Just say 'veto' - Labor and seniors lead fight to save programs from GOP

by Les Bayless & Tim Wheeler

This article was reprinted from the November 25, 1995 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

WASHINGTON - Organizations that mobilized postcards and phone calls demanding that President Clinton veto the Republican continuing resolution with its cuts in Medicare urged a similar outpouring against the GOP Budget Reconciliation and welfare "reform" bill soon to arrive on Clinton's desk.

"No doubt the president will veto the reconciliation package," said Patrick Burns of the National Council of Senior Citizens, a labor-backed group which together with the AFL-CIO spearheaded the campaign that swamped the White House mailroom and comment line. It succeeded in convincing Clinton to veto the GOP continuing resolution, forcing a five-day shutdown of the federal government.

"The Republican budget will mean the end of health care that every older American has known," said Burns.

The GOP extremists took a five-day drubbing from enraged voters. Their standing in the polls plunged with House speaker Newt Gingrich's approval rating falling to 19 percent. He told reporters he precipitated the crisis out of personal pique when President Clinton made him exit Air Force One from the rear of the plane on returning from the Rabin funeral in Israel. "Cry Baby Newt" was the headline in the New York Daily News next day. At that point Gingrich announced he will not run for president of the United States.

The deal reached Sunday gave Medicare and Medicaid protection against cutbacks, but the GOP insisted on adding the Pentagon and the Department of Agriculture to the "protected" list. Clinton agreed to language calling for a balanced budget within seven years, but parliamentarians agree that it is not binding.

Clinton's veto galvanized angry federal workers as well as millions of senior citizens, trade unionists and others. Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, put it most clearly in an open letter to President Clinton demanding that he veto the so-called "Welfare reform" bill which he had supported as recently as September. "It would be a great moral and practical wrong for you to sign any welfare 'reform' bill that will push millions of already poor children and families deeper into poverty, as both the Senate and House welfare bills will do," she wrote. "What a tragic irony it would be for this regressive attack on children to occur on your watch. For me, this is a defining moral litmus test for your presidency."

Clinton aides say he will veto the welfare bill and Clinton has promised to veto the GOP Budget Reconciliation Bill which would cut billions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, education, environmental protection and occupational safety and health.

Rick Hines, spokesman for Greenpeace, told the World, "The budget debate is not about whether there's enough money. It's a question of priorities. There's no money for environmental protection even though the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency is less than 3 percent of what the Pentagon spends each year. That's because the debate has been poisoned by polluters like Dow Chemical, DuPont and Exxon." The GOP budget, he charged, was "ghostwritten" by these profit-swollen corporations.

Admiral Eugene Carroll, U.S. Navy (ret.) deputy director of the Center for Defense Information, said the decision to exempt the military from spending cuts means "pain and suffering" through deeper cuts in social programs. "We are spending money we don't have to buy weapons we don't need to defeat a non-existent enemy," he said.

Barbara Duffield, spokesperson for the National Coalition for the Homeless, denounced the GOP Budget Reconciliation. "This budget is going to make sure there is a lot more homeless," she told the World. "The cuts in housing assistance and welfare programs will be devastating. It's like a shrinking bandage over a growing wound. "

Keith Geiger, President of the National Education Association (NEA), denounced GOP plans to slash federal aid to education by $36 billion. "What we have in this massive ax-wielding is a formula for lowering our standard of living," Geiger said. "What kind of values do we reflect when we cut assistance to children and families to finance giveaways to the wealthy?" He urged NEA's 2.2 million members to mobilize against the cuts.

In a special edition of the The New York Times Magazine, Sunday Nov. 19, titled, "The Rich," Lester Thurow, professor of economics at MIT, writes, "The Republicans' balanced budget plan essentially offers a return to [Herbert] Spencer's survival-of-the-fittest capitalism. It raises taxes on working people and lowers them for the wealthy. It sheds the safety net, apparently on the theory that individuals facing starvation will knuckle down and work. Spencer believed that it was the duty of the economically strong to drive the economically weak into extinction." That, he said, is the real agenda of the Republican majority in the House and Senate.