The US is the wealthiest society in the world. Yet one in four children is born into poverty the highest rate in the industrialised world. As Christopher Hitchens wrote recently, 'In the richest society in the history of the human race, it is laughably easy to tell a child's social background from the simplest nutritional or educational test.' It is about to become easier and the ranks of the poor are about to grow dramatically. Last month Clinton agreed to sign a bill passed through the Republican Congress which will fulfil his promise to 'end welfare as we know it'. In signing this bill into law, Clinton will be attacking the poor in ways undreamt of by Ronald Reagan.
Progressive magazine argued recently, 'Had a Republican candidate run on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it", liberals would have denounced that candidate loudly and clearly. But when a Democrat ran on that pledge, many liberals cheered or comforted themselves with the fiction that Clinton didn't really mean what he said.' As it turns out, abolishing welfare laws was one of the few pledges Clinton really did mean. This new law eliminates the federal welfare programme, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, one of the main reforms won by the working class in the 1930s. In so doing, it ends any obligation on the part of the US government to protect the poorest of the poor from hunger and homelessness.
That is not how the politicians presented their case to the public, of course. They spoke as if they were performing a service for the poor. 'It helps to build their self esteem and puts them to work', boasted E Clay Shaw, the Florida Republican who authored the bill. Newt Gingrich went so far as to proclaim, 'The president has a moral obligation to sign this bill.' Or, as Gary Ackerman, a Democrat representative from New York, explained, 'We had to show Americans that Democrats are willing to break with the past, to move from welfare to workfare Sometimes in order to make progress and move ahead, you have to stand up and do the wrong thing.'
Hunger and homelessness are what undoubtedly lie ahead for many of the 13 million people most of them children who now survive on welfare, and for the 26 million people most of them in working families who now receive food stamps. The new law imposes a lifetime limit of five years on those who receive welfare from the government, although individual states would be free to set limits as short as 30 days. It forces most welfare recipients to work or have their benefits cut off. It slashes $60 billion in programmes for the poor over the next six years, including $27.5 billion in food stamps. Legal immigrants will no longer be entitled to most forms of public assistance, including food stamps and welfare although they will still be required to pay taxes. Even a proposed amendment, which would have provided vouchers for such necessities as diapers, cribs, school supplies and medicine for poor children, was voted down by Congress.
Hillary Clinton, feminist and author of the book It Takes a Village (to raise a child), was unavailable for comment after this vicious attack on poor women and children. Yet the result will be nothing short of devastating, with an average loss of $1,300 of income per year to poor families. According to the Urban Institute, half of all current welfare recipients would be disqualified under the terms of the new law. The bill doesn't address what will happen in cities like New York, where 39 percent of children now receive welfare, or in Detroit where the figure is 67 percent. And the bill says nothing about what will happen in the next recession, when tens of thousands of poor people will lose their jobs, only to be told that they no longer qualify for any welfare benefits or food stamps. In fact, while the new law forces welfare mothers to find jobs, it actually cuts funding for job training by 23 percent.
And one need only look to one of the 41 states which have already passed welfare 'reforms' to get a glimpse of the new law's more punitive aspects. Once a new Wisconsin law takes effect, poor mothers with babies as young as 12 weeks old will be forced into a workfare job to 'earn' their welfare checks. If they fail to hold down a job, the state offers them no option for feeding their children besides giving them up to foster care. During the month of June 1,200 Wisconsin welfare recipients were temporarily cut off and had their food stamps reduced to $10 per month because they missed an appointment with a job trainer or social worker.
Marian Wright Edelman, leader of the Children's Defence Fund, called an earlier version of the bill Clinton signed into law 'the domestic equivalent of destroying Vietnamese villages in order to save them'. Clinton vetoed the first two versions of the welfare bill passed by Congress, saying they included provisions that were too cruel to poor children and immigrants. Yet in August, with an eye to the upcoming election, he agreed to sign a nearly identical bill. Douglas Bersharov, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, described the welfare bill as central to Clinton's re-election strategy: 'Clinton is going as far right as he has to deny Dole the [welfare] issue. There's probably some line he can't cross with liberals, but they're giving him a lot of running room.'
But at least some liberals who once supported Clinton are now recoiling in disgust at the monster they helped to elect. Columnist Carl Rowan wrote, 'I've rarely been closer to political sickness than when I heard Clinton extolling this dreadful law as a restoration of "the basic elements of work, responsibility and family". This "Democrat" uttered every Republican cliché of the last generation to justify his signing an atrocious law.' In the liberal magazine, the Nation, Robert Scheer included himself as one of those who 'wanted to support this administration because the Gingrich barbarians are at the gate. But now that this New Democrat has joined forces with the barbarians one must conclude that he, and the operatives closest to him, stand for nothing at all.' It is no exaggeration to say that, today in the US, literally millions of low income workers have nothing to lose but their chains. The only option now is to fight.