Budget ‘debate’ conceals cuts for retirees & poor

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Feminism is ‘pro-life’ — 6 Post office closures — 9 With blazing hyperbole and drama, corporate America pulled off yet an­ other multi-trillion-dollar rip-off of working people in the course of the fake “budget debate.” This time, the consciously orchestrated scenario included a government shutdown that furloughed 800,000 federal workers and left another million working without pay.

Added to the mix was the Tea Party/ Republican Party threat to prevent the government from raising the debt ceil­ ing another trillion dollars or so to avoid an almost unprecedented default of the U.S. government to its creditors around the world.

The capitalist media played on these themes to the hilt, bringing in the top leaders of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to warn of the catastrophic consequences to the world economy of a U.S. default. The “liberal” New York Times attacked the Republi­ cans and their Tea Party associates for brinksmanship and praised President Obama for standing firm in refusing to de-fund his Obamacare. Obama swore that he would not budge in defense of his plan and took to the airwaves to denounce his “fanatic” Republican op­ ponents.

The Oct. 17 New York Times captured the hype attendant to the debate in a six-column banner headline: “Repub­ licans Back Down in Fiscal Standoff.” The “news analysis” article stated, “For the Republicans who despise presi­ dent Obama’s health care law, the last few weeks should have been a singu­ lar moment to turn its botched rollout into an argument against it. Instead, in a futile campaign to strip the law of federal money, the party focused harsh scrutiny on its own divisions, hurt its national standing and undermined its ability to win concessions from the Democrats. Then they surrendered al­ most unconditionally.”

All the while, the pollsters chimed in with near daily reports regarding who was scoring the most points and what that might foretell for the next elec­ tion cycle. Wall Street’s biggest bankers threatened disaster—a plunging stock market, a damaging rise in interest rates, an end to the tiny housing con­ struction “recovery,” and the beginning of a worldwide economic meltdown.

But discounting the undeniable fact that U.S. and world capitalism do face an unprecedented crisis—which we will explain below—it was all a lie! In that regard, we recall that Shakespeare had the beleaguered Macbeth cry out in an­ guish over what he saw as the meaning­ less of our passage through this world: “Life … is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In the current context, Macbeth’s cry would handily sum up life in Washing­ ton politics, except that, in the present case, it would signify almost nothing. Bail-outs for the rich This “almost nothing” took place in a series of secret and concluding nego­ tiations between the representatives of the twin parties of capitalism to ham­ mer out an agreement, already signaled by Obama himself, to impose massive cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Med­ (Left) Congress shut down the government for 16 days, denying jobs and services to millions, during phony budget debate.

icaid, and other social programs, while lowering the tax rates of the corporate elite and ruling-class few to virtually unprecedented levels. Indeed, Obama had already sig­ naled his intention to reduce cor­ porate tax rates from 35 percent to perhaps 28 percent and to essen­ tially reduce tax rates on the accu­ mulated billions and trillions held by U.S. multi-national corporations in foreign banks to sufficiently low levels so as to entice their repatria­ tion.

These provisions are expected to become law when Congress meets to “debate” the Tax Code Overhaul legislation now in preparation. To be sure, the fine print will reveal additional trillions in grants to the rich. Working people are never a party to preparing such legislation. This is left to the corporate elite, who literally draft the desired lan­ guage that is ratified by their “dem­ ocratically elected” representatives. The result, as with the Decem­ ber 2012 Fiscal Cliff “crisis,” wherein trillions of dollars were slashed from social programs— “sequestration” was the term em­ ployed at the time—and trillions more were gifted to the elite by extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich that “saved” them a neat $4 trillion. This was yet another finger in the dike to prop up their failing predatory sys­ tem.

In each and every instance U.S. and world capitalism’s deepening crises are temporarily “solved” by robbing the working masses and bailing out the plundering rich.

George Bush’s last days in office saw Federal Reserve chief Benjamin Ber­ nanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson rush into the Congress to pro­ claim that if the three-page $700 billion bank bailout proposal they had drafted in consultation with the richest bank­ ers in the nation were not approved immediately, the nation’s entire bank­ ing and insurance systems would face a catastrophic meltdown. For those who might think that this image is a bit ex­ aggerated, not long afterward, the New York Times published a photograph of these corporate titans sitting around the stereotyped long corporate board­ (continued on page 10, in “Insurgents Take Over Apwu”)

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