BY NAOMI CRAINE

As expected, Democratic Party candidate William Jefferson Clinton won reelection as president of the United States November 5. He received 49 percent of the popular vote, compared to 41 percent for Republican candidate Robert Dole. Reform Party candidate Ross Perot garnered 8 percent of the vote. According to Voter News Service, less than half of the potential voters went to the polls - the lowest turnout in 72 years.

The Republicans maintained a majority in both houses of Congress, picking up a seat or two in the Senate and losing a few in the House of Representatives.

Wall Street was pleased with this outcome. The Dow Jones industrial stock average rose nearly 100 points November 6, to a record high of 6,178.

The capitalist investors are rightly confident that the Democratic president and the majority Republican congress will continue pushing the steady stream of assaults on workers' social gains and democratic rights Clinton led in his first administration. But even as Wall Street celebrates, the instability and disorder of the world capitalist system drives the owners of capital to try to take more from working people, and potential powder kegs abound, both within the U.S. borders and abroad.

The harsh tone of politics seen during the election campaign - the scandal- and slander-mongering - will continue as well. And ultrarightist figures like Republican presidential contender Patrick Buchanan won't be going away.

"I think you'll see us try to reach out and find a common ground with President Clinton," House Speaker Newton Gingrich said in an election night CBS news interview.

The Republican Senate leader, Trent Lott, agreed that Congress could work with Clinton "if he's really sincere about the positions he took in the campaign."

In his victory speech Clinton likewise declared that the "remarkable success of the last few weeks of this Congress" showed the importance of the Democratic White House and Republican Congress "working together." The president was referring to the series of antilabor measures he signed prior to winning a second term in office. Agreement to go after Medicare
There is general agreement in the ruling class that one of the next tasks before the government is taking steps to whittle away at Medicare, one of the entitlements won through workers' struggles in the 1930s that covers health care for the elderly and disabled. Politicians of both parties argue that the program will "run out of funds" if it is not restructured.

"We start with saving Medicare," Congressman Gingrich told reporters on election day. "You would want to do it in a bipartisan manner." Highlighting the failure of the so-called Republican Revolution two years ago - which sought to push attacks on the working class further and faster than the Clinton administration has done - the House Speaker stressed the need to "slow down and assess" what could be pushed through Congress in its next term.

"One of the few things this campaign has done is produce a consensus that there should be a bipartisan commission to give politicians cover as they tackle Medicare after the election," stated a column in the November 6 Wall Street Journal.

This approach is in keeping with the process Clinton has led of beginning to assault the social wage the working class has won. This includes enacting into law:

* The Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages and establishes a group of people specifically excluded from entitlements normally available to the spouses, such as inheriting pensions of a deceased partner.

* The Welfare Reform Act, which eliminated the entitlement of Aid for Families with Dependent Children, one of the gains codified in the 1935 Social Security Act.

Measures sharply attacking the rights of immigrants, including allowing stepped up deportations and denying many public services even to immigrants with legal documents.

Washington's attempts to roll back the social gains the working class has won necessitate the restriction of democratic rights. During his first term Clinton signed "anticrime" and "antiterrorism" bills that expanded the death penalty, reduced prisoners' rights to appeal, and cut into other civil liberties.

Clinton has consistently moved to give greater power to the police. He used the crash of TWA Flight 800 - which the evidence increasingly suggests was the result of mechanical failure - as a pretext to sign a law October 9 doubling the Federal Aviation Administration security force and authorizing more extensive computer checks on airline passengers in the name of combating terrorism. The law also includes a provision classifying all Federal Express employees as aviation workers, thus barring them from organizing local unions. Employers push against workers
Measures like these give wind to the employers' assaults directly on the working class, from General Motors to Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel. More and more these bosses find they need to push to take much deeper concessions than they have done so far. They are facing declining profit rates, and need to put the squeeze on workers in order to beat out their competitors.

While the mass of earnings for U.S. corporations increased in the third quarter of 1996, the rate of growth slowed down, the Wall Street Journal reported November 4. "In an economy that's losing its momentum, it's beginning to get tougher and tougher to earn more than in the same period a year ago," said Thomas McManus, market strategist at Morgan Stanley.

In the same third-quarter period, growth in the U.S. gross domestic product slowed to 2.2 percent. A higher rate of 4.7 percent in the previous quarter had been based on many companies building up their inventories, leaving them with full warehouses of goods they must try to unload during the rest of the year.

Throughout the July-September period, the Wall Street Journal reported, "edgy traders repeatedly recalled the July stock-market upheavals, when negative earnings surprises from companies like Motorola sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average reeling 7% in two turbulent weeks."

Auto is one of the industries where the bosses are seriously considering how fast they can push for deeper concessions. While making massive profits - the "Big Three" of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors pulled in $2.64 billion in the third quarter of 1996 - their profit margins remain extremely tight. General Motors is furthest behind in cutting high-paid union jobs and raising productivity. The contract the company has just reached with the United Auto Workers comes nowhere close to what GM needs, even though it will allow large layoffs and permanently lower wages in new parts operations. World capitalist instability
"We must keep America the world's indispensable nation," Clinton declared in his victory speech November 5. "Finishing the unfinished business of the cold war, meeting the new threats to our security through terrorism and the proliferation of dangerous weapons, and seizing these extraordinary opportunities to extend our values of peace and democracy and prosperity." In other words, the U.S. rulers need to be ready, including on the military front, to assert their control in a world of increasing inter-imperialist competition.

