They might have become lost in that sea of white faces at President Clinton's State of the Union speech, but the media made sure they were easily distinguishable from the rest of the audience. Where they were seated was highly symbolic.
Who was sitting on either side of Hillary Rodham Clinton? Not a dirt farmer from Arkansas or a textile worker from New England. Not Lane Kirkland from the AFL-CIO or Jesse Jackson or Ron Dellums or Cesar Chavez. No, no.
Symbolizing the change of direction — in case you thought the amiable antics of Clinton and his advisers were signs of the government moving in a wholly progressive direction — were two pillars of big business and high finance.
On one side was Alan Greenspan, chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Even compared to his predecessor Paul Volcker, the enduring Greenspan has proven to be the most conservative Federal Reserve head in decades. He is the bankers' banker.
By tradition, the heads of the Federal Reserve are in an adversarial position toward the executive and the legislative branches of government because they're in charge of the money supply. Every one of the Federal Reserve members is a banker. They guard the money supply as though it were their own.
No government agency is as independent as the Federal Reserve. Yet Greenspan, a right-wing Republican, went out of his way immediately after the speech to broadcast his agreement with this supposedly progressive new Democratic president.
He did it on the issue of the deficit, which is what concerns the bankers and the ruling class most. For years the slogan of the Fed has been to cut the deficit. Now this has been embraced by a liberal Democratic president.
Only so much can be collected through taxes unless forcible means are used. The next thing is to borrow. The borrowing operations expose the dependency of the capitalist state on the money lenders, the bankers.
The government's debts become assets of the banks. It's a remorseless process whereby they have to support the bankers.
The biggest item, after the military, is not health or education, but interest on the loans. The process of selling the indebtedness has caused the big burden. And of course it comes because of the huge expenditures on the military. In times of economic crisis, it becomes particularly burdensome.
The Federal Reserve is most interested in cutting expenditures on social programs for the masses.
What could Greenspan's endorsement of Clinton's program possibly mean? Not by any stretch of the imagination that this right-winger has been taken over by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Rather, the president has been taken over by the bankers and big business.
On the other side of Hillary Rodham Clinton sat the head of Apple Computer, John Sculley, the high priest of the high-tech establishment. There is nothing to distinguish him except that he is deep in computer technology. He has a prestigious standing in big business, particularly the part of it that is intimately connected with government and the military. According to the capitalist press, Vice President Albert Gore is highly interested in this area.
Clinton's economic plan calls for a broad new technology initiative. But so did the Reagan administration, and earlier the Carter administration.
Ever since World War II the U.S. capitalist government has showered billions of dollars on high technology. But it all goes to capitalists, whether you call them small entrepreneurs or whatever. It's an old practice that the right-wing Republicans almost always call a boondoggle, except when they are in power.
It would be different if Clinton planned to hire or rehire masses of workers in order to relieve the economic pressure on the people from the capitalist recession.
It's hard to miss the significance of all this. This is especially true because right after that day so full of drama and excitement generated by the capitalist media, the bad news came to the workers of the Boeing Co. Twenty-eight thousand were being laid off.
It couldn't have been done that easily without the complicity of Clinton himself. He is presumed to have knowledge of such a fateful step for so many workers and their families.
He then came to face the workers, rather hurriedly and unexpectedly. But what did he promise them? That the layoffs would be temporary? That their jobs would be saved? No. Nothing.
Instead, he indulged in the same kind of poisonous chauvinism as the Reagan and Bush administrations. Blame it all on the foreigners. Except this time it wasn't the Japanese but the Europeans and their airbus that are taking away the jobs at Boeing.
If ever there were a bold-faced lie, this is it. Boeing has never had any real competition in Europe or Asia. It has remained the principal aerospace contractor for the Pentagon. It has earned fabulous profits.
It is ludicrous to suddenly suggest that the civilian aspect of Boeing's business was a big deal. Many of the workers in Boeing's vast industrial and technological apparatus know this.
Why did Clinton meet in private with the company's executives without divulging the content of their discussion? Did he for a moment think of meeting first with the union leaders?
It will do no good for him to make an ostentatious visit to Hyde Park, N.Y., and invoke the humanitarianism and compassion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He cannot cover up his deeds behind the facade of identification with Roosevelt's reforms.
