The Fiscal Cliff Explained with faulty conservative conclusion! Kill Grandma you don’t need her: Give SS income to Jamie Diamonds Bonus pool party.
by jonkirby2012 When Not a moments gone by after our US elections and the republicans and their fascist friends have come out already with their fictitious fiscal cliff addage and here in Forbes we have it explained why the wealthiest 1% should get a social contract while their businesses are paying them huge bonuses at the same time we should destroy a social protection system built-in since the last great depression from the 1930′s which seems that we are far exceeding in our current times and it just makes no sense. This surely will destroy whats left of the libertarians and the tea party and well as the grand GOP. The Fascist dictates of Romney have been beat and this has great effect on the elite whom spent fortunes to almost beat Obama the electoral swing is large but the popular vote only by 300K won Obama something like he won by .26 % a very close call for the nation. As hard as Obama and Biden tried to throw the election to Romney the minority voters were roused to come out to vote when Bushes brain Rove concocted ways to close the election early and deprive minority voters this actually backfired and minority voters came in droves to Obama’s rescue. But no fear Obama is right now working on the grand sellout explained by this conservative online rag why we should commit genocide to the American people.
No to Austerity: Wall street Sales tax!!
The analysis is good but the conclusion is pathethic. The Real Answer should be screamed from roof top to roof top there should be no attacking Social safety nets and 80% Americans support that Idea too.
What should be done is a financial sales tax say 1% on all financial transactions WALL STREET TAX that could move than generate enough income to even get all domestic programs flying high again. And why not currently they pay no tax for their ill gotten gains and they are the ones that got us all in this mess!!
The FED needs to be Taken away from private hands! and terra tranches at 0% interest to all states for the purpose of capital infastructure and JOBS JOBS JOBS. these are real solutions. Austerity is madness played out before your eyes in europe a neverending spiral of debt that strangles you while the banking family chokes on the wealth of nations.
Warning: Conservative view points and conclusions ahead.. The Fiscal Cliff Explained
It’s the phrase that will be dominating the airwaves in the days and months to come as the pundits and prognosticators leave the 2012 election behind and turn their attention to dire predictions of economic collapse should the
government allow us to tumble over “the fiscal cliff.”
So, exactly what is the fiscal cliff and why is everyone so worried about it?
At its core, this economic event destined to dominate our lives for the foreseeable future is an accident of timing resulting in a one-two punch.
Think of it as the economic version of Hurricane Sandy that ripped through the northeast in the past few weeks. On its own, the hurricane could cause a lot of damage. However, when two additional weather fronts—that just happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time—combined with the hurricane, Sandy became an exponentially devastating storm, causing loss of life and billions upon billions in property losses.
One hopes that nobody will die as a result of the fiscal cliff. However, it is very serious, indeed.
If economists are correct, the failure to resolve this problem could send the U.S. economy into a severe contraction as money is sucked out of our pockets due to a rise in the tax payments that will be required of the average American family at the very same time less money will be flowing into our pockets due to dramatic cuts in government spending.
It begins with the December 31, 2012 expiration of the Bush tax cuts. These were originally scheduled to expire at the end of 2010 but were extended two years ago in a horse trade between President Obama and the GOP controlled Congress. You may recall the December deal, following on the heels of the Republican wave election victory of 2010, wherein President Obama agreed to continue the tax cuts for all Americans in exchange for Congress agreeing to extend long-term unemployment benefits for the many Americans who were out of work.
Should the Bush tax cuts now be permitted to expire, taxes will go up for most Americans—an increase that would extend to the taxes we pay on our earnings, investments and inheritance along with the removal of a number of tax incentives that have been made available to businesses for things such as research and development.
But the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is just the beginning.
The temporary, two percent reduction in payroll taxes that the Obama administration pushed through so that consumers could have a few more dollars to spend is also scheduled to end on December 31 of this year along with the long term unemployment benefit extension mentioned above.
Adding to the misery is the reality that, beginning on January 1, some 26 million households will again become subject to the alternative minimum tax which is estimated to raise taxes for many Americans by as much as $3,700.
When it is all said and done, the expectation is that the average American household will be paying $2,000 to $3,000 more in taxes each year—leaving them with $2,000 to $3,000 less to spend in our consumer driven economy.
Not a good thing as we struggle to get the economy on a more solid footing.
But we’ve only just gotten started.
While the expiration of all these laws that have provided Americans a measure of tax relief dating back to 2001 will deliver the ‘set up’ punch, the ‘closer’ comes from the sudden and immediate reduction in government spending that hits on January 1—courtesy of the failure of the White House and the Congressional GOP to reach a more reasonable agreement in 2011 to resolve the debt ceiling crisis.
This is the ‘sequester’ you’ve heard so much about.
The cuts hit all areas of the federal budget, including
a $55 billion reduction to the Pentagon’s budget in 2013,
a reduction of payments to physicians participating in Medicare, substantial cuts to FEM A and
the Dept. of Education budget
along with a host of serious reductions across the wide ranging operations of the federal government.
What’s more, few players on either side of the political aisle actually like these large budget cuts.
While many welcome spending cuts that will begin to deal with our dangerously high national deficit, the speed and immediacy of these cuts—coming at a time when the economy remains in a precarious position made all the more complicated by the scheduled rise in the tax obligations discussed above—could have a very negative impact on the economy.
Bear in mind that Congress passed the sequester never really intending it to go into effect. The idea had been to create legislation that would produce spending cuts so distasteful to both sides of the aisle that its mere existence would force everyone involved to come up with a more acceptable deal in order to allow the debt ceiling to rise.
As you will remember, that deal was never achievable, leaving us to face these draconian reductions that hit in January.
When you add up the increased payment of taxes and the cuts in government spending, we are looking at taking somewhere around $800 billion out of the U.S. economy next year—producing the potential for devastating consequences.
So, are we all just toast or is there something that can be done? (Ans: Tax wall street!, Corp want to be people then act like people and tax them too, but don’t kill grandma!)
Certainly, the fiscal cliff can be avoided.
Warning: Here comes the crazy Conservative answers…
It simply involves Congress and the White House coming to terms on a deal that will extend the Bush tax cuts for some or for all—along with the possibility of also extending some additional items of tax relief such as the 2 percent payroll tax cuts—for an additional period of time so as to avoid an economic catastrophe resulting from Americans having less money to spend. At the same time, the parties would need to work out an agreement on how to lower our deficit without throwing the economy into a tailspin by abruptly removing too much of the large amounts of money the government spends in our economy each and every year, money that comprises a significant contribution to our GDP.
(Yeah like Afghanistan war perhaps.)
Of course, it is not really so simple at all given that our political parties disagree on how this should all be done.
President Obama has drawn what appears to be a strong line in the sand, insisting that the Bush tax cuts be extended for everyone except those who earn more than $250,000 a year.
The President believes that the additional money that would flow into the government from the highest earners via slightly higher taxes would allow government to proceed with its plans to cut the deficit without having to go forward with all of the intense and immediate cuts to government services and programs scheduled to take place in 2013. There would still be cuts to the government budget, however, with the increased revenue coming in from the nation’s highest earners, the cuts would not be quite so severe as they would be spread out over a longer period of time, thereby having less of an impact on the total economy.
