With pomp and fanfare, U.S. president William Clinton announced a plan to "save" Social Security as the centerpiece of his State of the Union speech January 19. His proposal reopened the door to the idea of privatizing Social Security and gambling retirement benefits on Wall Street's stock market bubble.
At the same time, Clinton reiterated his administration's earlier announcement of the biggest increase in military spending in more than 15 years. He also threatened Tokyo with punitive trade measures, illustrating sharper conflicts with Washington's imperialist allies, who are also competitors. And he promised to toughen his "law and order" course by putting an additional 50,000 cops on the streets.
Clinton delivered the annual address to Congress as his presidency is in the midst of a deep crisis. Behind it is the spreading crisis of overproduction of the world capitalist system and the resulting decline of confidence in its leading personnel, not only among working people but among the system's beneficiaries.
Since January 7, the Senate has been conducting Clinton's trial on the two articles of impeachment the House of Representatives approved in November. Indications are that the Republican majority in the Senate will push for prolonging the trial by calling witnesses, including Monica Lewinsky, the former White House employee whose affair with Clinton and his attempt to cover it up triggered the yearlong scandal.
Whether Clinton will be acquitted by the Senate, convicted of the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice and ousted, or remain in office after being censured is not predictable yet. In a sign of the uncertainty and instability that has proliferated among ruling circles, Rep. Jennifer Dunn, Republican of Washington, said in her rebuttal to Clinton's speech: "These are disturbing and controversial times in the nation's capital." Referring to remarks by a TV network anchor that "the capital is in chaos," Dunn commented in a not-too- reassuring way, "Ladies and gentlemen our country is not in crisis. There are no tanks in the streets."
The drive to remove Clinton from office is led by rightist politicians, particularly the ultraright. This reactionary impeachment offensive comes from weakness, not strength. It is an attempt by a section of the ruling class to take away through a "cultural war" what they have been unable to wrest from working people in direct class conflict - like reversing a woman's right to choose abortion or doing away with affirmative action.
Sensing that the real target of the impeachment campaign is not the president and his offensive behavior but gains working people have made in struggle, a large majority within the working class has steadfastly opposed the right-wing attempt to remove Clinton from office.
The liberals in the White House are attempting to turn this sentiment into political support for their course. This course consists of a bipartisan foreign policy aimed at keeping as much of the world as possible open for the trade, investment, and exploitation that U.S. imperialism needs. This is combined with an increasingly bipartisan domestic policy that has shifted to the right over the last decade on all major social questions - from immigration to welfare.
Clinton repeated in his State of the Union address a favorite theme of bourgeois politicians of all stripes: that Social Security may be bankrupt within a few decades because a bigger section of the population is living longer after retirement.
The 1935 Social Security Act and other programs that provide some income security for workers - unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, Medicare, and Medicaid - were concessions by the employers' class to massive struggles by the toilers. Social Security, for example, was a concession to the CIO movement in the 1930s that also led to the formation of industrial trade unions. These programs provide some possibility for workers to make it through a lifetime, to have pensions, to be able to provide care for the young. They also tend to tie the working class together and buffer the dog-eat- dog competition bred by capitalism.
All these programs have been eroded by the bipartisan assault on the social wage, which is aimed at increasing the portion of the surplus value the bosses rob from the workers and at tearing the solidarity of the working class apart. Clinton, for example, signed into law in 1996 the Welfare Reform Act that ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children - the first gutting of the Social Security Act since 1935.
The most revealing explanations of what the bipartisan assault on Social Security is all about have been made by some of the more boldly forthright statisticians and economists. They argue that when the rulers passed Social Security, they never expected to have to pay out most of it, because average life expectancy was lower than retirement age. But now workers live 10 years longer than retirement age, on average. So the whole thing has become a big problem for them.
Fearful of widespread opposition among working people to any outright cuts in Social Security, Clinton proposed leaving benefits intact for the time being. He said, however, that "the best way to keep Social Security a rock-solid guarantee is not to make drastic cuts in benefits," implying that some cuts may be demanded in the future. Clinton proposed that a portion of the projected budget surplus be invested in the next 15 years to put Social Security "on a sound footing." That leaves open what will be done once an economic downturn hits and the projected surpluses disappear. Clinton also proposed that a substantial portion of the federal pension funds be invested in the stock market and that the government promote individual savings accounts for retirement supposedly to help low wage workers.
"By endorsing the concept of individual accounts and stock- market investments, Mr. Clinton has essentially begun negotiations with Republicans and Democrats who favor such ideas," said a front-page article in the January 20 Wall Street Journal. "Conservative Republicans also favor individual accounts for the same reason liberals oppose them - they could be a step toward privatizing Social Security."
Most Republicans attacked Clinton for his proposals and demanded precisely such steps that would go in the direction of ending Social Security as an entitlement. Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said a massive government investment of pension funds into the stock market would endanger the economy.
Republicans at the same time supported Clinton's main foreign policy initiatives. "The good news is that after six years of cutting spending for our armed forces, the President has signaled that he is ready to join us in strengthening our national defense," said Rep. Steve Largent, Republican of Oklahoma, in his rebuttal to the president. In his speech Clinton announced his budget proposal includes $115 billion increase for the Pentagon, the largest since the administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Clinton claimed this was needed to meet threats "from outlaw nations and terrorism," which include north Korea and Iraq. He also reiterated Washington's hostility against revolutionary Cuba, signaling that there will be no easing of the U.S. economic war against the Cuban people. "In this hemisphere, every government but one is freely chosen by its people. We are determined that Cuba, too, will know the blessings of liberty."
Pointing to the sharpening interimperialist competition, Clinton threatened the government of Japan with trade sanctions. "We must enforce our trade laws when imports unlawfully flood our nation," he said. "I have already informed the government of Japan that if that nation's sudden surge of steel imports into our country is not reversed, America will respond."
The U.S. president also indicated that Washington's collision course with Moscow will accelerate as NATO expands towards Russia's borders. The day after the State of the Union speech, the Clinton administration announced it had asked Moscow to renegotiate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow the U.S. government to test interceptor missiles - a version of Reagan's "star wars" program. The White House has threatened to pull out of the treaty altogether if Moscow disagrees.
This foreign policy course to advance the interests of U.S. imperialism worldwide is nothing but an extension of the rulers' war against working people at home. This was illustrated by Clinton's proposals to put another 50,000 police officers on the streets -on top of the increase by 100,000 cops the president engineered last year.