Real Scandal: Betrayal of the Poor

Well, now that the presidential sex scandal is mercifully behind us, let’s get on with some serious criticism of this administration: its unholy alliance with the Republican congressional leadership to betray the economic interests of working and impoverished Americans.

You want presidential scandal? How about the 15% increase in the last year in the number of people--26 million in all--requiring the support of charitable food bank programs? Those depressing statistics were released last week by Second Harvest, a national network of food banks, gives lie to the president’s claim that welfare reform has been a great success.

In New York state, which has a highly touted program for getting people off welfare and into jobs, only 27% of those dropped from the rolls have found any sort of job, according to a recent state study. And the small group that was successful in finding work includes those who earned as little as $100 in a three-month period.

The “success” of welfare reform is to make the poor invisible. It’s hardly a humane solution, and given that most of those suffering are women and children, it is disturbing that this has been less commented upon than the plight of Kathleen Willey, who managed to run up more than $300,000 in debt while living the good life.

You want an example of immorality in high places? Then check the statistics on who really benefited from the tax cuts concocted by Clinton and the Republican congressional leadership last year. They made the rich richer and ignored or hurt just about everybody else.

For each dollar tax break for those in the bottom 80%, the nation’s richest 1% saw a whopping $1,189 in tax benefits. The main tax break is on capital gains, a boon for the wealthy who have benefited from a wild appreciation of their investments, while the wages of working people have suffered. During the first five years of the much celebrated economic boom, which has fattened the portfolios of those who control politics with their campaign contributions, the median real wages of workers actually declined.

The political pundits love to cite Alexis de Toqueville, but they seem oblivious to the fact that the prosperous middle class, which he said was the basis of our system of democracy, is continuing to shrink. Most alarming is the large number of working poor, who are now in what has been proclaimed as the best of times, struggling to make ends meet. And what happens to them when the business cycle turns downward, as it inevitably will?

The real Clinton scandal, the sin of this administration, is that the president has sold out to the Republican leadership on basic economic issues. Indeed, it is Clinton who best represents large multinational corporate interests, not the Republican leadership in Congress that is held hostage to the right-wing, pseudo-religious fringe of their party.

It is Clinton who is pushing for $18 billion in funding for the International Monetary Fund to finance an Asian bailout that the leading American corporations feel they desperately need. That funding is tied up by the Republican leadership, which has attached an irrelevant anti-abortion rider to the IMF bill.

For all of the yapping of conservatives about the untoward influence of labor unions, Clinton has proved to be the most effective proponent of international free trade while slighting the concerns of unions over the erosion of labor standards. It was Clinton who pushed through NAFTA despite strenuous union opposition.

The multinational corporations also love Clinton’s cozying up to China and any other country with a potentially large market for their exports and investments. Clinton is also in total support of Alan Greenspan’s insistence on keeping inflation down even if unemployment starts to creep up, as it just did.

The stock market is booming because the president is the perfect agent of the interests of finance capital. Economic conservatives ought to rally around Clinton as their best bet for putting government at the service of the rich and powerful. It is the majority at the lower end of the economic ladder who should be bitterly disappointed.

For my money, Clinton can sleep with whomever he wants; it’s between him and his wife. But he has no moral right to betray the economic interests of the working and poor people of this country who elected him to office.