When you couple a less painful reduction in government spending with Obama’s plan to leave the overwhelming majority of Americans untouched by any tax increases, he believes we can accomplish the goal of starting the process of reducing our deficit without throwing the nation into an economic tailspin.
The Congressional Republicans are insistent that the tax cuts be extended to all Americans, including the highest earners. At the same time, they argue that some new taxes set to go into effect, most particularly some taxes created by the Affordable Care Act, should be repealed in the belief that that these new taxes will put a further strain on business and, therefore, the economy.
The Congressional GOP would also like to see the cuts to the government budget remain significant—however they do not like where some of the cuts being made, most particularly, the cuts to the defense budget. Were the GOP to have its way, the cuts would extend far more into government entitlement programs rather than being placed on the defense side of the spending equation.
(Sorry fascist this is genicide at a time with highest unemployment and austerity doesn’t work)
Republicans additionally argue that forcing our highest earners —the people Republicans like to call ‘job creators’—to pay more in taxes will have a detrimental impact on business—particularly small business—and that will result in fewer jobs at a time when job creation is priority number one.
(let wall street pay)
These issues are where the battle lines have been drawn. (little minds with little answers )
Clearly, compromise is required if we are to avoid tumbling over the edge of this fiscal cliff. The problem is that the word compromise, once a ten-letter word, has become a four-letter word among many of the more extreme Republicans who have entered the House of Representatives and the Senate over the past few elections. And, to be fair, Democrats are rarely in a compromising mood when it comes to cuts to entitlement programs.
(NO YOU CANT COMPROMISE WITH FASCIST they are too far right of center for that)
The end result is that our dysfunctional government is about to face one of its most significant tests.
Failure to work towards a compromise will leave every American exposed to the dangers of a reversal in the economy at a time when it appears to finally be getting its legs underneath itself.
But compromise will only come if Americans insist on intelligent, reasonable behavior on the part of our elected officials—behavior that has been sadly missing largely because so much of the American public has given up on the time honored benefits of meeting in the middle.
In recent years, too many Americans have been unwilling to acknowledge that well-intentioned people of different political ideologies have the right to contribute to the discussion, instead believing that a “my way or the highway” approach is the way to go. Well, we are now coming to the end of that highway and Americans have a choice. (but your insisting your way is ONLY correct and it isn’t, there are other options and good ones.
seize the FED,
Debt moritorium,
comedown on corp. tax dodgers,
Wall street sales tax,
Bush tax on the upper tax brackets,
Jail the banksters,
recover the tarp funds…
Develope programs that invest in society and pay back the treasury like your labor force..etc)
If we open our ears and minds to what our political opponents have to say and recognize that this is their country too, we can create an environment where the politicians will have no choice but to do the same. Remember, if the politicians go down in a blaze of political posturing and spiteful recrimination, they are taking us down with them.
The good news is that you have more to say about this than you think. You and I send these people to Washington and you and I can bring them right back home again if they don’t pay attention.
So let your elected representatives know you are watching. Send them emails encouraging them to be open to compromise. ( your suggesting on social cuts and i say NO , there are alternative!)
Let them know that you are paying attention and that you do not intend to be forgiving if these boneheads blow up our economy because they cannot behave like grown-ups.
Remember that, despite your own strongly held beliefs and principles, when government properly performs its role, nobody gets everything they want and nobody loses everything they want. And if you find that idea troublesome, try to keep in mind that this is precisely how America became great.
Do that, and this will all have a much happier ending for all Americans.
(You odviously represent the corporate position but killing grandma’s social security is not going to make everyone except your ilk happy)
from Forbes propaganda machine.
————————————-
My additional comment:
I agree write your congress and tell them what you think! Granny or jamies diamonds next big bonus party? you decide.
I say Wall street should pay and the FED should be seized and jobs should be the order of the day. No to Austerity doesn’t work and highly distructive spiral down policy that increases the debt! End result is happening like in europe right now all the countries have agreed to sacrifice their sovereignty to combine into a central bank where Rothschilds own daughter had them sign the paperwork over in belgium. The individuals countries can no longer make fiscal decisions for their own country and no possibility of exiting the relationship. check it out is this what you want. A manufactered crises where your answer is lose your sovereignty well thats what their engineering right before your eyes. Goal one world currency.
You will be hearing alot about Fiscal cliff during this lame duck session this wont be last time we go over this! Webster Tarpley has said this issue would be coming weeks ago and
did a very NICE show on the subject and gave good solutions in his world
crises radio show have a listen..
Jordan Davis, Teen Shot Over Loud Music, Compared To Trayvon Martin
By JACOB JORDAN
11/30/12 06:20 PM ET EST
ATLANTA — The fatal shooting of a Florida teenager who was
listening to loud music in a car a week ago has drawn comparisons to the
Trayvon Martin case, but the differences are significant.
Unlike the Martin case, several people witnessed this shooting and
there was no scuffle before 17-year-old Jordan Davis was shot to death.
And notably, the man accused of firing into the car was arrested a day
later.
Michael David Dunn is charged with murder and attempted
murder in the Nov. 23 shooting at a Jacksonville, Fla., gas station. The
45-year-old Dunn parked beside the sport utility vehicle occupied by
Davis and three other young men and told them to turn the music down,
police said. Dunn exchanged words with Davis, who was in the back seat,
and started firing. He later told police he felt threatened. His
attorney has said Dunn saw a gun and shot in self-defense, perhaps
laying the ground work for a case under Florida's "stand your ground"
law.
Since the shooting, Davis' family has received an outpouring of
support from the community. A "Justice for Jordan" Facebook page was set
up and his classmates gathered at a memorial service with T-shirts
showing Davis' smiling face. Fire trucks saluted him by spraying water
over an airplane carrying his body to Atlanta while it was on the
runway. The teen's mother lives near Marietta, and a funeral is
scheduled for Davis Saturday at the Trinity Chapel Church of God in
Powder Springs.
Davis' father, Ron, said his son was a typical high school junior who
was getting ready to start his first job at McDonald's, looking forward
to buying his first car and turning 18 early next year. He had a
"million-dollar smile" and liked music, listening to mostly rap but also
the sounds of his dad's generation, including James Brown and The
Temptations.
Standing over his son's casket, Ron Davis promised to fight laws that allow people to carry guns outside of their homes.
"Law enforcement should be the only people who should have guns on
the street," he said. "That's what's killing our kids more than
anything."
Police said they didn't find a weapon in the SUV with the young men,
and Ron Davis said he doesn't believe Dunn's claim that he saw a gun. He
thinks Dunn is searching for an explanation.
"They were just 17-year-old kids that were having a good time, coming from the mall," he said.
The
shooting has revived the debate over Florida's "stand your ground" law,
which allows people to use deadly force if they believe their life is
in imminent danger. Dunn's attorney hasn't said whether she will argue
the shooting was justified under the statute.
The law came under harsh criticism after Martin was shot in February
by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who believed the
teenager was acting suspicious. Martin and Zimmerman got into a fight
and Zimmerman said he thought Martin was reaching for his gun.
Authorities didn't arrest Zimmerman for more than a month after the
shooting, adding to the furor.
"This case is so far from Trayvon Martin's case," Ron Davis said.
University of Miami law professor Tamara Lave, who has closely followed the Martin case, agreed.
"I don't see how he is going to prevail under `stand your ground,'"
Lave, a former public defender in San Diego for 10 years, said of Dunn.
