EVERYWHERE, from the motor car industry to the mines of Appalacia, the US working class is struggling for its jobs and its trade union and democratic rights, with right to work (for low pay) laws and other union-busting legislation being pushed through in a number of US states.
However, the Obama plan to cut health and welfare by hundreds of billions of dollars could well be the straw that, not so much breaks the camel’s back, but proves to be unbearable, and leads to the working class breaking with the Democrats.
This is all the more likely since the Republicans will demand further major attacks on the workers by Obama before they step back from their threat to jump over the edge of the fiscal cliff, taking the USA and the rest of the planet with them.
The head of the AFL-CIO trade union federation, Richard Trumka, has issued the following statement on Obama’s budget proposals.
He wrote: ‘A president’s budget is more than just numbers. It is a profoundly moral document. We believe cutting Social Security benefits and shifting costs to Medicare beneficiaries – while exempting corporate America from shared sacrifice – is wrong and indefensible.
‘The administration’s budget cuts cost-of-living increases for current and future Social Security beneficiaries by $130 billion over 10 years, and much more in future years. It shifts $64 billion in healthcare costs to Medicare beneficiaries over 10 years. Yet despite closing some loopholes, it calls for corporate income tax reform that is “revenue neutral” – meaning it fails to ask big, profitable corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.
‘The Obama budget also continues to demand more sacrifice from federal employees than from Wall Street. Federal employees did not cause the Great Recession. They did not cause the deficits that resulted from the Great Recession. Yet their pay and their retirement keeps getting cut. Why?
‘Putting aside the injustice of demanding sacrifice from the innocent while letting the guilty off scot-free, the Obama budget falls short of putting our economy on a path towards higher wages and full employment. As we have said many times, the greatest economic challenge facing America is the jobs crisis, not the deficit. Yet the administration cuts the part of the budget that pays for investments in worker training and jobs, which has already been cut to its lowest level since the Eisenhower administration, by another $100 billion. This austerity budget is bad economic policy at a moment when the economy remains weak and we urgently need more job-creating investments.’
It ends: ‘Last November, working Americans voted for jobs and growth, not for budget austerity and benefit cuts. We urge the President to drop these cuts and build support for investing in jobs.’
The president’s office describes his budget as one that ‘would replace the across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester with smarter ones, making long-term reforms, eliminating actual waste and programmes that are no longer needed.
‘And finally, because he is willing to make tough choices and serious about finding common ground to further reduce the deficit, President Obama’s budget incorporates his compromise offer he made to House Speaker Boehner that achieves another $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction in a balanced way.
‘When combined with the deficit reduction already achieved, this will exceed the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, while growing the economy and strengthening the middle class.’
Across the USA cities are going broke, like Detroit and Stockton. They are now piles of rubble and are either going bankrupt or have been put under a dictator as has Detroit. With the elected city officials sacked, his mission is to screw the debt out of the city’s inhabitants.
There is only one way forward for the US workers. It is to break with the Democrats and build a Labour Party to mobilise the middle class, working class and the poor for the struggle for socialism.
Absolutely vital for this struggle will be the establish- ment, rapidly, of the US section of the Fourth International.
