"There should be incentives to be honest and to eliminate fraud," the president pontificated in goal number ten. "The programs should be simpler and easier to administer."

But behind the vagueness and platitudes, the thrust of Carter’s program is reactionary to the core.

Goal number one: "No higher initial cost than the present systems." This means no additional aid to the poor. With inflation, it means a cut in real aid.

The average state pays out $275 a month--$3,300 a year--to a family of four enrolled in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the main welfare program. That’s way below even the official government poverty level of $5,500.

Goals two, three, four, five, and seven are all roundabout ways of saying that people on welfare must accept whatever job the government offers. This is demagogy aimed at whipping up racist sentiments against "welfare bums." But of the 11.2 million people in the main welfare program, all but 700,000 are children or their mothers. And the overwhelming majority of the rest are disabled or old people.

What might Carter’s plan mean in practice? In Milwaukee, welfare recipients are forced to work for the county at two dollars an hour. After taxes and job-related expenses, they take home less than forty-five dollars a week.
 
May 12, 1952
May Day in Bolivia, three weeks after the revolution that overthrew the pro-Washington military dictatorship in that country, provided additional proof of the continuing conflict between the workers, whose militancy made the revolution successful, and the new government, which is dominated by the conservative leaders of the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR).

As last week’s Militant showed in detail, the MNR leaders (President Victor Paz Estenssoro and Vice President Hernan Siles Zuazo) are fundamentally pro-capitalist in outlook and reluctant to nationalize the foreign-owned tin mines. However, they are under powerful pressures to carry out this and other measures of social transformation from the anti-imperialist masses, still armed with 10,000 rifles and machine guns and a resurgent labor movement (Central Organization of Bolivian Workers), led by Juan Lechin, Minister of Mines and Petroleum in the MNR cabinet.

The May Day event brought to the surface more of the differences between the Paz government and the labor movement and led Edward A. Morrow, N.Y. Times correspondent in La Paz, to conclude that Paz appears to be "facing a strong and constantly increasing opposition to his comparatively mild political and economic objectives."

Speaking to the May Day marchers, Lechin said, "It was foolish to think the revolution was ended by the taking of the Presidential Palace. It has only begun," he asserted.  
 
 
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