"You're allowed to own a gun. Even if there was a gun in the car, that
doesn't mean the gun was used to threaten him in any way."
The shooting unfolded about 7:40 p.m. when Dunn stopped at the gas
station with his girlfriend after going to his son's wedding, police
said. Dunn's girlfriend went into the store, and he told the young men
to turn the music down.
"It was loud, they admitted that, but that's not a reason for someone
to open fire on them and take action," Jacksonville Sheriff's Lt. Rob
Schoonover said.
Dunn fired eight or nine shots into the car and Davis was hit a couple of times, police said. Dunn's girlfriend ran outside.
"When she came out, she said, `What's going on?' and supposedly his
statement was, `I just fired at these kids,'" Schoonover said. "At that
time I don't know if he knew that he struck anyone in the vehicle."
Dunn and his girlfriend drove off and spent the night at a hotel.
Dunn was arrested a day later at his home in Satellite Beach, about 160
miles away, when police tracked his license plate.
He told detectives he had been in the process of turning himself in to a neighbor, who was in law enforcement.
"His side of the story is he felt threatened and that is the reason he took action," Schoonover said.
Dunn was described by police as a gun collector who shot at local
ranges. His attorney, Robin Lemonidis, told The Florida Times-Union her
client "absolutely" saw someone with a shotgun in the SUV. She only said
"we'll see" if Florida's "stand your ground" law would be part of her
defense.
Police didn't know if Dunn had a concealed weapons permit, but said he had the gun for a "long period of time."
Lemonidis told the newspaper Dunn was "devastated that anyone was harmed in this instance."
Phone calls made to his relatives were not immediately returned.
Police said they were looking into whether alcohol was a factor, but
didn't know. Lemonidis said it was not. An assistant for her said she
did not want talk more about the case more until the trial.
Political Report to the United Front Against Austerity, New York City, October 27, 2012
Webster G. Tarpley Ph.D. TARPLEY.net
October 27, 2012
Over the next several months, the Wall Street ruling class and its
controlled politicians in the Republican and Democratic parties will
attempt to inflict a series of savage and brutal austerity measures on
the American people — measures which will add up to the initiation of
domestic genocide on an unprecedented scale. This will occur
irrespective of whether Obama or Romney has won the November
presidential election.
The reason we are gathered here is to hammer out a strategy to
attack, harass, disrupt, and defeat the forces of austerity, and — by
breaking the power of the Wall Street financiers, the hated 1% — to
prepare the political ground for an economic recovery program.
The Fiscal Cliff is a Big Lie
You have heard the buzz words of this austerity campaign. We are
told that we are approaching a horrendous fiscal cliff which must be
addressed during the lame-duck session of Congress. In reality, there
is no fiscal cliff — it is a myth invented by reactionaries and
proto-fascists. The lame-duck session suits Wall Street because many
congressmen will be defeated or retiring, and looking to Wall Street for
future jobs and lucrative consultancies. We are told we need a Grand
Bargain. In reality, the Grand Bargain will be orders of magnitude
worse than the Satan sandwich embraced by Obama and the Republicans in
August 2011, on the brink of a totally unnecessary US national
bankruptcy.
While many victims of the current system fix their attention on the
presidential contest, the preparations for murderous austerity are in
full swing behind the scenes in Washington. Leading the charge is the
so-called Gang of Eight in the United States Senate, more accurately
known as the Crapo Commission in honor of Republican Senator Mike Crapo
of Idaho, the reactionary Mormon who is one of its leading figures.
Other gangsters of the Gang of Eight include Saxby Chambliss of Georgia,
Lamar Alexander of the prison industrial complex, and Dick Durbin of
the corrupt Illinois bipartisan combine. These political gangsters are
now colluding with Obama to shred the economic rights acquired by the
American people over centuries of political, labor, and civil rights
struggles.
Backing up the Gang of Eight is the so-called Simpson-Bowles
commission, known more accurately as the Catfood Commission, since this
is what senior citizens will be reduced to living on if their demands go
through. Former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming is a decrepit
misanthrope who has left little doubt that he thinks senior citizens
should be exterminated to relieve the pressures
on the federal budget and open the door to bigger and better bailouts
of the Wall Street zombie banks in the near future. Erskine Bowles is a
former Morgan Stanley zombie banker himself who joined with Newt
Gingrich to wreck Social Security during the second Clinton
administration when he was White House Chief of Staff, and would have
succeeded — until Miss Lewinsky came along.
Wall Street Austerity Ghouls Run Wild
Halloween will soon be upon us, and the austerity ghouls are running
wild in the Witches’ Sabbath of class warfare against working people.
The Satanic orchestrator of much of this has over recent decades been
Peter Peterson, the former head of Lehman Brothers, the bank whose orgy
of derivatives speculation blew apart the world banking system four
years ago. But, against all evidence, Peterson and the Wall Street
faction he speaks for continue to argue that the current depression has
been caused by excessive spending on entitlements and the social safety
net, and not by hot money speculation, derivatives, and hedge funds —
which is what actually happened four years ago.
These are the forces with whom Obama has said he is “eager” to reach a grand bargain on the backs of the American people.
These will be killer cuts, following on years of bipartisan gouging,
chiseling, and shredding. Manual laborers will have to work many extra
years before they can get their pensions. The cost of living mechanism
will be tampered with to guarantee that monthly benefits for retirees
will dwindle rapidly over coming years. Be it by a death panel or by
the alleged “market,” Medicare will be rationed and denied. Medicaid
will be block granted to the states, meaning that more and more
middle-class families will be pauperized by the costs of keeping their
aged relatives in nursing homes. Unemployment benefits are already
paying for fewer and fewer weeks, and the Ninety-Niners have been
betrayed and forgotten. Pell grants, the only way low-income kids can
hope to attend college, will be on the chopping block. Child nutrition
programs like WIC and school lunches will also be targeted. Both
parties are targeting food stamps, the only remaining program keeping 50
million Americans alive — Americans who have no job, no unemployment
benefits, no welfare (Clinton ended welfare in 1996), and no healthcare.
If food stamps are cut, some of these people will die.
In the real world, between 30 and 40 million Americans who want and
need to work have no jobs. Republicans and Democrats are cooperating to
break the back of what remains of the labor movement. Romney and Ryan
demand that all states be forced to institute union-busting
right-to-work laws, of the kind that have just been rammed through by
Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana. Obama’s approach to union-busting is
more complex: along with education Secretary Arnie Duncan, he has
focused on busting the American Federation of Teachers, as for example
in the recent Chicago teachers’ strike. The goal of both parties,
backed up by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other 1%ers, is to privatize and
asset strip the public school systems of the United States, taking us
back centuries to a time when schooling was the prerogative of the
wealthy. Obama calculates that, since public workers are the vanguard
of today’s union movement, and since teachers are the strongest of the
public workers unions, smashing the teachers union will prepare the
ultimate demise of labor in this country. We should add that Obama’s
much touted program for General Motors and Chrysler rescued the holders
of bonds and derivatives, by forcing the once mighty United Auto Workers
to reduce wages and benefits to the abysmal levels of the right to work
sweatshop plants in the southern states.
