As we go to press President Clinton is locked in a battle with Congressional Republicans over next year’s budget. The President has vetoed much of the budget sent to him by Congress and has twice allowed the Federal government to "shut down" in the absence of an actual budget or a stop-gap spending measure that would allow full governmental activity.
The sudden appearance of the President’s backbone has won him some high praise from congressional Democrats and liberal pundits as well as a dramatic shift in his approval ratings from the American electorate. Clinton’s positive ratings eclipsed the 50 percent mark for the first time in two years in the wake of his first veto. Concurrently, Newt Gingrich’s standing in the polls has fallen below the 30 percent mark as the public becomes increasingly dismayed with a man whose veneer of sincerity is so thin as to be nearly transparent.
Much of the disagreement over the budget between Clinton and the Republican leadership is over how quickly to balance the budget and how deeply social spending should be cut in the process. The President has proposed that millions be cut from vital health and welfare programs, but by much less than the proposed Republican plan. There is also disagreement on the timing of a tax cut for the middle class; Republicans want to initiate a round of tax cutting right away, Clinton proposes to wait until the budget is nearly balanced before the cuts kick in.
There is additional and significant disagreement over funding for the EPA and other environmental priorities. Republican efforts to gut environmental regulation has met resistance from a consummately political President who has discovered the polling value of supporting clean water and clean air as opposed to sacrificing them in the interest of higher corporate profits.
The problem with the conventional wisdom interpretation of the budget impasse, as I see it, is that it gives credit where credit may not be due. President Clinton’s "courageous" stand against the Contract on America is more show than substance. The crucial timing of his "bold" stand is important; it came after he had signed the defense appropriations budget into law, an appropriations budget that gave the Pentagon $7 billion more than it had requested. This is a bill I can characterize only as immoral; it comes at the time of a massive dismantling of the already sparse safety net of social legislation designed to rescue those who lose at the gaming tables of casino capitalism.
The difficulty in casting Clinton as the hero in the budget battle is that he had given away the end game well in advance of his posturing as the defender of what is just. By accepting a time-table to balance the budget in seven years, by paying lip service to the need to "end welfare as we know it," and agreeing to fund the military at levels above its own requests, Clinton has accepted Republican parameters for budget negotiations and trapped himself into accepting Republican solutions, even if they are somewhat less draconian than the ones proposed by Gingrich. Cornered by his own rhetoric the President is left with only enough maneuver room to mitigate some of the worst impulses of the Contract on America. As an example, Clinton’s welfare "reform" budget was assessed by his own Department of Health and Human Service as a plan that would push an additional 1.2 million children into poverty. Meanwhile the U.S. defense budget accounts for over 40 percent of all defense spending globally.
This in the post-cold war, one-super-power environment.
The budget bill that the 104th Congress has pieced together puts the finishing touches on the Reagan revolution. The more prescient observers of the eighties noted at the time that the Reagan budget deficits would transform themselves into a policy straight jacket within which budget decisions would have to be made. A straight jacket that would, if defense spending was held constant, force the issue of dismantling the remnants of New Deal social legislation. By spending the country deeply into debt in a militarized Keynesianism, Reagan foreclosed future social policy options. That is, again, for emphasis, if military budgets were to hold their absurdly high cold war levels. Gingrich’s so-called revolution is nothing more than the finishing touches on the Reagan agenda.
It is a disturbing irony that while Reagan’s legacy seems to grow more sour with each passing day his political agenda is reaching fruition at the hands of a Democratic successor. The current Defense budget is a frank admission that our whole post-war economic edifice is built on a perverted reading of Keynes that distorts domestic agendas and functions as an industrial policy designed to keep the boom-bust cycles of capitalist production from plunging us back into crises like those experienced during the 1920s and‘30s. Where is the "peace dividend" that we heard so much about during the election? Those dollars are being spent on pork barrel defense projects that the military has openly stated it has no interest in. That pork can be found equally in Democratic as well as Republican districts, by the way.
Back to Clinton’s backbone. What spine the President has been able to locate has come in the form of Dick Morris, former Republican electoral magician (with a client list that includes Jesse Helms) whom Clinton brought on board to bail water from his sinking ship. (See David Corn’s article in The Nation of December 11 for more details on Morris.) As the prognosis for reelection seemed ever grimmer, Clinton’s handlers engaged in an intensive round of polling to determine what course they should plot in the impending budget battles with Gingrich and Dole. The pollsters discovered that the American public was not one with the right-wing of the Republican party. This is not news, of course, to the those who read these pages or for those who were awake enough to notice that Clinton won the 1992 election against a sitting conservative President (not, as he sometimes seems to believe, against McGovern) on the basis of promises to strengthen environmental regulation and enact a massive jobs bill. What’s more, the pollsters unearthed the astounding bit of wisdom that the American public has not been shouting for the dismantling of environmental regulation so that we can further jeopardize our, our children’s, and our planet’s health in the interest of greater corporate profitability and "global competitiveness."
