Bill Clinton says the "economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades." Healthy for who? Not for working people.
Average real wages in the United States are exactly where they were 10 years ago. For lower-paid workers, today's earnings buy less than those at the end of the 1970s. Despite periodic pompous noises from President Clinton, the minimum wage has remained at $4.25 per hour, well below the poverty line.
Unemployment remains at historically high levels, especially considering that right now the economy is still in the upturn of the current business cycle. And among those who are employed, the hours are longer, the line speed faster, and working conditions are increasingly hazardous. (This doesn't bother Clinton, of course. He even invited the owner of a fire-trap textile mill to his speech as a guest of honor.)
The fact is, the economy isn't so healthy for the bosses either, in the sense that they can't squeeze out the level of profits they are accustomed to and that they require to expand their robbery of the wealth produced by workers and farmers. That's why big business continues its grinding offensive against the working class, through downsizing, speed-up, multi-tier wage scales, and other attacks workers are all too familiar with.
For the same reason, all the capitalist politicians in Washington are in substantial agreement on trying to take back the forms of a social wage that working people have conquered - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment compensation, to name a few.
Their only dispute - and it is a real one - is over how open and blunt they can be in trying to convince working people we must sacrifice for the sake of the bondholders and big business. They are debating tactics on how fast to move in assaulting these gains and in attempting to create pariah layers in society through scapegoating immigrants, working people forced onto the welfare rolls, and others.
Whether these scoundrels pass a budget before the presidential elections or not, the Clinton administration and Congress are already moving to put in place pieces of their plan piecemeal. How much of it they can actually implement depends largely on how much resistance the working class puts up - not just to the "budget" proposals, but to the bosses' assaults in the workplace as well.
Right now the 30,000 members of the Service Employees International Union on strike in New York, who are fighting against two-tier wages and health-care cuts, are in the forefront of this resistance. The SEIU strikers, the striking newspaper workers in Detroit, Teamsters picketing a dairy in Wallington, New Jersey, and other fighting workers are the only obstacle Clinton, Dole, Gingrich, and Co. face in their assault on our class.
Clinton outlined the bosses' program in his "State of the Union" speech. Working people need our own program - one presenting demands for jobs for all above everything else, and a program that can point toward international working-class solidarity.
Such a program would include: