Obama, Congress call for austerity; U.S. workers are their prime target

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While their European competitors impose countrywide austerity plans, and their Chinese trade rivals focus on continued state support for booming industries, capitalists here at home seek to boost their global competitive stance, and overcome their profitability crisis, with their longstanding policy of misery by a thousand cuts. That means attacking the U.S. working class for the most part—one industry, one policy, one benefit at a time.

But the absence of resistance to such cuts has emboldened both ruling political parties to go after bigger game. The most threatening example at the moment is the call by the co-chairs of Obama’s “Deficit Reduction Commission” in late November for a drastic overhaul of Social Security. The co-chair of the commission, Alan Simpson, told the executive director of the National Older Women’s League that Social Security was “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

Co-chairs Simpson and Erskine Bowles would like to gradually raise the early retirement age from 62 to 64 and the standard retirement age from 67 to 69. They would reduce scheduled benefits for better-off retirees and use a less-generous measure of inflation to calculate cost-of-living increases. The commission co-chairs also want to keep taxes low for corporations and the rich, but eliminate or slash tax benefits for workers’ health care and housing.

Liberal columnists have pointed out that Social Security is self-financing, and so it is an odd target for a body charged with reducing a deficit to which the program doesn’t contribute.

National Nurses United pointed out that delayed retirement is a particular burden for workers in occupations like nursing with tremendous physical pressures. NNU also noted that the commission’s goals are designed to allow “high-income earners to continue to receive tax breaks and our endless Middle Eastern wars [to] continue unabated.”

Another “budget-balancing panel”—headed by Alice Rivlin, a budget director under President Bill Clinton, and Pete Domenici, a former Republican senator from New Mexico—issued a report that largely mirrored the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles Commission. And both panels’ proposed cuts will be reinforced by parallel attacks at state and municipal levels, carried out simultaneously but separately in each governmental entity—thus fragmenting potential labor response in the absence of more far-seeing leadership.

The Washington Post reported, “Consensus is forming on what steps to take in cutting the deficit.” This bipartisan consensus includes “big cuts at the Pentagon. Higher taxes, including those on home ownership and Jin Lee / Bloomberg (Above) April 2010 march on Wall Street, organized by the AFL-CIO. Labor officials have done little to lead fight against government cutback demands.

health care. Smaller Social Security checks and higher Medicare premiums.” We can be sure the Pentagon cuts will be minimized. But they’re dead serious about the rest, as well as others not named—especially attacks on pensions and job security for public workers.

Reports from a recent meeting of state governors said (continued on page 3, in “A right turn in U.S. politics?”)