The truly depressing lesson from this mean season of heated political battles over relatively small differences in budget priorities is the stark realization of how limited our political discourse has become. A political platform that would have passed for moderate Republicanism in the mid-seventies would today be viewed as left-wing Democratic politics. What’s worse, our very political vocabulary has been edited to the point that it is no longer even legitimate to speak in terms of the humane, of taking a course of action because it is socially just rather than the economically expedient. At a time when the World Health Organization estimates that over one billion people in the world live in extreme poverty, meaning that they cannot even meet their daily requirements of caloric intake to sustain themselves, must we justify all policy decisions on the basis of how they affect international markets?
Ultimately the results of the budget battle will come down to the problem of Clinton. Until he proves otherwise we must assume that he is congenitally incapable of standing on a matter of principle in the face of objections from corporate elites. Time and again he has proved himself to be more concerned with genuflecting before his corporate patrons (as when he told a gathering of wealthy businessmen that he had raised their taxes too much in his last budget) than with pursuing the interests of those poor souls who had the misfortune of electing him to the highest office in the land. Whatever the outcome of this particular budget battle we must bear in mind that the terms of the debate are permanently skewed. If we forget that simple fact we too risk accepting the parameters of the Republican agenda and will find ourselves willingly donning the policy straight jacket so carefully tailored by Reagan some years ago.
Local (Northern Illinois)
• Friends of the Chicago River is hosting "Friends of Trashed Rivers III," a national conference sponsored by the Coalition to Restore Urban Waters. The conference is in May but FCR is looking for volunteers to help with the early logistics. If you are interested and can help please call Naomi Cohn at 312-939-0490.
• The city of Chicago has just begun its blue bag recycling program. I would strongly encourage all of you who are already recycling with an existing community based recycling center to continue to do so. While the blue bag program may be better than nothing it is probably just barely so. The non-profit centers that have been carrying the ball so far need your support in order to continue their fine work and we need them as a presence to keep recycling issues in the fore and the city honest. Besides, they are nicer people than the folks at the mayor’s office.
National
• In what may be an indication of the turning of the tide from the scariest moments of Gingrich’s rule, Rep. Hansen (R-UT) pulled HR 1745 from consideration moments before it was scheduled for a House vote. The bill would have released 4 million acres of Utah wilderness for development and has been fought vigorously by a grass roots coalition centered around the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). It seems that after a head count the Republican leadership could not be sure of the bill’s passage in the face of moderate Republican defections on other green votes of late. Rather than risk an embarrassing defeat with possibly 40 GOP House members bolting party ranks, because the bill is too odious even in these days of the salvage rider, Hansen pulled the bill from consideration. One can only suspect that he used the Christmas break to barter favors in order to bring the bill up for reconsideration in 1996. Nonetheless, the bill would have sailed through if not for the intense amount of phone calls and letters received by house members from constituents who were concerned about the fate of Utah wilderness. Keep up the good work. You can contact the SUWA @ 801-486-3161.
• The EPA has just released its evaluation of the nation’s waterways and it is far from encouraging. At a time when Congress is undermining environmental regulation in general, and the Clean Water Act in particular, the EPA has found that 40% of our waterways are still not swimable or fishable. We have far to go in our attempts to undo the worst damage that we have inflicted on the world around us.
International
• I sometimes get the feeling that politics in the late-twentieth century is a succession of deja-vu experiences. In November the military regime in Nigeria brutally murdered human rights and environmental activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and five of his cohorts. Shortly thereafter the Shell Oil Co. inked a huge oil deal with the corrupt and discredited Abacha regime. Staking its reputation on vanishing historical memories the gigantic multinational conglomerate defended its actions by claiming that doing business in the country was good for the people of Nigeria and would foster closer contact between the Nigerian military regime and the tempering influences of western business interests. Constructive Engagement, the sequel. Of course, these arguments sound hauntingly familiar to South African President Nelson Mandela who rejected them out of hand and called for an international boycott of Nigeria, Shell and all multinational corporations that do business in Nigeria. Mandela knows only too well that the business interests of multinational corporations dovetails nicely with dictatorial ruling regimes and does not rebound to the advantage of the people that suffer material hardships and political repression under their rule. So, once again, the international human rights community is gearing up for a boycott of Western firms that are bedding down with a repressive regime in Africa. If you have a Shell credit card cut it in half and mail it to Shell with an explanation of why you no longer choose to do business with them, and by all means spread the word of the Shell boycott. Consumer boycotts are of limited impact but as the dismantling of Apartheid in South Africa demonstrated it can be an integral part of a larger program of resistance.
• The French Government of Alan Juppe and Jacques Chirac is in trouble again, or, rather, deeper trouble still. In addition to the resumption of nuclear testing that has lead to an international boycott of French goods the government is (as we go to press) in the third week of a crippling strike. Railway workers in France went on strike to protest the dismantling of the significant French welfare state. The strike quickly spread to include nearly all workers in the public sectors as well as to coal miners. That there should be such an emboldened effort to ward off Chirac’s re-writing of the French social contract seems to have taken the embattled President by surprise. There seems to be little public support for the return of reactionary imperial rule at home or abroad and Chirac seems determined to learn this lesson the hard way on every front.