A new minimum: $10 and hour.

President Clinton got his comeuppance at one of his recent welfare-reform dog-and-pony shows. Clinton's penchant for staging photo-ops at black churches to add credibility to his nasty social policies has always struck me as particularly offensive. So it seemed especially fitting that he was attacked at what he presumed was a routine public-relations gig at New York's Riverside Church. The attack was led by Earl Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine.

To applause from the 100 or so people in the church meeting room, Graves took Bipartisan Bill to task for his "unrealistic and unfair" expectation that the private sector will "do the government's job" and make up for the massive cuts in social services this Administration has endorsed. Graves pointed out that the private sector cannot absorb all the people who are about to be tossed off the welfare rolls. Certainly, private employers are not about to give them all jobs that will make it possible for them to support their families.

Nilda Roman, a welfare recipient from New York, joined Graves in criticizing Clinton, pointing out that the new welfare law forces people out of educational programs and into employment that is often demeaning and brutalizing. That is, if they can find any employment at all.

Clinton's response was worse than lame. It was repugnant. He ignored the truth - that the private sector does not provide adequate employment for everyone who is already in the labor market. His own reappointed head of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, insists that keeping a minimum of eight million people officially unemployed is essential to a "healthy" economy.

Instead, Clinton conjured up the invidious, bogus imagery of a permanently dependent welfare population that is alien to the rest of us. "When you consider that the welfare population is different than it used to be, and that there are some people who are on it perpetually, I think it is a good thing - not a bad thing - that we did that."

In other words, welfare recipients aren't like you and me. They're defective - otherwise they'd have no trouble joining the middle class.

This statement is particularly galling because Clinton knows it's a lie. He is, after all, the policy-wonk President, pals with Marian Wright Edelman and William Julius Wilson. And he hired liberal poverty researchers Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood. All of these people have debunked the myth of widespread, long-term welfare dependency.

Well, what more could Clinton do to tell us that he has absolutely no interest in supporting anything that anyone committed to social and economic justice cares about? That his most basic reflexes twitch rightward, that he quite happily prefers Newt Gingrich's political company to ours?

Even after the leaders of the AFL-CIO spent scads of millions of dollars and, worse, soft-pedaled criticism of Clinton's many betrayals to ensure his reelection, he repaid them by nominating as Secretary of Labor a party operative with no history of connection to the labor movement, who lists working to pass NAFTA and the hideous crime bill as her big accomplishments of Clinton Administration I.

It's long past time for us to try to steer our own course, and that means, among other things, not allowing Clinton and his ilk to define the discussion of poverty and inequality. Victim-blaming rhetoric about pathologies and the mythical "underclass" are a dodge. There's a simple explanation for the persistence and growth of an impoverished population in the United States: the failure of the market economy to generate enough jobs that pay wages people can live on.

We must shift the terms of political debate, so we aren't solely occupied with defensive responses to the rightwing, corporate agenda. Preserving Medicare and Social Security is important. But we need a broader, alternative social vision. Otherwise, it will be nearly impossible even to hold onto the scraps of social programs we want to preserve.

One of the more inspiring developments of the last few years is the campaign for a "living wage." In cities around the country, living-wage campaigns - usually led by ACORN, the New Party, and the AFL-CIO's Jobs With Justice coalition - concentrate on mobilizing public support for laws that establish a wage floor. The floor is usually set at the local poverty-threshold wage for a family of four.

In Baltimore, an early success story for the movement, activists won $6.60 an hour. In Chicago, where the campaign has stalled at the moment because of the mayor's opposition, the target is $7.60. New York's city council has passed an ordinance that sets a sliding scale up to $12 an hour.

It says something about how much ground we've lost politically that the premise of these campaigns - that a job should pay enough to live on - sounds so bold and controversial. But getting that idea on the table for public discussion is a major victory.

Living-wage campaigns have their limitations, though. Chief among them is that local governments are the weakest links in the federal system. They are vulnerable, among other things, to threats of capital flight, and their revenue is severely constrained by state constitutions. Therefore, the wage demands have to be relatively modest, and elected officials' support is still tenuous at best. (Baltimore's Kurt Schmoke, who has a reputation as a pro-labor mayor, has begun undermining his own city's ordinance by bringing workfare participants, who aren't covered by the law, into the municipal workforce.)

What we need now is a national living wage.

The Labor Party has taken a step in that direction, kicking off a campaign for a constitutional amendment that would read: "Every person shall have the right to a job and to receive a living wage for their work (defined at $10 an hour in 1997, adjusted for the cost of living)."

The campaign is a door-to-door, workplace-to-workplace effoft to gather signatures on petitions directed to state and local public officials, calling on them to act as people's tribunes and to exhort Congress to take up and pass the amendment.

This might sound like pie in the sky, but it is doable. To pay for it, the Labor Party proposes eliminating all corporate tax breaks and subsidies and imposing higher taxes on the rich. These would include: a boost in income tax for the upper brackets; a wealth tax on those with personal assets over $2 million; a tax on mergers and acquisitions over $1 billion; a tax on all stock options over $1 million; a tax on nonprofit institutions with $100 million or more in assets; and a 100 percent tax on that portion of executive salaries that exceeds twenty times the average worker's salary in the firm.

As for the risk of capital flight, we'd have to raise the costs of disinvestment. The Labor Party program calls for a job-destruction penalty law that would require any firm with 100 or more employees worldwide to pay two months' severance for each year of service to any worker it lays off, and a $25,000 indemnity per laid-off worker to the community to cover the social costs of dislocation. The Labor Party also calls for the renegotiation of NAFTA and GATT, excluding repressive, anti-labor regimes, and establishing the strongest possible labor and environmental standards.

The national living wage would have a profound, positive effect on people's lives. It could mean a thirty-two-hour, four-day work week (at forty hours' pay), with a double-time minimum for all overtime. Compulsory overtime would be prohibited. People would get twenty paid vacation days a year, and a year of paid leave for every seven years of work. If we can't sell that, we can't sell peanuts at the ballpark.

Full-time, post-secondary students might also be recognized as workers. Other ways to spread work around and free up workers to live better lives could include twelve weeks of paid leave for every newborn or adopted child, flexible work schedules, and subsidized day care for children and the elderly. Early retirement - with mandatory minimum pensions - would also improve quality of life and expand the pool of available jobs.

These possibilities are all drawn from the Labor Party program. They constitute a coherent vision of how society could be organized. Granted, they diverge sharply from the pro-corporate, free-market theology, which the pundit class has defined as the boundary of the thinkable. But if we want to have a chance of enacting a model of a decent world, we need to shift the terms of public discussion to focus on our needs, rather than the desires of bloated corporations and financial speculators.