Thursday, April 29, 2010

You Think the Warren Commission Was Bad. . .

Wait 'til we get streamrolled by the Obama Commission.

Patrick Martin with the details.
The deficit commission is co-chaired by former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Democratic former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles of North Carolina, two individuals long identified with advocating fiscal austerity. Every one of the 18 members of the commission is a proven defender of the profit system, and nearly all are multi-millionaires, including the longtime president of the Service Employees International Union, Andrew Stern, the lone representative of “labor” on the panel.

The initial session of the commission featured a series of high-profile witnesses, beginning with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, who both declared that the trillion-dollar federal deficits now projected by the administration are unsustainable. Bernanke said, “The reality is that the Congress, the administration and the American people will have to choose among making modifications to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, restraining federal spending on everything else, accepting higher taxes, or some combination thereof.”

Congressional Democrats sounded the same theme. Senator Richard Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip and a member of the commission, said that “bleeding heart liberals” had to be open to cuts in entitlement programs as part of a deficit reduction plan.

The most categorical call for austerity came from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, in an op-ed column published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Shared Sacrifices Will Solve the Debt Crisis.” Declaring that “the greatest driver of our long-term deficit is rapidly growing entitlement and health-care spending,” the Democratic congressman said the commission “could recognize that Americans are living longer and raise the retirement age over a period of years.”

Both Hoyer and Budget Director Orszag cited the budget crises in Europe—with Greece, Portugal and now Spain having their debt ratings downgraded and credit drying up—as a warning to the United States. Hoyer wrote, “Americans may be wondering whether the Greek financial crisis could happen here. It will—unless we change course.” Orszag said in his testimony to the deficit commission, “The goal is to get ahead of an adverse financial market reaction.”

This is part of a concerted effort to blame the ongoing financial crisis and economic slump on “excessive” and “profligate” spending on the needs of ordinary Americans, rather than on financial speculation and plundering by Wall Street. The Greek events are being used as a pretext to justify austerity policies within the United States that would supposedly preempt a similar crisis.

Obama sounded the theme of “equal sacrifice” in his own remarks to the commission, in which he blamed the crisis, in the final analysis, on the American people, citing “the reality familiar to every single American—it’s a lot easier to spend a dollar than to save one. That’s what, at root, led to these exploding deficits. And that is what will lead to a day of reckoning.”

The gargantuan federal deficit is not, however, the product of poor decisions by “the American people.” It is a product of the worldwide crisis of the profit system and the drive by the American ruling elite to secure its global domination, both against capitalist rivals in other countries and against the working class at home.

Hoyer was compelled to admit in his Wall Street Journal column that the rapid increase in the US national debt is the product of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (launched by Bush and continued by Obama), the bailout of Wall Street (begun by Bush and continued by Obama), and the ongoing recession (which began under Bush and continues under Obama). In other words, corporate America, not the working people, is responsible for this crisis.