BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
The impeachment crisis facing U.S. president William Clinton
has deepened and does not seem to be under anyone's control.
Whether Clinton will be found guilty and removed from office,
forced to resign, or retain his post after being censured is an
open question. This turn of events is a reflection of the
growing instability of the world capitalist system and the
decline of confidence in its leading figures, not only among
millions of working people but among the rulers themselves.
The drive to unseat Clinton is led mainly by rightist politicians. Their main weapon is the "cultural war." This is a term ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan popularized in 1992. It describes an ideological offensive aimed at reversing affirmative action, school desegregation, a woman's right to choose abortion, and other gains working people made in struggle, and for some at carving the cadre of an incipient fascist movement in the process. Sensing what the real target of the impeachment assault is, a majority among working people - especially among those who are Black - appear to be opposed to the attempt to remove Clinton.
The response by the liberals controlling the White House so far is to refuse to give in to the effort to oust Clinton, while shifting their domestic policy proposals on social programs slightly to the right and accelerating Washington's drive toward war.
Senate majority leader Trent Lott announced January 5 that the president's impeachment trial would begin two days later. At the same time, statements by Lott and a growing number of other Republican politicians indicated that a bipartisan deal floated earlier to avert a lengthy trial and simply censure Clinton was off.
Referring to this plan, Republican senator Larry Craig of Idaho said, "I think it's dead, and finally, I hope it's dead."
The aborted deal would have condensed Clinton's trial to a few days by barring witnesses and then holding "test votes" on whether the two articles of impeachment approved by the House of Representatives warrant Clinton's removal from office. A two- thirds majority is required to oust the president, which most capitalist politicians and pundits have been arguing would be very difficult for the Republicans to muster. The Senate's seats are currently divided 55-45 between Republicans and Democrats. If less than 67 senators found Clinton guilty, the trial could adjourn by a simple majority vote and the Senate would then move towards censure. Before New Year's, the tide was turning against such an arrangement. Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, called the deal a "whitewash."
According to the January 6 New York Post, Sen. Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, became the first in Clinton's party to indicate he may vote guilty in the trial. "I could go either way based on the evidence as I've seen or heard it," he said. "And I've followed it closely."
Just three days earlier, several senators from both parties, including Republican Phil Gramm of Texas and Democrat Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, called on Clinton to postpone his State of the Union address, scheduled for January 19, if the impeachment trial is still going on. Lott now says the trial could last into February. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton December 19. The two articles of impeachment that were approved accused Clinton of perjury in his testimony to a federal grand jury, in relation to his affair with former White House employee Monica Lewinsky, and of obstruction of justice.
Offensive from weakness, not strength
Despite repeated predictions to the contrary, rightists
seeking Clinton's ouster seem to retake the initiative at each
juncture. "The political reality is that conservatives have
consistently emerged as the dominant force in the impeachment
drive against Mr. Clinton," said an article in the January 6
Wall Street Journal. "`The only people who have an endgame in
mind are the people who want him out of office,' one Republican
said."
This rightist offensive comes from a position of weakness, not strength. U.S. imperialism's economic superiority vis-a-vis its allies in Europe, which are also rivals in trade and markets, has probably peaked. In the middle of a world deflationary crisis that has deeply affected southeast Asia, Russia, and other countries, competition between the imperialist powers has intensified.
The French-based Airbus Industrie has made further inroads against its main rival, the U.S. aerospace giant Boeing. On January 6, Boullioun Aviation Services, a U.S. aircraft leasing company founded by a former Boeing executive, announced its first purchase of Airbus jets. The launching of the euro has raised the prospect that not just the U.S. dollar but three main currencies -the dollar, the euro, and the yen - are likely to compete for domination of the world's financial markets, raising the specter of military conflicts among the imperialist powers (see article on page 3).
Anticipation of the closeness and suddenness of such crises is behind the coarsening of bourgeois politics that has become so evident in the year-long scandal.
"In its latest issue, The National Interest makes a plausible case that ties between U.S. and Europe are fraying," said the main editorial in the January 4 Wall Street Journal, titled "U.S. leadership in doubt." It continued, "Relations with another long-standing ally, Japan, have not been aided by the Administration's bad economic policy advice." Pointing to what they called "symptoms of waning influence," the editors of the conservative daily stated, "Despite Mr. Clinton's repeated warnings that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction posed a lethal threat to the populations of Western Europe, the U.S. was only able to muster one European ally, Britain, for the attack on Iraq last month. Now, after the attack, Saddam still thumbs his nose and there is no clear evidence of how much the attacks succeeded in `degrading' his ability to threaten great harm to Europe and the Middle East."
The Journal's editors were also uneasy about the results of NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and about worsening relations with Moscow. "The NATO involvement in policing what was left of Bosnia after the war has not contributed much to NATO unity," the editorial said. "Rather, it has exposed underlying tensions, between the U.S. and France, for example.... The Russians, by no means as domesticated as Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott would hope, exploit these divisions.
"Indeed, relations with Russia are at a post-Cold War nadir."
The recent pact between the governments of Belarus and Russia for an economic union and other ties between the two republics has evoked the ire of many capitalist politicians and pundits. "Belarus's chief pursues dream to revive the old Soviet Union," was the headline of a front-page article in the December 27 New York Times. Moscow has already defaulted on loans from foreign investors to the tune of $45 billion. These events have intensified the collision course between Moscow and Washington, especially over NATO expansion into Eastern and Central Europe aimed at positioning U.S. forces closer to Russia's borders in preparation for military attempts to restore the domination of capitalism throughout the former Soviet republics.
