Let them eat values.

Things can't get much worse than the House Republicans' welfare plan. In the "Personal Responsibility Act," the new House leaders declare that no one--no matter how desperate--is legally entitled to aid from the Government.

In particular, the bill excludes non-citizens (even if they're in this country legally), children whose paternity hasn't been officially established, and the children of unmarried teenaged mothers from programs that alleviate hunger, homelessness, and disease.

States will be required to spend the money "saved" in this way to set up orphanages, group homes, and programs that exhort women to stop having babies out of wedlock. Instead of food and shelter, the hungry and homeless will get seminars on morality.

For the first time, the Federal Government would also cap spending on Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled, as well as housing assistance and AFDC. When the money runs out, it would be up to the states to decide whether to reduce benefits or simply turn people away.

Among the programs the Republican plan would repeal are the Food Stamp Act of 1977, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the National School Lunch Act of 1946, and the Emergency Food Assistance Act of 1983. Medicaid, child immunizations, school lunch and breakfast programs, maternal and child health care, and a number of other programs would no longer be available to millions of poor people who fall into the excluded groups.

The madness and savagery of this effort should be self-evident. It will cause an enormous amount of suffering for no reason at all. The argument that the Republicans' plan will save money is particularly repellent since the programs they propose to cut--while essential to the survival of millions of poor Americans, mainly women and children--represent only 3 percent of the Federal budget.

Furthermore, the Personal Responsibility Act does nothing to address the economic crisis facing a growing number of families in this country. Instead, it singles out for neglect the most vulnerable members of our society--most of them children. Nothing could be more destructive.

Yet, according to The New York Times, the Personal Responsibility Act has a better chance of passing than any of its myriad welfare-reform competiors in Congress. When it comes to welfare, bigotry and opportunism vanquish the facts.

Welfare is a hot-button issue, Mickey Kaus declares in a recent cover story on the elections in The New Republic, because of the (mistaken) perception that mostly African-American, inner-city residents receive it: "Welfare may or may not have caused this underclass, but welfare is clearly what sustains it. And the underclass, in turn, drives the crime problem, the race problem, the 'urban crisis,' and the general sense of social decay ('twelve-year-olds having babies, fifteen-year-olds killing each other')."

This hodgepodge of stereotypes demands that we starve the poor. On the crassest political level, Kraus thinks this is a good idea. "Clinton's political advisers seem to believe that the only way to win over the struggling middle class is to deliver tangible benefits--tax cuts, job training, health insurance," Kaus writes. "But another way to appeal to the struggling, underpaid workers is to honor their work--by dishonoring the non-work of those who stay on the dole."

The lesson of the nasty House Republican welfare plan, according to Kaus and other self-described New Democrats, is that President Clinton must push the idea that he, too, is tough on blacks, single mothers, and poor people. With a straight face, Kaus suggests, "Clinton must compromise," as if he hasn't compromised enough already. Indeed, Clinton's decision in the 1992 Presidential campaign to pledge "an end to welfare as we know it" was a compromise that led naturally to the draconian Republican alternative--ending welfare without any of the job-training and other forms of support Clinton promised would ease the transition.

Clinton's original proposals were not nearly as damaging as the plans now on the table in Congress and in a number of states.

But by cashing in on anti-welfare sentiment in his own campaign, Clinton helped clear the way for the poor-house-and-orphanage era.

Winking at evil is the New Democrats' style. And it appears that, even in the face of this drastic new measure, they are going to keep it up. "We dont' really know, after all, how many welfare recipients are simply incapable of working. We don't know the extent to which cutting off unwed mothers will encourage marriage, and the extent to which it will simply produce homelessness," Kaus writes. "The answers won't come from the study of the mincing, incremental reforms that have been tried."

So let the Republicans do their worst, these New Democrats say. If the suffering that follows is great enough to appall voters, maybe they'll vote for four more years of compromise. Then Clinton will have a chance to advance his own, somewhat less destructive plans. This is the kind of logic that got us where we are today.

Beginning with the inverted premise that welfare causes poverty, and that poor people cause economic hard times, the welfare-reform argument has devolved into the tragic absurdity of the House Republican proposal: Neglect the poor and hope they go away.

Marie Antoinette advanced a similar line of reasoning 200 years ago.