Beyond the Two Party System
The two-party system has obviously become an intolerable straitjacket
for the political expression of the American people. It is now
necessary to create a mass movement outside of the two parties, a mass
movement at least strong enough to destabilize the existing power
combinations in the direction of constructive and radical reform. Each
party is a colossus with feet of clay. The Republican Party is
demographically doomed because its core constituency of white men is
dwindling as a proportion of the society. The Democratic Party is
increasingly a loose congeries of parochial interest groups, held
together only by support of the New Deal reforms. If Obama wins the
election, the Republican Party could well dwindle to a regional party of
racists and reactionaries in the deep South. In that case, the
Democratic Party might split into a Wall Street faction led by Obama and
a populist faction around Sherrod Brown, Kaptur, Defazio, and others.
If Romney becomes president, the Republicans will attempt to impose a
permanent plutocratic austerity dictatorship. This will involve a
restriction of the franchise by voter ID laws, by repeated purges of the
voting rolls, by limiting the hours of voting, and by harassment and
intimidation. Citizens United has opened the door to plutocratic and
oligarchical domination of elections. If Romney can name one or two
Supreme Court justices of the Scalia type, the way will be clear for
such a permanent dictatorship, most likely fronted by the Republican
Party. Naturally, such a low-wage sweatshop economy with no public
education, declining rates of college attendance, no child labor laws,
and a general atmosphere of Dickensian cruelty will not be able to
compete with China and others. But the thoroughly incompetent US ruling
class is unable to see beyond the prospect of short-term gain.
Replacing this incompetent ruling class is perhaps the greatest
historical necessity of all.
A Mass Movement Built Around Economic Demands
The required mass movement must be built on the most basic issues of
economic survival. We learned in the 1960s and 1970s that a foreign
war, unless the casualties mount to the millions, cannot be the basis
for a movement able to contend for power. We learned during the last
decade that even a foreign war combined with mass skepticism about a
false flag operation is also inadequate to the task. Process reforms
like campaign finance limitations will appeal to the good government
wing of the petty bourgeoisie, but this is also not enough. Only the
bedrock life or death issues of individual and family survival can impel
working people to enter the political fray with all its risks.
Union Busting and Drastic Austerity are the Essence of Fascism
So far there are no black shirted or brown shirted storm troopers in
American streets, and thus no classical Central European fascist
movement, but this is beside the point. In a country with an entrenched
tradition of elections and representative government, and a country
which is so far not reeling from millions of war dead on the scale of
World War I, fascism will inevitably look different in modern America,
but the essence is likely to be the same. The top priority for both
Mussolini and Hitler was to smash the trade union movement, and this is
something the United States is well on its way to achieving by more
gradual means. And then came the austerity. In Fascist Italy, the
Mussolini regime reduced wages between 1927 and 1935 by 60% to 75%, even
as the cost of living was rising by 30%. In Nazi Germany, Hitler cut
wages in his first 2 ½ years in power after 1933 by 25% to 40%. Taxes
and special contributions skimmed off another 20% to 30%. So, cutting
the standard of living of working people by two thirds to three quarters
appears as one of the essential features of fascism. Union busting and
austerity are fascism. We are here to fight that fascism.
Austerity Psychosis Gave Hitler Victory
We must also recall that it was austerity that gave Hitler political
victory. Anton Erlekenz was a moderate trade union official who
campaigned against the austerity psychosis in Germany in 1930-1932,
before Hitler seized power. He saw clearly that as long as millions
remained unemployed, the struggle against fascist ideology, no matter
how well intended and executed, was hopeless and doomed. Only by
replacing austerity with the recovery program and creating millions of
jobs could fascism be defeated.
If a democratic government in Germany had forced the central bank to
issue several billion marks of long-term, low-interest credit — as
demanded by the trade unionist Woytinsky and the civil servant
Lautenbach — the autobahns and superhighways could have been started in
1931 and 1932, putting millions of unemployed back to work. The loss of
millions of desperate supporters could have cut Hitler off at the
knees. Such a policy might have meant no Nazi dictatorship, and no
World War II in Europe. In the era of nuclear weapons, we are playing
for even bigger stakes today.
The democratic forms of representative government in this country
cannot and will not survive very long in the face of 30 to 40 million
unemployed.
Break Out of the Three-Step Process of Depression, Dictatorship, World War
Another word for austerity was and still is deflation, and Erlekenz
was right to say that if you want to stop fascism you must “put an end
to deflation, this immense destruction of labor, economic value, and
capital.” No polemics against fascist ideology, no matter how
brilliant, would do the job. No denunciation of fascist crimes, however
graphic, could win the argument against the hunger and despair coming
from unemployment.
In the 1930s, and they are relevant because we are now in a similar
depression, the world was caught in a three step process of economic
depression, totalitarian dictatorship, and world war. The totalitarian
dictatorship grew out of the collapse of representative government and
also of older authoritarian regimes. And the world war grew out of
depression scarcity as reflected through the inner dynamics of the
totalitarian governments.
The three phases are never neatly divided, but it ought to be clear
today that we are well into a depression, with forms of totalitarian
rule multiplying all around us, and clear rumblings of new international
conflicts soon to come. So what do we do?
We must deal with depression levels of unemployment before the
totalitarian dictatorship is fully realized, since under those
conditions organized political action may become virtually impossible.
We need to make sure that we supplement whatever we and our
organizations have been doing so far with a high priority struggle for
economic recovery and the creation of 30 to 40 million good jobs.
Otherwise, nothing else will matter.
But the crisis around us appears in outrageous, excruciating,
heart-rending, and terrifying forms every day. Americans are being
intimidated, starved, looted, exploited, abandoned, expropriated,
harassed, beaten, jailed, framed-up, and simply murdered by Wall Street
and its captive politicians, intelligence agencies, and police. We need
to denounce these situations and focus public attention on them. But,
if we tried to organize around each of these situations in its own
terms, our limited forces would be dispersed and lost in the swirling
currents of political and social chaos and breakdown. We need to
proceed from a strategy of our own.
Attack the Weak Point on Wall Street’s Death Star
Responding to enemy attacks is not a strategy — in fact, it amounts
to letting the enemy impose his will on us. Our task is to determine
the single most vulnerable point in the enemy’s deployment, and
concentrate all our efforts there. We need to find and attack the weak
point on Wall Street’s Death Star.
Wall Street is determined to dismantle the economic rights of the
American people, and reduce them to paupers. Two thirds to three
quarters to four fifths of the American people — across all divisions of
race, gender, age, geography, and other factors — want to maintain
their hard-won economic rights. Surely this is the vulnerable point in
the deployment of Republicans and Democrats as they strive to carry out
the Wall Street program.
The obvious need therefore is to create a national and international
mass movement to oppose austerity, break the power of Wall Street, and
carry out the revolutionary economic reforms which alone can usher ran a
broad-based recovery and full employment.
But, all around us, the opposite seems to be happening. Today,
radical or antiestablishment politics of all stripes appears as a
shambles in this country. We need to survey the wreckage briefly in
order to remind ourselves what has failed and what we must not imitate.
A Landscape of Failed Movements
Obama has failed. His messianic and utopian rhetoric of 2007-8
stands revealed as a colossal con job, and some of us tried to point
this out in useful time. 2008 was potentially the moment to launch the
long-awaited second New Deal, but Obama’s job was to make sure that that
potential was aborted. Obama has functioned as a Wall Street puppet,
motivated by a neoliberal ideology which he seems to sincerely believe.
