Obama and Boehner represent the US financial aristocracy, which is seeking to make use of the orchestrated crisis over the raising of the federal debt ceiling to create the conditions for an unprecedented attack on the living standards and social rights of working people.
The latest proposal introduced by the House Republicans would condition an increase in the debt ceiling on $3 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, to be enacted in two stages. An initial $1.2 trillion would incorporate all the cuts in non-entitlement programs already accepted by the Obama administration in talks led by Vice President Joseph Biden. A further $1.8 trillion, including cuts in Medicare and Social Security, would be worked out by a bipartisan congressional committee and adopted by next January.
The latest Democratic plan was put forward Monday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. It would raise the debt ceiling immediately, rather than in two stages, and provide for $2.7 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, with no tax increases. Reid proposed to put off cuts in Medicare and Social Security until after the 2012 election and instead count as a spending cut the planned decline in military spending due to the draw-down of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Both plans embrace the same $1.2 trillion in cuts in non-entitlement programs, which will have devastating effects on the social infrastructure, particularly education, the environment and transportation, as their first stage.
The principal difference is that the Republican plan calls for a two-step process that would force a second vote on raising the debt ceiling and slashing social programs, particularly entitlement spending, sometime in 2012, a provision whose transparent purpose is to help mobilize the ultra-right Tea Party elements and depress traditional Democratic Party turnout in the elections.
In his television speech, Obama endorsed the Reid plan, which demonstrates that his rhetoric about taxing the wealthy is just hot air. He now backs a plan that provides zero tax increases on the rich, abandoning even the pretense of "shared sacrifice."
In the official Washington debate, the needs and interests of working people count for nothing. Obama pitches his campaign for raising the debt ceiling entirely to the financial concerns of Wall Street, while the Republicans respond with an ever more brutal defense of the "right" of the wealthy to keep every penny they have plundered from the working class.
The working class must oppose any and all calls for sacrifice, whether in the name of deficit reduction or to avert a federal government default after August 2. Working people are not responsible for the Wall Street crash, or the economic slump that followed, or the massive federal deficits generated by the slump and the bailout of the banks.
If the capitalist politicians in Washington touch off a financial crisis through their maneuvers, that will only underscore the irresponsibility and recklessness of the American financial aristocracy.
The response to such a crisis must not be "shared sacrifice," but the launching of a political struggle by the working class to put an end to the profit system, through a break with the Democrats and Republicans and the building of an independent political movement of working people based on a socialist program.
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