The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

EDITORIAL
Super Committee, Super Fraud

Nov 28, 2011

The “Super Committee” failed! The TV “news” programs wailed and the politicians threw invective at each other.

Fail? No, the “Super Committee” didn’t fail. It did exactly what it was supposed to do–and that was to make propaganda for the outrageous presumption that the population should pay for the mess that the bankers and other capitalists created.

What a fraud!

Certainly, both parties would have been content if the Super Committee had come up with a clever way to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid–to cut them, that is, without the population realizing what had been done.

But with elections coming up, neither Republicans nor Democrats were eager to take the blame for attacking programs so vital for such a large part of the population–and electorate!

And so both parties pulled back, attacked each other and looked toward the 2012 elections.

They had pushed through enormous cuts in public services, social programs and education already this year. In April, both parties agreed on 38-billion-dollars worth of cuts in these vital necessities, followed by a deal they cut in July for one-trillion-dollars worth of cuts, plus another 1.2-trillion-dollars worth of “automatic” cuts if the Super Committee couldn’t come up with a deal.

The “Super Committee” was little more than a carnival sideshow, a honky-tonk circus that blared out one refrain, over and over: “Sacrifice.”

The U.S. has a debt crisis–so the Super Committee’s story went–so “everyone” must sacrifice.

It’s true that the U.S. national debt has been jumping up, from month to month. The current annual budget deficit is running about 1.5 trillion dollars this year–compared to half a trillion before the recession hit. And the yearly deficits have led to an accumulated debt of 15 trillion dollars, roughly the same as the total GDP, the measure of all the goods and services produced in this country for the year.

Yeah, it’s true, that’s a big debt. But it’s not true that “everyone” should sacrifice–“everyone” did not cause the debt, nor benefit from it.

The banks benefitted from the debt–raking in trillions of dollars in the government bailout.

So did the military and the military contractors. For years, money spent on the military has been more than the total amount of the year’s budget deficit. And for what? To carry out wars in the interests of the oil companies. To carry out wars in the interests of the biggest banks in the world, the Wall Street banks. To award every major company in the country with boondoggle, cost-plus-assured-profit military contracts.

The wealthy have their dirty fingerprints all over the debt–with tax rates that have been brought down decade after decade, ever since 1963. Today, they pay a lower actual tax rate than do middle income taxpayers.

So, if there is a debt crisis, let those who caused it and benefitted from it pay to bring down the debt.

Let the banks give back some of those trillions in government money they squirreled away. Let the big military contractors cough it up. Squeeze some trillions out of the oil companies and the banks whose forays around the world drove the army into action.

And let the top politicians and the generals kick in their share, while they’re at it. They shift back and forth between government, military and big business, always with their hands out, every step of the way.

Don’t let a one of them dare come to the population, demanding payment.

“Super Committee”? No, it’s only another Super Fraud!