Obama has declared himself “eager” to reach a grand bargain for
austerity with the reactionary Republicans, at the expense of the
American people. The lesson: don’t fall for the demagogy of politicians
from either of the two Wall Street parties.
The current phase of mass resistance to austerity started in
Wisconsin, but thanks to Obama, the model of statewide labor struggles
typified by Wisconsin has also fallen short. The initial Wisconsin
upsurge of February 2011 was magnificent, and marked the return of the
mass strike to the United States after decades of labor rout. It was
truly a general strike shutting down an entire state. But the
treacherous Democratic Party immediately dumped all demands on wages and
benefits, focusing only on representation — good for trade union
bureaucrats, not so good for beleaguered workers. The successive
efforts to recall Republican state legislators and the fascist Governor
Walker himself were proportionally the greatest petitioning effort in
the history of the United States. But all this immense labor was
aborted by a failed Democratic Party hack, Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, who
refused to campaign for the rights of state workers, and who dragged
the entire effort down to defeat. Obama had promised to join the picket
line if worker rights were under attack, but he never appeared — nor
did Biden, nor Eric Holder, nor Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Obama
cares about Obama, not the workers of Wisconsin.
Occupy Wall Street has also failed, as their one year anniversary
flop underlined. Occupy Wall Street was pervasively under the influence
of some very fishy characters from Adbusters Magazine of Canada, a
descendent of NATO’s Situationist International deployed against
President Charles de Gaulle of France. The Occupy Wall Street program
was to camp in the park, as Bill Maher has pointed out. The apparatus
of the general assembly, consensus, facilitators, and mindless
repetition was a straitjacket from which Occupy never emerged. It was
New York City unions — the Transport Workers, the Communications
Workers, and the United Federation of Teachers — which put Occupy on the
map, but Occupy never seriously raised any demands whatsoever that
would have benefited other groups in society. Occupy never fought for
labor, women, blacks, Hispanics, farmers, soldiers, or anyone else, so
when the police came there was nobody to fight for Occupy. Most
insidious was the mindless doctrine that demands, organization, and
leaders were bad in themselves. As Frederick Douglass wisely remarked,
“Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Demands represent the goals
and identity of the movement, and they are simply indispensable, as the
debacle of Occupy should have taught us all by now. Without
organization, impotence and defeat are certain. Without tested
leadership worthy of confidence, the result is a leaderless group, the
plaything of media and provocateurs. The defining moment for Occupy
came when a creepy facilitator in Atlanta, backed up by his anarchist
fund raisers, turned away Congressman John Lewis, a hero of the civil
rights movement, who had come to offer the support of the black
community. Such criminal stupidity can never be allowed again.
Libertarianism, especially of the Ron Paul variety, has also failed.
Libertarianism is frequently based on the Russian fascist author Ayn
Rand, who is the idol of vice presidential contender Paul Ryan.
Libertarian economics comes from von Hayek and von Mises, both of them
financed by David Rockefeller of the Trilateral Commission. The current
libertarian movement starts with the Mount Pelerin Society of 1947,
sponsored by the right-wing CIA and European feudal aristocrats.
Libertarianism has been spread by ultra-reactionary donors establishing
endowed chairs at universities or think tanks — the relation of the Koch
brothers to the Cato Institute tells the tale.
Until recently the top libertarian was reactionary Texas congressman
Ron Paul, who used the gullibility of the now defunct 9/11 truth
movement to build a mailing list and the national organization, even
though Paul was always hostile to 9/11 truth. He voted for the
Afghanistan war and all the dictatorial measures that has entailed. Ron
Paul has proposed the most genocidal austerity of them all — $1
trillion in killer cuts immediately, including a 63% cut in the food
stamp program which keeps 50 million Americans alive from day to day.
This is nothing short of a demand for massive genocide against the
American people — a Nuremberg crime if there ever was one.
The entire Ron Paul campaign was a tentacle of Mitt Romney’s
presidential effort. Ron Paul was Romney’s right wing man, ensuring the
defeat of Santorum and other creatures, and funded with millions of
dollars from an anarcho-capitalist Peter Thiel, a leader of the “young
wolf” faction of the Bilderberg Group. Lesson: libertarianism is in
operation run by Wall Street. Another lesson: steer clear of the two
parties if you have any brains at all.
Thanks to Obama, the peace movement has failed. Many who opposed the
Afghan and Iraq wars are now warmongers for Obama, applauding the
bombing of Libya, and calling for US military intervention against
Syria, which of course means against Iran. The 9/11 truth movement is
long gone, and other movements have not fared any better.
If we look abroad, the situation is no better, with one significant
exception. The much touted Spanish indignados are still incapable of
mounting a political and programmatic challenge to the fascist Rajoy and
his Lehman Brothers Finance Minister.
Tragic Void at the Center of US Anti-Establishment Politics
Occupy has collapsed. Ron Paul has collapsed. The peace movement
and protest movements of the 00’s have collapsed. The result is a
tragic void at the center of American politics — just when the American
people are looking for a way to defend themselves against the bipartisan
austerity assault. The task of the United Front Against Austerity is
to fill that void as rapidly as possible.
Since there exists no single organization that one could simply join
and begin to fill the bill, we need to use the time-tested method of the
United Front, as it has evolved from over a century of labor struggles.
We need not look far afield for examples of what to do. In the last
days of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King had a strategic conception
calling for the unification of the civil rights movement, the movement
against the war in Vietnam, and the labor movement — this is why he
attached such importance to the strike of black garbage men in Memphis.
Syriza of Greece: The Example for Success
As we survey the world of 2012, the one bright spot is Greece, where
the Syriza bloc has rocketed from 4% of the vote to 27% of the vote,
going from insignificance to the status of the main opposition party in
just a few months, under conditions of extreme austerity dictated by the
troika of International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank, and
European Commission. Syriza is an excellent example of what we must
generally accomplish in the United States in the next few months.
Syriza has grown thanks to four necessary ingredients — organization,
strategy, leadership, and program. Notice that Occupy has been telling
you that all of these elements are bad. Let us examine them one by
one.
As for organization, Syriza started from a situation of extreme
fragmentation and impotence of anti-austerity forces. This was
especially because so many unions and groups are controlled by the
Socialist International, meaning that they had to support the Papandreou
government, who were the ones implementing the austerity. More than a
dozen general strikes had not stopped the killer cuts.
Syriza started as a united front of more than a dozen smaller
organizations who decided to make common cause around the program.
These were political parties, splinter parties, sects, groups,
grouplets, political organizations, and the like. Alone, each one
counted for nothing. United, they reached the critical mass necessary
to be taken seriously.
Then there was strategy. Syriza was adamant that it would under no
circumstances support austerity cuts against Greek working people. It
would not lend its support or its votes in the parliament to a
government carrying out austerity. This allowed the Greeks to recognize
that Syriza was fundamentally different from the reactionaries of New
Democracy, the Papandreou socialists, or other contenders. We need to
apply the same principles here. The United Front Against Austerity must
be based on the bedrock refusal of any and all layoffs, firings, wage
cuts, cuts in social services, of any and all forms at the expense of
the American people.
Who Will Pay for the Depression? Working People or Wall Street
Since we are in a depression, the main political question is, Who
Will Pay for This Depression? The Wall Street parasites demand that the
cost of the depression they have created be shifted to working people.