Empire's Assignment

Bill Clinton is dazed and confused. Stunned by the Republican triumph on November 8, he is stumbling around, uncertain about what to do, unclear about what to advocate, and unwilling to fight for what is right.

In this staggered state, Clinton is unwisely heeding the advice of pundits and aides, who are urging him to try even harder to sound like the Republicans. Just days after the election, Clinton gave the first signal that he was ready to be rolled when he declared his interest in a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to prayer in public schools--long a Republican rallying cry. No matter that such an amendment runs absolutely counter to the separation of church and state, which is so central to our democracy. No matter that it is an offense to civil liberties. Clinton saw school prayer as a bone to throw conservatives. Of course, when liberals squawked, Clinton backed and heaved--his form of daily exercise.

The second signal came on December 1, when Clinton went out into the Rose Garden to unveil a proposal to increase Pentagon spending by $25 billion over the next six years. Now that's something we really need. Peace dividend be damned. Clinton by law will need to find $25 billion in cuts to offset these additional expenditures, and you can bet he won't hack away at the Pentagon.

Surrounded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clinton justified this ridiculous bloating of the already bloated Pentagon by saying it was necessary to improve readiness. What readiness? Is our military not ready to defend the United States from attack? Surely it is. Clinton and the Joint Chiefs have a different definition of readiness, however. They define readiness as the capability to fight two major conflicts at once. That's right. Our prevailing military doctrine requires the United States to be able to fight not one but two wars outside our borders. This is the empire's assignment. And Bill Clinton is more than willing to carry it out.

Market Uber Alles

Now that the GATT's out of the bag, do you want to know what this trade agreement is really about? It's not about high-minded concepts like free trade. It's about carving up the globe for multinationals, and it's about forcing nations to bend and bow before these giants.

Here's a little-known fact: Some 40 percent of all world trade is not between different countries or even different companies: It's among branches of the same companies. These companies want the lowest tariffs possible in every country, so that when they trade among their subsidiaries in far off places, they can do so at no extra cost.

The elimination of trade barries also enables them to crush small competitors, which rely on tariffs and subsidies to stay in business. Under GATT, small farmers around the world will have no way to compete against giant agribusiness companies, which will be able to undersell them with ease. Deprived of a livelihood, these farmers will have no choice but to flock to overcrowded Third-World metropolises.

In addition, multinationals want the lowest environmental and labor standards, which they consider mere costs of production. Now GATT will ensure the lowering of these standards. As Ralph Nader has pointed out, GATT is a dire threat to our labor, environmental, and consumer-protection laws. An unelected, unaccountable group of bureaucrats in Switzerland will have the power to judge whether our laws represent barriers to trade.

GATT intrudes on our sovereignty, and on the sovereignty of any Third World country that wants to control the affairs of its own economy and society.

GATT was undemocratic from start to finish. Look at how it became law. The American people were not lobbying for GATT; they weren't given enough information even to understand the agreement. Certainly there was no democratic groundswell for GATT; no one went knocking on doors to rally support. No, GATT was a product of the big-business lobby, pure and simple, and Clinton railroaded it through Congress on a special fast track.

By boosting GATT, Clinton was simply promoting the agenda of the most powerful members of our society. But it will hurt the least powerful at home and abroad. Welcome to the new age. Multinationals rule the world.

Nuclear Terror

Seems there's a little problem at the Oak Ridge nuclear lab in Tennessee. For several months, uranium has been seeping from an old nuclear reactor into a filter pipe, risking an uncontrollable nuclear reaction.

Not to worry, says the Department of Energy, the problem is being taken care of. But just to be sure, the employees who worked near the pipe have been removed from the site; the radiation level there is so high that work will now have to be done by remote control. Somehow, that's not reassuring.

The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance calls it "an accident in progress." Said one former Oak Ridge employee, who is now a member of the alliance: "They've got a nuclear pipe bomb in their backyard there."

What's even scarier is that we've got nuclear pipe bombs all over America. When the Department of Energy shut down some of its nuclear reactors over the years, it made no long-term plan to dispose of the radioactive material, The New York Times notes. As a result, tons of old uranium fuel pipes are leaking and rusting across the land.

Is the Department of Energy going to clean up its act, or is it going to wait until one of these pipe bombs goes off?

