WHILE THE media alternate between the razzamatazz of the Democratic Party convention and latest sexual sleaze to hit President Bill Clinton's team of advisors, millions of Americans have more immediate reasons to reject his glib electioneering phrases about family values'.
In the run-up to the Chicago renomi. nation jamboree, Clinton signed into law one of the most brutal attacks on social welfare ever imposed, scrapping over 60 years of welfare provision established by Roosevelt's New Deal. Nothing could more firmly underline the call for a new Labour Party in the US than this bi-partisan attack on the poorest sections of the working Class.
The cuts of $16 billion in Federal welfare payments will leave each state to decide and fund its own level of welfare support, throwing up to 2.6 million peo. ple, including I.l million children, into destitution. At the same time an extra $13 billion has been allocated to the US military budget, and a massive $85 billion assigned to 125 schemes benifiting big business.
Clinton's cuts actually go further than the Republican-led Congress had demanded. A $3 billion jobs programme endorsed by the House has been wiped out The biggest savings come from cuts in support to legal immigrants. and cuts in the provision of food stamps through Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Under the new rules, a family will lose all benefits if the family head is unemployed for more than two years. And nobody will be able to claim benefite for more than five years during their lifetime.
Mothers aged under 18 will only get benefits if they stay in school and live with an adult. Legal immigrants who have not taken US citizenship will be denied social security and food stamps, regardless of how long they have lived and paid taxes in the US.
Childless adults aged 18-50 will be allowed only 3 months of food stamps in their lifetime. And 300,000 disabled children will be lose their entitlement to welfare support.
These savage attacks on the most deprived sections of US society run alongside Clinton's boast of creating up to i million jobs, almost ail of which, as in Britain, are low-paid, part-time and temporary.
For hundreds of thousands of porerty-stricken individuals there will be no escape other than crime. The drug trade beckons: but another master-stroke of Clinton's new cuts is to deny any welfare benefits to anyone convicted of drug felonies.
The burden will of course fall hardest on the black and Latino communities.
Already 50 per cent of black children and 40 per cent of Latino children live in poverty, compared with 24 per cent of white children. The most powerful capitalist country in the world has | 4 million children eking out an existence below the poverty line.
The amount of cash saved is puny compared with the toll of misery created. The significance is a dramatic shift in ideology, opening the door to more dramatic cuts. As the Wall Street Journal leads the cheers of the business community, the next target in their sights is the scrapping of federal pensions, and abolition of state-funded education.
America's rabid right are celebrating their recruitment of Bill Clinton as their standard-bearer, pointing out that only he could have pushed through such cuts.
But the warning is clear to British and European socialists fighting what has become a global offensive on welfare rights. As Observer columnist Alexander Cockburn points out:
"Dole or Gingrich could never get away with it To destroy a Democratic legacy it has to be an inside job. Translate Democratic into Labour and Clinton into Blair and you get the picture."