"Hanoi has made it clear that Mr. Clinton is welcome as a friend," the International Herald Tribune reported November 17. Banners were strung across highways and buildings greeting Hillary Clinton, who also toured the country.

The U.S. president arrived in Vietnam with an entourage of more than 50 U.S. corporate bosses from Boeing, Nike, General Electric, General Motors, Cisco Systems, Citigroup, Procter & Gamble, and others. These big-business executives seek to deepen U.S. imperialist penetration into the country and take advantage of cheap labor costs there. "Its workers earn high marks from foreign employers--and not just for the low pay," a New York Times article noted.

Several companies already have significant investments in Vietnam. By investing in and opening new manufacturing facilities, they hope Vietnam could serve as an export platform for U.S. finance capital. Big-business investors also have an eye toward buying some of the more than 6,000 state-owned enterprises.

Pressing the country's 78 million people to embrace capitalist "reforms," Clinton spoke to 600 students at a November 17 nationally televised meeting at Hanoi National University. "Only you can decide if you will continue to open your markets, open your society, and strengthen the rule of law," he declared.

The U.S. big-business media devoted massive coverage to the warm welcome Clinton received in Vietnam. Le Mai Huong, a recent law school graduate, displayed a different reaction. "America behaves as if its the head of the family," Huong told a New York Times reporter. "It won't listen to anybody and just does what it wants. It wants to impose its subjective ideas on the rest of the world. They keep talking about human rights but I wonder--what America did in the war, was that an example of human rights?"

Vietnam's industrial development was devastated by Washington's brutal war, which lasted more than two decades. Today, more than a third of the population lives in poverty. It is a country rich in mineral resources with sizable deposits in phosphates, manganese, bauxite, chromate, and other metal ores. Production is being developed for oil and gas deposits discovered off the southern shore. But Vietnam's economic output fell 5.8 percent in 1998 and 4.8 percent last year.  
 
Legacy of Vietnamese revolution
Coming out of World War II, the Vietnamese people stepped up their national liberation struggle to drive out the Japanese and French colonial masters. After the 1954 defeat of the French imperialists at Dien Bien Phu, U.S. presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy sent military advisers to train U.S.-backed forces based in the southern part of the country.

An estimated 3 million Vietnamese people and 58,000 U.S. troops died in the war, which included massive bombardment and dumping of toxic chemicals like Agent Orange that continue to plague the Southeast Asian country today.

In 1975 the U.S. war machine, which involved more than 3 million military personnel, was evicted from Vietnam, marking a political defeat for Washington. Vietnam's workers and peasants subsequently overturned capitalist rule and property relations in the south, strengthening the working class and oppressed worldwide. Despite its bureaucratic deformations, the new regime was forced by the rising tide of revolutionary struggle to establish a state monopoly of foreign trade, nationalize major industries, launch a deep-going land reform, and introduce economic planning.

As a result of the literacy campaigns and other education carried out by the liberation movement, Vietnam today has a literacy rate of 94 percent, the highest in Southeast Asia. As punishment for these revolutionary measures, the U.S. government maintained an embargo against Vietnam, refused to normalize relations, and backed an invasion by the Chinese military in 1979.

The bureaucratic leadership sitting atop the Vietnamese workers state granted political concessions to Washington in exchange for normalizing relations. In 1994, the U.S. rulers lifted a trade embargo that had been in place since the war. The following year full diplomatic relations were established between the two countries. Washington's ultimate aim is to reestablish wage slavery in Vietnam, China, and other regions torn from the world capitalist system. However, nothing short of using military force against the toilers in these workers states will accomplish this objective.

Trying to whitewash the history of Washington's brutal efforts to maintain its hegemony in Southeast Asia, Clinton claimed in an interview with CNN November 19, "We had never had any imperialist designs here. The [Vietnam War] was over what self-determination for the Vietnamese people really meant and what freedom and independence really meant."

Clinton's Vietnam visit also included a spectacle at the site where a U.S. warplane was shot down and crashed. A reported 1,500 U.S. GIs are missing from the war. "Gaining the fullest accounting of American prisoners of war and Americans missing in action.... is on the top of my agenda for this trip," Clinton asserted, adhering to Washington's ongoing campaign to use this timeworn issue as a political weapon against the Vietnamese people. An estimated 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers are unaccounted for.  
 
'Entrepreneurship, competition'
Clinton wrapped up his tour extolling the virtues of "entrepreneurship, innovation, and competition." He said the trade agreement signed last July between Washington and the Vietnamese government would lead to "a more open, sophisticated free market, based on international rules of law." The trade pact, subject to ratification by the U.S. Congress, mandates Vietnam to reduce tariffs on a broad range of U.S. commodities and to open its telecommunications industry and the country's banking system to foreign investors over seven years. Washington also agreed to reduce the 35 percent import tax it imposed on Vietnam's exports.

Capitalist investments, which poured into Vietnam at a rate of $4 billion a year over the past decade, trickled to $1.4 billion last year. Some of the dwindling foreign capital reflects the bosses' difficulties in extracting more profits out of the workforce through speedup and working longer hours. Vietnam's 11 new auto plants, which run at less than 10 percent of capacity, sold only 8,000 vehicles in the first eight months of this year. Ford Vietnam, a joint venture between Ford Motor Co. and a Vietnamese enterprise, makes only 100 of the 14,000 cars that the factory could produce each month.

Hazardous working conditions are prevalent in U.S.-owned plants. An inspection at Nike, the largest private firm in Vietnam with 45,000 workers at five factories, revealed high levels of toxic chemicals at its Tae Kwang Vina facility. Some 77 percent of the workforce suffered respiratory ailments. "Right now, I have good health, but in five years I won't be able to work this job anymore. It is too hard," said Nguyen Anh Ha, a worker at the plant who earns $50 a month making $120-a-pair athletic shoes.

Growing pressures from the working class has prodded Vietnamese government officials to debate reducing the official workweek from 48 hours to 40. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pressing Nike's bosses to campaign against this move.

Meanwhile, anger is bubbling among peasants and farmers who have been pushed off from working the land. Demonstrations over land rights have erupted in the northern provinces and elsewhere.  
 
 
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