Just hours before Clinton's speech, thousands of workers demonstrated in hundreds of cities across Russia, demanding several months of back pay owed to them. This was one indicator of how Clinton's second term will be marked by increased instability around the world, with Washington drawn into one explosive situation after another in maintaining its dominance as the last world empire.

Other examples of the instability of capitalism worldwide abound. Just in the last several days 1.5 million metal workers in Bavaria took part in protest strikes and demonstrations against austerity moves by the German government; Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was dismissed and placed under house arrest; and both Paris and Washington probed the possibility of sending troops to intervene in Zaire.

On the eve of the election, U.S. warplanes fired missiles into Iraq twice, part of the ongoing U.S. aggression against that Middle Eastern country. The Pentagon justified the actions of U.S. pilots who, enforcing the Washington-imposed "no-fly zone" over large swaths of sovereign Iraqi territory, said they bombed Iraq after cockpit equipment suggested they had been targeted by Iraqi radar installations. U.S. military officials later acknowledged that in both instances the alarms were false.

The U.S. rulers got a taste of what can potentially explode at home when 20,000 people - overwhelmingly youth and workers - marched on Washington October 12 in defense of immigrant rights. The demonstration reflected the rise in resistance among Chicanos and Mexicans in particular to national oppression and attacks on their rights. Thousands marched in California November 6 to protest passage of the reactionary Proposition 209 gutting affirmative action. Recent protests against police killings of Blacks in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Leland, Mississippi, showed the tension brewing in the Black nationality as well. `Family values' and `culture war'
One of the campaign themes that won't die after the election is the demagogy over "family values." Under this rubric, the president touted his support for teen curfews, drug testing young people who apply for a driver's license, and measures supposedly aimed at reducing out-of-wedlock births. Clinton pushes proposals such as "flexible work time" - actually an attack on overtime payments.

One of Clinton's favorite examples of his "family values" credentials is the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off work to care for a newborn or in medical emergencies - something most workers can't afford to do in any case. Like his other "pro-family" proposals, this law seeks to place the burden of meeting social needs more squarely on individual workers.

While liberals like Clinton lead the march to the right in practice on social questions like these, ultrarightist forces push what Patrick Buchanan has termed the "culture war" - campaigning to whip up emotional energy against social norms and values that are changing in a historically progressive direction. They argue that moral decay and a corrupt elite are to blame for the social and economic crises generated by capitalism, as part of putting together a rightist cadre willing to take street action. Aspects of this right-wing ideological offensive, aimed at justifying the antilabor onslaught of the bosses, could be seen in some of the many referenda on the ballot in various states.

One ballot initiative that passed was the misnamed California Civil Rights Initiative, also referred to as Proposition 209. This referendum barred the state from using affirmative action measures in employment and education. There was substantial debate over Proposition 209 within the spectrum of bourgeois politics, as well as some important protests organized by students and workers in defense of affirmative action. In addition, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke traveled to California to campaign in favor of 209, over the objections of the referendum's more "respectable" backers. The measure ended up carrying with 55 percent of the vote.

In Colorado, rightist forces campaigned in favor of an amendment to the state constitution that would enshrine the "inalienable right" of parents to "direct and control the upbringing, education, values, and discipline of their children." This proposition was voted down.

Each shift to the right by Clinton and his ilk emboldens those who will keep pushing this "culture war." Coarsening of politics
As part of the rulers' offensive against the working class, the shrill tone and coarseness of bourgeois politics won't change after the election. Scandals such as the charges that Clinton received illegal campaign funds from Indonesian businessmen, the charges associated with the "Whitewater" investigation of the Clintons' business dealings, and various sexual scandals involving the president and those around him will continue. On the Republican side, Gingrich still faces an investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

Corruption and lechery are endemic to all capitalist governments. Ruling-class figures simply become more vulnerable to scandals in times of instability like today.

Forces within bourgeois politics, particularly the ultraright, use this scandalmongering to try to drag working people - who are rightly disgusted by the rulers' hypocrisy and abuse of power - into an almost pornographic resentment against the "degenerate elite." This is the stock-and-trade of Buchanan, who made it clear when he acknowledged defeat in the Republican primary that he was only declaring a "truce." Speaking to his young supporters in the Buchanan Brigades, he declared, "This cause will prevail."

Perot, the billionaire businessman who took almost 20 percent of the presidential vote during his first campaign four years ago, does a similar thing. He promotes himself as a figure who will "clean up" the corruption of both the Democrats and Republicans.

He and his running mate, Pat Choate, added a particularly chauvinist twist around the recent campaign finance charges, repeatedly complaining that Clinton was taking "foreign money" and therefore couldn't be trusted.  
 
 
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