It is not that Roosevelt cut such a heroic figure in U.S. history. He was not always regarded that highly by the workers, even in the best of times. Some can remember when times became tough and the ruling class, in particular the manufacturers in heavy industry, began to most viciously attack Roosevelt.
During the Little Steel strike in 1937, a private army of the steel companies openly attacked the workers with firearms after they had tried to ward off strike breakers. Roosevelt moved away from the labor side of the class struggle and denounced both sides: "A plague on both your houses."
But Roosevelt certainly did become popular enough with the masses that Clinton and his entire entourage of advisers would like to associate themselves with his name. As of yet, however, they have little to show.
"Style is the man," said Count Georges Louis Le Clerc Buffon (1707-88), one of the early figures of the European Enlightenment. Generally regarded as a naturalist, he was also a man of letters who took time to write a thesis on style in 1753; he was admitted to the Academie Francaise on that basis.
Roosevelt did have an original style. His fireside chats over national radio, his imaginative ideas and initiatives, many of them in the field of labor relations, were new and innovative. Some might have been considered revolutionary for his time, especially coming from an open advocate and admirer of the capitalist system.
Roosevelt's distinguishing political characteristic was his boldness, even rashness for his time. In the short time of 100 days, Roosevelt changed an entire epoch.
But Clinton is all style and no progressive content. Clinton gives the impression of being bold, but he has yet to take a bold step that would evoke even the mildest opposition from the ruling class.
Clinton draws on the milk of human kindness — but when it came to the life of a death row prisoner, he made sure to sign the death warrant. Then again, Clinton, full of humanitarianism, stopped Haitian refugees from immigrating into the U.S., endangering the lives of many and excluding them on a threadbare basis.
Roosevelt not only proposed legislation of a "revolutionary" character but he issued executive orders on the most critical issues. Roosevelt pushed through most of the specifics of the National Recovery Act — more than 500 of the NRA codes — by executive order.
What he felt was not possible or easily acceptable in Congress, he did by executive order. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court dared to interfere for some time.
The NRA was the boldest piece of political legislation enacted since the Civil War. Roosevelt was able to do this based on the virtual breakdown of the capitalist system. The context for his initiatives and imaginative legislation was an insurgent working class. The working class was beginning to assert itself in an unprecedented way, and was entirely in accord with the revolutionary working-class struggles in Europe.
Roosevelt's politics reflected the need to deal with the urgency of the economic situation and the militancy of the workers. His strong point was reliance on the resurgence of the workers to push his program when that was opportune for him.
Clinton, on the other hand, is relying on the stagnation of the labor movement to help him with the budget deficit. He has worked at winning support from the labor bureaucracy by sending Labor Secretary Robert Reich, to Bal Harbour for a stroking operation with the AFL-CIO Executive Council.
In his trip to Hyde Park, Clinton talked about how Roosevelt suffered a great deal because of his ill health. But he avoided saying the one Rooseveltian thing that was necessary — that health care should be put on a par with social security and unemployment insurance.
There should be free, universal health care. But Clinton is only promising to cut costs through revising the way it is administered.
It is of course manifestly unfair to compare the whole Roosevelt period with a bare month of the Clinton administration. But he has had ample time to prepare progressive measures that could have had the same effect as Roosevelt's, if he had only tried.
He has not to date lifted a finger to actually halt the layoffs and recall the unemployed workers — or to provide for the employment of at least a portion of the unemployed by executive order. He certainly has as much power as Roosevelt did, but has not used it at all.
Clinton in his career has shown none of the boldness and little of the initiative that Roosevelt demonstrated.
As for his attempt to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military, he showed timidity in the face of unexpected opposition from the Pentagon and the right-wing leaders in his own party, especially the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn. So now it is mired down in negotiations. The fate of his order will ultimately depend on the struggle put up by the masses, especially by lesbians and gay men.
The workers must be told the truth. However one articulates it, this is the essence. Clinton has unmasked himself.
Where this is not clear, it is necessary to be patient and to carefully explain, to watch his every move, not to be taken in by shenanigans like visiting Hyde Park.
For him to invoke the name of Roosevelt is a mask to cover his reactionary retreat into the camp of the bankers and industrialists. On such a short voyage, he has already undergone a sea change.
Last updated: 15 January 2018