Politics of resentment
The "cultural war" offensive by right-wing forces is a
response to a shift to the left in bourgeois politics in most
imperialist countries, which has been evident for nearly two
years and has gone hand-in-hand with a rise of social
polarization and Bonapartist figures like Minnesota governor
Jesse Ventura (see article on page 4). As working-class
resistance to the bosses' belt-tightening demands has
intensified in the United States and other capitalist powers,
and the threat of a steep economic downturn has become
tangible, a majority in the ruling classes in western Europe
and North America have opted, for now, to lower interest rates,
speak demagogically of job creation, and distance themselves to
a degree from previous proposals to slash social programs. This
is how many Democratic Party politicians campaigned leading up
to the November 3 elections, in which they made gains,
narrowing the Republican majority in Congress. Such promises by
the liberals, of course, are nothing but deceit.
The Clinton administration, since the president was first elected in 1992, has worked hard to make domestic policy more bipartisan, leading the employers assault on the rights and social gains of working people. Clinton's "anticrime" and "antiterrorism" bills expanded use of the death penalty; narrowed the right of appeal of the convicted, especially those on death row; and pushed backed freedom from illegal search and seizure further than other administrations even dreamed of doing. The president made good on his pledge to "end welfare as we know it," by signing a bill that eliminated federally guaranteed Aid for Families with Dependent Children in 1996. And he has turned the Immigration and Naturalization Service into one of the most heavily armed government agencies that has qualitatively stepped up harassment of immigrant workers and deportations.
All this has not been enough for the right, which demands not only further inroads into social gains but moving towards a complete reversal of affirmative action and even doing away with Social Security altogether. These are among the ultimate goals of ultrarightist politicians, who are the main pushers and beneficiaries of the scandalmongering and "expose's" of the dissoluteness and corruption of Clinton and Co.
In a number of syndicated columns campaigning for removing Clinton from office, Buchanan has used strong language to denounce any deal that would lead to censure and push for a full Senate trial that would prolong and further institutionalize the salacious saga that can best be described as pornographication of politics. "Any deal to abort a trial," Buchanan said in a December 23 column, "would be craven.... Censure is a fraud and a political fix."
In a January 5 column, Buchanan said, "If Lott buys into this deal, he will be handing over 34 liberal Democrats the authority to declare Dick Gephardt and Barney Frank were right and Henry Hyde and Tom DeLay were wrong." Buchanan was referring here to Democratic congressmen Gephardt and Frank and Republicans Hyde and DeLay. Hyde chaired the House judiciary committee that introduced the articles of impeachment in Congress. Frank is a liberal who has occasionally been singled out by rightists for being gay.
In a January 2 column, titled "Un-American Ivy League," Buchanan denounced those "who have lectured America for years on racism and prejudice" and are "themselves closet bigots" and said that white Catholics and Protestants are discriminated against in college admissions through affirmative action, to the supposed benefit of Jews and Asians.
Conservative politicians at the center of the impeachment drive have their own records of having courted "white citizens only" organizations. Trent Lott has in the past been associated with pro-Confederacy groups. He addressed the Sons of Confederate Veterans and spoke to Southern Partisan, a magazine that extols the virtues of the slaveholders' Confederacy. He also addressed members of the Council of Conservative Citizens in 1992, though he later distanced himself from the organization and its racist views.
In a column in the January 7 New York Times, Bob Herbert quoted a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama group that monitors racist outfits. The report stated, "The Council of Conservatives is the reincarnation of the racist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s."
Sensing that the "cultural war" offensive by the rightists is aimed not primarily at Clinton but at reversing social gains won in struggle, millions of working people have opposed the impeachment. Most opinion polls have shown that large majorities oppose the attempts to remove Clinton from office - an indication that many working people have steered clear of the trap of the politics of resentment laid by the ultraright.
The union tops of the AFL-CIO have tried to channel this sentiment into political support for the Democratic Party. They have organized a number of "anti-impeachment" rallies to back Clinton and his policies, including offering support for the bombing of Iraq. And groups on the left like the Communist Party USA have campaigned against impeachment by throwing more of their support behind an array of liberal politicians.
The response by the liberals in Congress and the White House has been to stick to their guns in opposing Clinton's removal. At the same time the Clinton administration has taken steps to accelerate Washington's militarization drive and to renew proposals for cutting Social Security.
This was revealed in Clinton's announcement of the largest increase in military spending since the administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (see article on page 3). The article in the January 2 New York Times reporting this decision, hinted how the White House may use this as part of cutting social programs. "The officials refused to say exactly how Mr. Clinton would propose paying for the increase in military spending," the article said. "He has already vowed not to spend the recent Federal surplus until he and Congress agree on a way to shore up the Social Security system, which is lurching toward insolvency."
In making these moves, Clinton is simply following in the footsteps of hollowed liberal icons who have led a bipartisan foreign policy of war since the 1930s. These include Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt who led Washington's entry into the inter-imperialist slaughter of World War II, Harry Truman under whose administration the Cold War was launched, John Kennedy who organized the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and Lyndon Johnson who escalated the war against Vietnam.
The goals of the Democratic Party's foreign policy are the same as the Republicans: to keep as much of the world as possible open for the trade, investment and exploitation that U.S. capitalism needs. But as the world deflationary crisis has accelerated and competition between the main imperialist powers has grown, the disputes among the rulers themselves are getting out of their control.
The current impeachment crisis is deeper than what the bourgeoisie in the United States faced with the Watergate scandal in 1973-74, impeachment proceedings against then- president Richard Nixon, and Nixon's subsequent resignation. That was an attempt to limit the damage to the ruling class by the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam and the rise of the struggle for Black freedom in this country. That crisis was under a large measure of control.
This can't be said of the events that have led to Clinton's trial in the Senate. The outcome is not predictable.