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Obama and the debt ceiling

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Instead, it declared that the origins of the crisis "go back decades," to Franklin Roosevelt, who established Social Security and began the creation of the "entitlement society." This was expanded through the creation of Medicare, Medicaid and other social benefits, which the mouthpiece of finance capital describes as "redistribution programs."

Here is the class logic that underlies the increasingly open assault on social programs for working people. From the standpoint of the capitalist class, all social benefits are deductions from their profits, a redistribution to the working people of trillions that would otherwise flow into the coffers of the bankers and billionaires. Under conditions of deepening financial crisis on a global scale, the ruling elite is driven to claw back everything it can by destroying benefits won by working people in struggles over many decades.

To fight against this policy of social counter-revolution, the working class requires above all an understanding of the class character of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. Obama is not a too timid "progressive," as his liberal apologists from the New York Times to the Nation magazine would have it. He is the most trusted instrument of the financial aristocracy, wholly devoted to defending the interests of Wall Street.

To fight this historic assault on their living standards, working people must put aside any illusions in Obama, break with the Democratic Party, and build an independent mass party of the working class, based on a socialist and internationalist program.

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Patrick Martin writes for the World Socialist Website (wsws.org), a forum for socialist ideas & analysis & published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
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