BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Toasting each other in their bipartisan assault on social entitlements, the Clinton administration and Congressional negotiators reached a budget pact May 2.

"This agreement will help us to finish the job," President William Clinton crowed at the press conference where he announced the deal. Republican Speaker of the House Newton Gingrich claimed the deal was the completion of his so-called Contract with America.

The negotiations ended when the Congressional Budget Office supposedly discovered a "last-minute financial windfall" of $225 billion, lowering the projected budget deficit over the next five years by that amount. The stated aim of the deal is a "balanced" budget.

The five-year accord includes a $115 billion cut from Medicare - the government program that provides medical care to the elderly and disabled - over the next five years. Clinton had earlier called for slashing $100 billion from Medicare in his 1998 budget proposal to Congress February 6.

The pact will increase Medicare premiums by $1 per month, up from the current $43.80 a month. The capitalist politicians previously probed hiking these insurance payments by as much as $8 per month.

Some $16-17 billion will be cut from Medicaid benefits for low-income recipients. These cutbacks would involve slashing payments to hospitals that serve large numbers of working people. The five-year plan Clinton presented to Congress proposed chopping $22 billion from Medicaid.

Earlier versions of the budget plan included reducing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) by 1.1 percent, thereby lowering cost-of-living increases in Social Security and other benefits. Nervous about the possible reaction, the negotiators backed off this probe and instead decided to approve a 0.15 percent "adjustment" to the CPI in 2000 that is expected to be implemented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The big-business dailies claimed the bipartisan budget will cut some $85 billion from the military "after accounting for inflation." But they plan to increase military spending by $23 billion.

The budget also proposes tax cuts totaling $135 billion. About $100 billion would go to reducing the capital gains and inheritance taxes. Under the agreement ironed out on Capital Hill, the amount exempted from estate or inheritance tax would be doubled from $600,000 to $1.2 million. About 30,000 U.S. citizens pay inheritance tax every year. There is little mention in the capitalist media of annual interest payments to wealthy bondholders of $247 billion. That's more than twice the amount of the deficit, which workers are supposed to make sacrifices in order to reduce.

No relief for working people
Working people will get no relief in the proposed budget from the Welfare Reform Act Clinton signed into law last August. That measure eliminated federally guaranteed Aid for Families with Dependent Children, a component of the Social Security Act of 1935. The new welfare law affected most of the 13 million workers and farmers receiving welfare and the 25 million receiving food stamps. An estimated 1 million immigrants with legal documents were due to be cut from the food stamp program and hundreds of thousands have been excluded from Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

Clinton and his congressional cohorts offered a few crumbs to working people such as restoring medical and disability benefits to legal immigrants already in the United States, but new arrivals would not be eligible. And while Medicaid coverage for indigent children of legal immigrants would be reinstituted, food stamps for the 1 million legal immigrants would not be restored.

Some Democrats, trying to distance themselves from some of the harshest aspects of the budget projections, grumbled about the Clinton administration keeping them in the dark during the final phase of the negotiations. "I'm declaring my independence," said Senator Thomas Daschle, the minority leader. "It's atrocious that deals would be cut and that decisions would be made behind closed doors."

Other bourgeois commentators complained that the budget agreement didn't go far enough. The May 3 New York Times editorial called the Medicare cuts a "temporary respite." Stepping up its probes on Social Security, the editors said the "plan makes no progress in accelerating corrections in the Government's gauge on inflation [CPI] -the fairest way to cut the deficit because it reduces Social Security benefits."

The editors of the Washington Post complained that "neither party wants to take the ax to the broad" entitlement programs such as "Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, that make up the bulk of the budget."

`Volunteerism' summit
A few days before the budget deal, the president participated in a government-sponsored "Presidents' Summit for America's Future" in Philadelphia. The three-day gathering, which began April 27, launched a volunteer campaign aimed at sugarcoating the attacks on the social gains of working people. Former Gen. Colin Powell, who led Washington's slaughter against the Iraqi people during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, was the meeting's chairman. Powell, Clinton, and former presidents James Carter and George Bush addressed an April 27 rally of 5,000 calling on them to volunteer their labor to compensate for federal cuts in jobs and social programs.

At the volunteer summit Clinton announced plans to triple the current 200 scholarships under the "Police Corps," which gives grants to college students who agree to serve at least four years as cops. He said he would push more federal workers to volunteer for charities, and took part in a well- hyped effort to paint over graffiti.

Meanwhile, as the bipartisan assault on the social wage continues, the White House is preparing deeper attacks on affirmative action programs. Government officials announced May 5 that the Clinton administration is revising its approach on business contracts for oppressed nationalities.

The measure is a response to a Supreme Court decision stating affirmative action programs were constitutional only where there was concrete evidence of discrimination. The Commerce Department is conducting an industry-by-industry review on discrimination in the awarding of government contracts. Officials say the review could eliminate, suspend, or cut back federal contracts to minority-owned businesses worth $200 billion a year.

This probe follows an April 8 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which ended an injunction that halted the implementation of Proposition 209. This measure, officially bearing the cynical title of the California Civil Rights Initiative, bans affirmative action programs in public hiring and education.

Campaigns for similar anti-affirmative action measures are planned in the states of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington. Rep. Charles Canady from Florida has declared he will sponsor a bill in the U.S. Congress that would roll back federal affirmative action programs.

Meanwhile, the so-called Whitewater scandal continues to stalk Clinton. New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal wrote May 5 that he "rejected" the statement by Clinton and his wife Hillary that no one at the White House knew former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell was possibly facing criminal charges when he resigned from that post in 1994. Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr is investigating whether Clinton or his aides helped find employment for Hubbell to encourage him not to cooperate with the Whitewater probe.

In 1994 Clinton met with James Riady, whose family owns the Indonesian-based Lippo Group, shortly before he held a meeting with Hubbell. Later, the Lippo Group hired Hubbell for $100,000, a few months before he went to prison for bilking the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was a partner with Hillary Clinton.

Rosenthal wrote that he was now convinced the Clintons risked "an obstruction of justice charge, the accusation that led to Richard Nixon's resignation."  
 
 
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