If you think there are no more nuclear weapons threatening America, think again--then duck.

Blood Money

How much are human rights worth? Something less than $40 billion, according to Bill Clinton.

Indonesia has one of the worst human-rights records in the world. In 1975, with a wink from President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, it annexed the independent nation of East Timor and systematically wiped out one-third of its population, killing 200,000 Timorese. Today, it still occupies the tiny nation, and it also represses any hint of labor organizing in Indonesia itself. A more repressive country would be hard to find.

Yet Bill Clinton agreed to participate in the trade conference in Indonesia in mid-November, the first American President to visit there since Gerald Ford gave the green light to the invasion of East Timor nineteen years ago. Clinton was forced to confront the Indonesian human-rights issue after protesters demonstrated in East Timor and at the U.S. embassy. Clinton's words were fine--he urged the Indonesian government to ease its repression. But words are cheap.

At the very time Clinton was chiding the Indonesian government, he was sealing a deal with that government allowing massive U.S. investment in Indonesia.

"Where I come from," Clinton said, "$40 billion is still real money--and we're grateful for the business."

The Indonesian government got that message--loud and clear. It's a message that muffles any pious talk about human rights.

Refuge No More

You'd think that Salvadoran refugees had suffered enough, but evidently Bill Clinton doesn't think so. In the 1980s, with U.S. aid, the brutal government of El Salvador killed tens of thousands of its own citizens. To escape the horror, some 200,000 Salvadoran refugees fled to the United States. Now Clinton is preparing to ship them back.

In 1990, Congress granted Salvadoran refugees temporary status in the United States, but that status runs out on December 31. The Clinton Administration says it will make no effort to renew that status. As a result, the Salvadorans will be forced to return home.

And what will they find there? The same repression they fled. El Salvador still has a horrendous human-rights record. Last March alone, during Salvador's election race, the brutal forces there killed at least thirty-three leftists. Many refugees that are shipped back to El Salvador will face reprisals.

But this doesn't seem to bother Clinton. What bothers him is losing popularity, and he knows that there's an ill wind blowing on the issue of immigration.

Clinton's a human weather vane. He'll spin whichever way the wind pushes him. But his spinning can have awful consequences, as Salvadoran refugees are finding out right now.

Nuts at the Helms

Jesse Helms is off his rocker. First he said President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief. Then he warned that Clinton better watch out and bring a bodyguard if he ever visits Helms's home state of North Carolina.

The outrageous comments from the unreconstructed Senator from North Carolina show precisely how brazen the right-wing is getting these days. Helms is not alone, of course. Oliver North has made similar disparaging comments about Clinton's fitness as Commander-in-Chief. John McLaughlin has invited soldiers to disobey Clinton's orders during the Haiti occupation. And Rush Limbaugh regularly smears Clinton's credentials with any filth he has available.

Evidently, civilian control of the military is not one of the traditional values the right-wing holds dear.

Nor is consistency. Imagine if we here at The Progressive had dared to suggest that Ronald Reagan or George Bush should visit our home state of Wisconsin only under heavy guard. Then Jesse Helms, Rush Limbaugh, John McLaughlin, and Oliver North would have tarred and feathered us. Now are they going to tar and feather themselves? Don't count on it.

What's the Punch Line?

Spare us the Jeffrey Dahmer jokes. There's nothing funny about the murder of the notorious serial killer behind bars in Wisconsin in late November. And no kind of justice was served in the murder of Jeffrey Dahmer--or the murder, let's not forget, of the other prisoner, Jesse Anderson, who was bludgeoned to death along with Dahmer.

It doesn't matter how hideous Dahmer's crimes were. He was not sentenced to death; he was sentenced to life in prison. And the prison failed to do its job in seeing that the sentence of the court was carried out.

The dirty little secret that Jeffrey Dahmer's death reveals is the brutality of our prisons. Routinely, male prisoners are beaten or raped behind bars by other inmates. Frequently, female prisoners are sexually assaulted by guards. This is cruel and unusual punishment; it is unconstitutional, and it's a scandal.

It's all the rage to make life as grim as possible for prisoners, as if that will actually make a dent in crime. But laughing at violence behind bars won't make any of us safer. It will just make us smaller.

