After shifting a $42 billion deficit on to the backs of the workers and middle class of California, the politicians of both capitalist parties are gearing up for more attacks as the deficit projected for next fiscal year (ending in July 2010) is already $8 billion and will surely grow.
Amid all the hype about hope and the Pollyanna, cult of personality atmosphere that dominates American political life, the reality is that more attacks are on the way. Politicians whose task it is to carry out the cuts at the local level, call meetings of those whose votes they sought under false pretenses to map out a plan to institute the cuts. Workers gather together in little groups at these community forums and are presented with one agenda item only: where should the cuts occur?
The heads of organized Labor do the same, showing their democratic credentials by calling their members forth to discuss how they cut their own throats. The big business politicians and their allies atop organized Labor are champions of democracy and community involvement when the issue on the table is layoffs or wage cuts, layoffs or reduced social services, less jobs or fewer classrooms with less subjects and increased workloads for those teaching them. "let them make the decision" they tell each other in order to lay the blame after as the pain hits.
Eventually people get worn down as seeing no united way forward division, internal squabbling over who should be cut first or the most and other far more dangerous social chasm's open up. The relatively comfortable and well connected liberal middle classes on the local city council, school board or well off Union officials who set the whole thing up can then point to the ignorance of American workers or our inherent failures and selfishness.
"Can't they see" they echo in chorus, "there's just no money to spare. We all have to make sacrifices for the nation.
As they cry crocodile tears while carrying out the dictates developed in the board rooms of the few hundred corporations that control society we watch as some $3 trillion is handed over to the perpetrators of this fraud, the the capitalists, yes that's what they call themselves in their papers, to the capitalists who caused the problem in the first place. They are about to hand over trillions more through the "toxic asset" relief program that Treasury Secretary Geitner (the man who forgot to pay his taxes) has announced.
With our organizations suffocating under the stifling weight of the Union bureaucracy and having no mass political party of our own, the forces against us are formidable--but not insurmountable. We don't have to accept their reality, their analysis of the problems or their solution to it.
One thing that is blatantly obvious is that the Democratic Party, an insidious and bitter enemy of working class people cannot show a way forward. Noreen Evans, the California state assembly's budget chairwoman, whines that "we have cut way past the bone at this point" referring to the past budget deal. This member of a political party that the heads of organized Labor supported and handed over some $400 million of its members' hard earned dues money to had more to say about the future, "California residents are going to feel a reduction in services--there's just no way around that."
There you have it.
We don't have to accept it though.
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