then be my guest...
...We feel stalked in the jungle of nations by small, hidden, but deadly predators ready to strike whenever we lower our guard," he wrote...
...We have been colonized for so long by our own people, and perhaps the time has come for us to be aware of it," said one Indonesian citizen named Hussein...
...Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post called for an attack...
...In July, the Clinton Administration said that Iraq was planning to improperly use the proceeds of the oil sales...
...Depriving non-English-speaking Americans of accessible social-security documents, tax information, and pamphlets explaining public services will not empower people...
...But don't expect our government to take a principled stance in support of the Indonesian protesters...
...Had a Republican candidate run on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it," liberals would have denounced that candidate loudly and clearly...
...How dare you call that reform...
...But we're going to empower them to get out of that so they can have a piece of the American dream...
...One of Clinton's senior officials 'Americans need to make a psychological adjustment to living in a world of predators who target Americans and their institutions...
...As a result, the standard of living plummets for the citizens of these countries...
...He co-opted and immobilized many of those who should have been clamoring for the poor, he legitimized the bashing of people on welfare, and he brought Democratic Senators and Representatives along with him...
...It's not a lot of money...
...corporations and banks, which depend on the IMF to guarantee their profits...
...How dare you call it reform...
...he really wants to help...
...The neediest among us are now the ones being punished, and for this we have Bill Clinton to thank...
...Purging the rolls—not improving people's lives—seems to be the only goal of today's welfare games...
...companies make billions in Indonesia...
...And something is now more than Washington wants to concede...
...But poverty will deepen for millions of Americans...
...We need to consider "what standards of proof need to be met in order to fix responsibility and what the procedures of punishment then ought to be," the Post wrote...
...And now he's gone ahead and signed this bill that will do away with the guarantee that poor women and children shall not starve to death...
...We are now entering the sixth year of economic sanctions against Iraq, and these sanctions aren't hurting Saddam Hussein...
...They're hurting the Iraqi people...
...Courtroom-type proof obviously would be preferred, but considering that it may be hard to come by, a lesser standard may be judged sufficient...
...It will effectively deny them public benefits most Americans take for granted...
...The U.S...
...forces killed 100,000 Iraqis...
Vol. 60 • September 1996 • No. 9