Free at Last

An obituary in the Milwaukee Journal: "George F. 'Happy' Edwards, age seventy-two years, of Madison, died on Tuesday, October 3, 1994, at a local hospital after a long courageous battle with doctors."

Keep Those Blinders On

From an item in Time magazine on New York City restaurants: "Tribeca restaurant's multimedia men's room boasts a thirteen-inch TV set mounted in the wall above each urinal. Tames the eyes of even the most overly competitive man."

Defending Community Values

From an article in The New Mexican datelined Los Alamos: "A proposal by children from fifty U.S. states and fifty-three nations to erect a statue and peace park in the town that built the world's first atom bomb was rejected Monday by the Los Alamos County Council. ... Nearly a dozen children, many of whom left the council chambers Monday in tears, told council members that they had signatures from 41,379 children who have donated more than $20,000 toward construction of a statue and peace park.... In spurning the project, councilors cited concerns that the park could become a rallying point for peace activists and serve as an indictment of the town's role in the creating of nuclear weapons."

Tonya's Turkey Day

"Tonya Harding works twice a week at a senior center as part of the community service requirement of a criminal sentence arising from an attack on fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan," a wire-service story in the Milwaukee Journal reports. "But on Thanksgiving Day, she volunteered on her own to ... deliver meals to elderly shut-ins, including George Rogers, 80, of Gladstone [Oregon]. She came into his house with a group of reporters, cameramen, and photographers. They trampled his oxygen line in the process."

Now You Know

Newly elected U.S. Representative Sonny Bono (Republican of California) in a National Enquirer article entitled "I'm living proof you can have the American Dream": "Don't let a lack of qualifications stop you from pursuing your career goals. I was never qualified for any of the positions I achieved."

Domestic Violence Act I

Circuit Judge Robert Cahill (in the Chicago Tribune), on why he gave Kenneth Peacock of Towson, Maryland, only eighteen months in prison for killing his wife hours after finding her in bed with another man: "I seriously wonder how many men married five, four years would have the strength to walk without inflicting some corporal punishment.... I am forced to impose a sentence ... only because I think I must do it to make the system honest."

Domestic Violence Act II

New Jersey's new animal cruelty law was called extreme after one state resident landed in court for killing a rat that was eating his tomato plants. As a result, the Star Ledger reported: "The Senate yesterday passed a bill that would expand the list of activities exempted from the [law] to include the killing or disposal of a Norway brown rat, black rat, and house mouse." The Ledger quoted the bill's sponsor, Joseph Palaia (Republican of Monmouth), defending the legislation: "'People who beat their pets, deprive them of water or food, or needlessly kill and mutilate their animals should be treated as animals.'"

A World Safe for Democrats

Vice President Al Gore, in a recent New Yorker profile, renouncing remarks he made in letters he wrote as a college student opposing both the Vietnam war and the "national madness" regarding communism during the Cold War: "That's dead wrong, too. I have very strong, inveterate antipathy myself for communism."

Everyone's a Critic

From a story in the sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle: "Saturday's loss to Auburn may have been hard to swallow for Florida, but it won't keep Gators offensive tackle Anthony Ingrassia from sinking his teeth into his other role. Ingrassia writes a weekly restaurant review column in the student newspaper. It's called 'Anthony Digests'.... Using the helmet rating system (five helmets denotes culinary excellence), the six-foot-two, 296-pounder is picky about his tastes. ... For pure volume, the all-you-can-eat spaghetti restaurants are his favorite.... However, being a curious journalist, he did visit a Taco Bell once and ordered every item off the menu."

Barbie Gets Real

M.G. Lord, author of the new book Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, in U.S. News & World Report: "When women returned to run the Barbie line in the 1980s the doll's message became more realistic: 'We girls can do anything as long as we look like pinups.'"

Frontiers of Holiday Shopping

"Looking for something completely different for a holiday gift? Try moose droppings," suggests the Chicago Tribune. "Ecologically compatible gifts made from one of Maine's most common but least-used resources are being offered in the 1995 version of the 178-year-old Farmer's Almanac, now out. It's not as bad as it sounds. Winter moose manure is 99 percent wood.... The publication is offering earrings for $5.95, a key chain for $4.95 and a tie clasp for $4.95. Add $2 for shipping and handling."