The United Front Against Austerity demands instead that Wall Street pay
the cost of the depression it has created. All strategy flows from
this simple idea.
Then comes leadership. Syriza benefited from a group of
sophisticated and intelligent political cadre who had learned the
necessary lessons from the post-2007 European banking crisis. Most
prominent among them is Alexis Tsipras, who was born in 1974, just as
the NATO backed dictatorship of Papadopoulos and the other Greek
colonels was collapsing. Tsipras and his co-thinkers get credit for
leading Syriza from 4% to 27%, and assuming the leadership of the
opposition. Unlike the narrow chauvinism of so many European
anti-establishment leaders, Tsipras has also understood the need to
organize internationally from the get-go. During the last week of the
election campaign, Tsipras visited Paris, where, under his influence,
the leftist leader Melenchon rightly began talking about the need for a
common struggle against the European Central Bank. In Berlin, Tsipras
met with some leaders of Die Linke, the German leftist party, and the
result was a joint European program of Die Linke and Syriza which has
many valid elements. This is what serious politics looks like.
The French leftists and Die Linke are not ideal partners, but let us
remember: you don’t go into the mass strike with the revolutionary party
you’d like to have; you have to do it with the political forces you
actually have.
The question of leadership is posed in the United States in a very
acute form. If the leadership of any movement turns out to be Noam
Chomsky and Michael Moore, with Amy Goodman providing the news
reporting, that movement is doomed.
Finally, there is the most important ingredient of all — program, the
one you actually start with, and which determines the rest. Syriza
began with the categorical rejection of austerity for working people, be
it in the form of wage cuts, firings, layoffs, tax increases, benefit
cuts, service cuts, user fees or any other. Government workers and
other workers who had been fired in the austerity campaign would have to
be rehired immediately, with no loss of seniority
A second point was the rollback of repressive anti-union,
anti-worker, and anti-collective-bargaining measures imposed in the
framework of austerity. This would apply to the union busting assaults
successfully carried out in Indiana, beaten back for the moment in Ohio,
and still pending in Wisconsin and many other states.
A third point involved social and economic democracy. Much of this
is specific to Greece, and need not be detailed here. In the United
States, it is clear that police brutality, which has long targeted the
black, Hispanic, and labor communities, is now being extended to
middle-class protesters. The mass incarceration of black men and
others, combined with the prison industrial complex, is creating a slave
labor sector of the US economy which looks more and more like the
concentration camps run by the Nazi SS. Part of the problem derives
from the perversion of the war on drugs. This has become a war against
the black and the poor, and it must be halted. The reality of the drug
plague is that the CIA runs the drugs, and Wall Street launders the
proceeds. We need to fight the CIA and Wall Street, and stop
scapegoating the American people.
A fourth point in the Syriza program is that bankers who have
committed felonies must go to jail. This stands in sharp contrast to
the Obama administration, which has so far refused to bring any criminal
indictments against the zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas who
created the world derivatives bubble and panic of 2007-8, and who have
continued these activities ever since.
The fifth and final point of the Syriza platform is that illegitimate
debts which have been contracted by corrupt politicians or sociopathic
bankers and executives must yield in every case to the need of the Greek
people for survival. This point specifies that if certain categories
of international financial debt are found to be oppressive for the Greek
people, they can and will be subject to a debt freeze or debt
moratorium, meaning a halt in all payments of interest and principal.
The debt moratorium has been a key element in the economic self-defense
strategies of nations like Mexico in the early 1980s, Brazil in the
1990s, and Argentina after 2000. It is the legitimate assertion of
national sovereignty and paramount national interest against the
predatory international banking system led by the IMF and World Bank.
The leading role currently played by Greece could have been assumed
two years earlier by Iceland, where the excesses of the zombie bankers
had caused a general political crisis and mass strike movement in
2008-2009. By October 2009, key leaders of The Movement, the political
formation which had emerged from months of demonstrations, were
beginning to raise the demand for a debt moratorium in the Icelandic
parliament. But, before long, the clever operative Julian Assange blew
into town and convinced The Movement to turn away from the debt
moratorium and instead join in his limited hangout operation inspired by
Langley. As a result, Iceland never has declared a debt moratorium,
and the value of its currency has shrunk by one half. Unfortunately,
the standard of living in Iceland has also shrunk by about one half, and
the Socialist International Prime Minister who still holds power in
Reykjavík is still scheming about how to pay the debt.
No Grexit from Euro, But Europe-Wide Fight to Seize ECB
Syriza is quite correct to stay inside the euro and build a European
wide coalition against the ECB. The entire euro crisis is really a
crisis of the European zombie banks, created in turn by London and Wall
Street as a means of exporting the depression to Europe and relieving
pressure on the US dollar. The euro resembles a wartime convoy in which
stragglers who fall behind will inevitably be destroyed by wolf packs
of hedge funds. Greece is looking forward to probable early elections
in the spring of 2013, and we must do everything possible to support
Syriza as they march towards power. They are currently the vanguard of
the entire worldwide movement.
The Signature Demand: The 1% Wall Street Sales Tax
Here in the United States, the signature demand of the United Front
Against Austerity the leading edge of our agitation must be the 1% Wall
Street Sales Tax, which grows organically out of every demand for the
maintenance of public services and the social safety net, and out of
every strike by public employees fighting for their own survival. The
social safety net must be maintained and public employees must keep
their jobs. When the reactionaries ask how this can be paid for, the
answer is in every case the Wall Street sales tax.
The Wall Street sales tax has also been called the Tobin tax, the
financial transfer tax, the securities transfer tax, or the Robin Hood
tax. It should be called the Wall Street sales tax because this is the
name that expresses most clearly what is being demanded. Quirky names
like Robin Hood tax appear designed to fail.
The fiscal problems of the United States are largely due to the fact
that Wall Street pays no taxes. Like the nobility in France before the
French Revolution of 1789, the zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas do
not contribute to the public treasury. The total turnover in terms of
buying and selling of securities, including stocks, bonds, and
derivatives on US exchanges is surely in excess of five quadrillion
dollars (5,000 trillion dollars). A 1% tax on this turnover, equally
divided between the federal government and the states, largely solves
the budget deficit at all levels of government. It also discourages
the most dangerous forms of speculation, especially derivatives
speculation, and helps to level the playing field between financial
services — which are now in effect subsidized because they are not taxed
— and the tangible, physical production of manufactured goods on which
our economic survival depends.
A small federal tax on securities transfer was in effect until the
Johnson administration. Here in New York State, a small transfer tax
remains on the books, but the $20 to $30 billion yearly proceeds are
being remitted to the zombie banks as a result of successful Wall Street
extortion starting with Governor Hugh Carey. The Wall Street sales tax
is very much in the mainstream. It has been nominally endorsed by the
AFL-CIO, and has been vigorously supported by National Nurses United,
one of the most militant and intelligent trade unions in the country.
It is endorsed by the European Trade Union Confederation, the
International Metal Workers Federation, and other leading institutions.
The governments of Germany and France are in the process of instituting
such a tax, although they also want to miss direct the proceeds.
Opposition to this tax has been centered in Wall Street and the city of
London.
The restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act is sometimes proposed as
the leading edge of education in the current phase. The Glass-Steagall
Act represents a necessary reform, but it is also a process reform
inherently unsuited to be the centerpiece of mass action. Working
families urgently need jobs, unemployment benefits, defense against
foreclosures, student loan amnesty, access to Medicare, food stamps, and
the like. The Wall Street sales tax is naturally paired with each of
these demands as the means of paying for them. We should avoid
Glass-Steagall fetishism, which presents the separation of commercial
banking from investment banking and insurance as a kind of universal
panacea.
The labor movement in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and
everywhere else needs the Wall Street sales tax as a principal weapon to
put the pro-austerity union-busting forces on the defensive. When the
average person realizes that, while individuals pay sales tax on
necessities like clothing and often even food, while Wall Street pays
nothing on flash trading and high frequency trading, the result is a
powerful indignation which can be the key to the large-scale political
transformation we need.
No Cuts
The most basic anti-austerity demand which must be advanced
everywhere is that there must be no cuts in wages, benefits, social
services, public services the social safety net, and related payments to
working people. There must be no layoffs, no firings, no downsizing,
no outsourcing, no off-shoring. There must be no tax increases or user
fees for working people. This is the pledge which political candidates
must sign, starting with Obama.
We propose a series of related anti-austerity demands for immediate
educational use, each of which reflects the general principle of making
Wall Street pay for the depression which the plutocrats have produced.
Student Loan Amnesty
Students and young people are being crushed by a burden of $1
trillion in student loan debt. This debt is illegitimate, since it
reflects the success of US corporations in making working families pay
to train the labor whose economic benefits will then be harvested by
these firms. Student loan debt is now interfering with the normal
progression of human life itself. This makes it less and less possible
for young people to secure apartment of their own, to get married, have
children, and to pursue advanced degrees or professional training. Even
Defense Secretary Panetta is now complaining that the fear of student
loan debt now looms larger than the stress of combat for military
personnel. Here is a classic example where the demands of debt collide
head-on with the demands of human society.
We demand an immediate comprehensive student loan freeze, meaning a
total halt to all payments on interest and principal for at least five
years or for the duration of the world economic depression, whichever
lasts longer. At the end of this time, the issue of his student loan
debt can be re-examined, with a view to instituting a complete amnesty
or cancellation. A provision of this type should have been instituted
in the Bush-Obama TARP legislation, and should have been made a
precondition for financial institutions drawing on the $26 trillion, 0%
interest line of credit made available by the Federal Reserve. The
student loan amnesty can therefore be considered as Wall Street’s thank
you for the younger generation.
Stop All Foreclosures
Another area where the machinery of debt collection is interfering
more and more with the requirements of human life and human society is
the foreclosure crisis. Three to four million American families are
being kicked out of their homes each year by the zombie bankers as a
result of a financial panic created, not by subprime mortgages, but
rather by the Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps
which were permitted on top of these mortgages by the bankers
themselves. These subprime mortgages with a result of fraudulent
marketing, and the foreclosures frequently involve robo-signers,
robo-judges, and other obvious political corruption, which the
Obama-Holder Justice Department is eager to ignore.
New Frazier-Lemke Act
The only answer to this chaotic situation is an immediate and uniform
federal law outlawing all foreclosures on primary residences for five
years or the duration of the depression, which ever lasts longer. The
model should be the Frazier-Lemke Act of 1934, which prevented banks
from foreclosing on homes and farms if the owner could get a payment
plan agreed to by any court at any level. This is another requirement
which should have been built into the TARP, and which also should have
been attached to the cheap federal credit made available by the Federal
Reserve to financial institutions. As for the Collateralized Debt
Obligations and Credit Default Swaps, there is a growing consensus that
these extremely dangerous forms of derivatives need to be outlawed.
Medicare for All
About 50 million Americans currently have no health insurance, and
many of them have no access to medical care. All Americans must
immediately be given access to the Medicare program, one of the most
successful federal programs of all time, which has been instrumental in
lowering the levels of morbidity and mortality among senior citizens,
thereby saving and prolonging millions upon millions of lives. Those
who can afford to pay can contribute $100 a month towards this coverage,
which is comparable to the current fee. Those who are unemployed or
destitute must be given free access, with no person turned away.
The terminology of Medicare for All is decisive. Very few people
understand the slogan of single-payer, and even fewer know the
difference between single-payer and the public option, whatever the
latter might be. But the vast majority of the American people can
immediately understand Medicare for All, reflecting the broad popularity
of this program which three quarters to four fifths of Americans do not
want to see cut.
Obamacare is largely concerned with bailing out insurance companies
bankrupted by their own derivative speculation through ensuring them a
permanent cash flow. The most sinister feature of Obamacare is the
rationing board which decides which life-saving technologies can be used
and who is to be excluded. The only way a civilized nation can save
money on health care is by finding cures to heart disease, cancer,
Alzheimer’s, and other dread diseases. This requires a massive
investment in biomedical research, meaning an effort on the scale of the
Manhattan Project in World War II. As diseases are cured, costs can be
humanely reduced. In order to guarantee that medical care will be
available, the United States will need to train approximately 250,000
doctors and specialists over the next few years. We will also need to
build about 1,000 modern hospitals to replace the ones shut down by
privatizers and looters over the last quarter-century.
Jobless Benefits for 99ers and Beyond
Wall Street is responsible for this depression, and not American
working people. Unemployment benefits represent an economic right, and
must not be reduced in the way that Obama and the reactionary
Republicans have been colluding to do. Those who have exhausted their
unemployment benefits, including the so-called 99ers, must be given
immediate assistance. Unemployment benefits must be made open ended,
for the duration of the current depression.
10% National Usury Law
American working families are currently crushed by over $1 trillion
of high interest consumer and credit card debt. Before the tenure of
Paul Adolf Volcker at the Federal Reserve during the Carter and Reagan
administrations, most states had usury laws which limited interest
payments to 10% per year. Those laws were phased out because of
Volcker’s 21% prime rate. This has resulted in the current plague of
high interest payday lenders who prey upon the most vulnerable working
people. We urgently require a federal law to put a 10% ceiling on all
interest rates. If necessary, this can be implemented under the Defense
Production Act and motivated by the current multiple national
emergencies.
Minimum Wage and Living Wage
By reducing the amount of national income absorbed by high interest
in speculation, resources will become available to begin raising the
standard of living of the American people. The federal minimum wage, at
its highest point in 1968, reached the equivalent of about $11 in
today’s money. Obama has done nothing on this front, including when he
had a Democratic majority in Congress. Accordingly, it is time to raise
the federal minimum wage from the current $7.25 per hour to $11, as a
first step towards further increases in the near future.
Restore Food Stamp Benefits
The 50 million Americans who currently survive on food stamps (SNAP)
generally have no jobs, no unemployment benefits, no healthcare, and no
welfare payments, and are entirely dependent on this program. With
increases in food prices due to financial speculation, the food stamp
benefits have been increasingly eroded. The food stamp program must
include a cost-of-living escalator to allow these payments to offset the
effects of price inflation. In addition, the food stamp benefits must
be increased to a level adequate for the well-being of recipients, as
determined by the most modern nutritional science.
The measures detailed so far represent the urgent defense of our
greatest national resource, the qualified labor power of the US
workforce. Beyond this, we must demand policies which can set in motion
an economic recovery with the creation of at least 30 million new
productive jobs.
Seize and Nationalize the Federal Reserve System
How can the necessary economic recovery be financed? It is clear
that the zombie bankers cannot do this, since these banks are derelicts,
bankrupted by the masses of kited derivatives they hold. The zombie
banks absorb the resources, drive up the price of food and gasoline
through speculation, collect exorbitant fees, and otherwise parasitize
the economy. The zombie banks need to be put through Chapter 7
bankruptcy proceedings, with all of their derivatives wiped out in the
process.
Paul Krugman and other Keynesians propose an economic recovery
financed exclusively through the federal budget. Our objection to this
method has nothing to do with the reactionary Republican demagogy about
deficits and debt. Alexander Hamilton pointed out that a funded
national debt, provided it is not excessive, is actually an advantage to
a modern nation. But the measures we have already proposed, even with
the help of the Wall Street sales tax, will represent a significant
expansion in federal spending. A sustained economic recovery requires a
source of credit which cannot be the zombie banks and which should not
be the federal budget, given the urgent competing claims on the
resources of the US Treasury.
The obvious source of financing for the US economic recovery is the
Federal Reserve System. In the 2008 financial panic, the Federal
Reserve made available approximately $27 trillion in credit. But only
financial institutions were eligible for these loans. To get a 0% loan
from the Fed, you had to be a bank, a money market fund, a credit card
company, or some other kind of financial service. Some loans were made
available as monetary stimulus, such as QE I, II, and III. Other loans
were made as a credit stimulus, including the Term Auction Facility
(TAF), Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), Primary Dealer
Credit Facility (PDCF), Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), and
others.
These policies have failed to create a recovery. It is now time for
the Fed to stop serving the banks, and to start serving the needs of the
US economy as a whole. This would take the form of a Main Street
Credit Facility and a Rebuild America Infrastructure Facility.
Either through law or political pressure, the Federal Reserve must be
forced to put out a tender offer to states and regional authorities
like the New York-New Jersey Port Authority stating the Fed’s
willingness to buy an initial $1 trillion of state bonds with the
proceeds devoted exclusively to rebuilding the infrastructure of the
United States. These must be century bonds, with 100 year maturities
and the coupon rate must be set at 0%. Once the first tranche of $1
trillion is expended, another tranche should be offered, until the point
at which full employment is reached. The states issuing the bonds can
offer solid collateral of the infrastructure improvements that are being
created.
These state and authority bonds will make possible the long overdue
rebuilding of the entire US Interstate Highway System, including its
bridges; the national passenger, freight, and commuter rail using the
technology of the 21st century; the national electricity production and
transmission grid; canals, ports, sewage and water systems;
telecommunications; public housing; schools, hospitals, libraries,
public buildings, etc.
0% Federal Credit for Production
At the same time, the Main Street Credit Facility will offer 0%
federal credit to automobile manufacturers, Silicon Valley, biotech and
pharmaceuticals, farmers, and any and all companies active in
manufacturing, construction, mining, scientific research, energy
production, and other forms of tangible, physical, commodity production.
Cheap credit for productive activity must be available all the way
down to the local auto repair shop, dry cleaner, plumber, electrician,
or restaurant, since all of these represent tangible physical
production. Financial services will no longer be eligible to be
subsidized by cheap federal credit.
This policy of federal lending, as distinct from federal spending,
can be used to break the current political impasse. The cost of capital
can be radically lowered, and a competitive advantage of the United
States in world markets can be secured. The overriding goal is the
creation of 30 million new jobs, with high capital investment, high
energy intensity, high value added, and high technology.
A president of the caliber of Franklin D. Roosevelt could implement
this policy with a single phone call to the Federal Reserve, informing
Bernanke of what the national interest requires in the current
emergency. The ultimate goal must be the nationalization of the Federal
Reserve, meaning that its policies must no longer be set by secret
cliques of bankers meeting in the paneled boardrooms, but rather by
public laws approved by the House and Senate and signed by the president
— the only conceivable method under the current system. These laws
must determine the amount of credit to be made available, the interest
rates to be applied, and the approved categories of lending.
Cheap federal credit can and must be used for the vast program of
biomedical research already mentioned, for research and development in
the field of high-energy physics, and for the revival of the space
program. These represent the first three of multiple science drivers
that can be used for technological modernization and the increasing the
productivity of labor.
If applied today, the Keynesian methods suggested by Krugman and
others would result in excessive burden on the federal budget, thus
creating a vulnerability to speculative attack on the Greek model. The
Keynesians also do not understand that it is impossible to defeat a
depression without a recovery in the capital goods industry. The
consumer led recovery was implicit in the Obama stimulus of 2009, which
had positive effects, but which has failed to produce a sustained
broad-based recovery. The theoretical basis for the program advanced
here is the traditional American System of Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich
List, Henry Carey, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, the populists, and the
New Deal. The method of transforming the central bank into a national
bank to finance a recovery derives from the work of Woytinsky and
Lautenbach, interpreted in the light of the experience of the US
Lend-Lease Program.
Our Method of Intervention
Under depression conditions of economic breakdown and increased
political repression, traditional methods of class defense and struggle
become outmoded and likely to fail. Any struggle which remains isolated
or confined to a single group in the population is in danger of defeat.
Our guiding principle is to mobilize and rally the principal
components of the 99% around individual struggles, with the goal of
uniting them in a single common front capable of effective action.
Labor unions, unorganized workers, the unemployed, blacks, Hispanics,
women, farmers, soldiers, and other groups are all indispensable for
such a common front. We seek to create a national coalition capable of
asserting the common interest of the 99% against the 1% who currently
monopolize all power.
For this to happen, a common program of the type we have outlined is
required. The time is coming when it will be realistic to think of a
nationwide general strike capable of directing the Congress to enact a
Wall Street Sales Tax as part of legislation rolling back cuts to social
services, the social safety net, and government jobs at all levels.
In the run up to the November 6 election, we call for a mobilization
of all persons of good will to secure the passage of proposals A and B
in Michigan, to assist communities like Benton Harbor putting an end to
the dictatorship of Governor Snyder’s emergency managers.
For November 8, we urge all who can to intervene to breathe life and a
program of the Wall Street sales tax into the demonstrations called by
the AFL-CIO and the SEIU to protest against cuts in Medicare and Social
Security. We expect to provide programmatic leadership in the fight
against the Grand Bargain.
We are closely following developments in the struggle at Sensata
Technologies in Freeport, Illinois, where workers are fighting the
export of their jobs to China planned by Romney’s Bain capital. We’re
also following the nationwide agitation against Walmart.
We are also closely following the efforts of French workers to
prevent the closure of Peugeot plants, and also the resistance to plant
closures by Ford in Great Britain. We are in touch with anti-austerity
forces in Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere.
The objective necessities of the current phrase mean that habitual
and customary methods can no longer be effective. All individuals and
groups must recognize the need to alter their practice so as to
contribute to a united front capable of implementing a recovery program.
To this end, we suggest that participants in this conference and
other interested parties should form an informal coordinating committee
for the exchange of ideas and information about how to proceed during
the difficult months ahead.
government allow us to tumble over “the fiscal cliff.” 
Think of it as the economic version of Hurricane Sandy that ripped through the northeast in the past few weeks. On its own, the hurricane could cause a lot of damage. However, when two additional weather fronts—that just happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time—combined with the hurricane, Sandy became an exponentially devastating storm, causing loss of life and billions upon billions in property losses. 
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