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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=tanstl@hotmail.com href="mailto:tanstl@hotmail.com">David Sladky</A>
</DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Friday, April 20, 2012 1:14 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Democrats conceal post-election austerity plans</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr>
<H2>Democrats conceal post-election austerity plans</H2>
<H5>19 April 2012</H5>While the Obama reelection campaign claims to support
higher taxes on the wealthy and oppose cuts in Medicare and other programs on
which working people depend, the White House and congressional Democrats are
already making plans for a bipartisan attack on social programs after the
election.<BR>These plans are being concealed from the people behind a
smokescreen of demagogy about standing up for the “bottom 99 percent” and making
the rich pay “their fair share” in taxes. The cynicism of the Obama campaign
underscores the phony and undemocratic character of the entire electoral
process.<BR>The Obama campaign has focused on political ploys such as the
“Buffett Rule,” a proposal to establish a minimum 30 percent income tax rate for
all those making $1 million or more a year. This is an effort to make the
American people forget three years of bailouts of the banks and the super-rich
and a worsening of income inequality. According to a study released March 2, the
top one percent of the American population garnered 93 percent of all increased
income in 2010, the first year of economic “recovery” according to the White
House.<BR>Obama’s pretended attacks on the wealthy have been combined with
denunciations of congressional Republicans and the presumptive Republican
presidential nominee Mitt Romney for supporting a budget, drafted by Congressman
Paul Ryan, that calls for $5.4 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years,
including the gutting of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and other social
programs. The Republicans would, for example, cut three million people off from
food stamps.<BR>The real attitude of the Democrats to massive budget cuts was
seen in Tuesday’s decision by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad,
Democrat from North Dakota, to postpone any action on a 2013 budget resolution
until after the November election. Conrad announced that his committee would
begin drafting a budget resolution based on the deficit-cutting recommendations
of the Simpson-Bowles commission, appointed by Obama, but that no actual votes
would be taken until after the election—i.e., until it is too late for the
American people to react at the polls.<BR>Conrad said he had made the decision
to postpone a vote after it became clear that not enough Democrats were prepared
to support a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan in advance of the elections.
“I don’t think we will be prepared to vote before the election,” Conrad said,
indicating action would only be taken in a lame-duck session of Congress.<BR>The
Bowles-Simpson plan would slash $5.4 trillion from the deficit over ten years,
cutting discretionary domestic and military spending as a percentage of gross
domestic product from 8.4 percent this year to only 4.8 percent by 2022, and
raising taxes, mainly on middle-income families, through abolishing tax breaks
such as deductions for mortgage interest and employer-paid health benefits. The
plan envisions reductions in income tax rates for the wealthy as well as
corporate tax rates.<BR>The result of such policies will be a devastating
decline in the living standards and social conditions of the vast majority of
working people, who will be paying the price for the ongoing bailout of the
financial system, the increase in wealth of the super-rich, and the escalating
costs of American military operations overseas.<BR>Obama’s treasury secretary,
Timothy Geithner, echoed the concerns of Conrad in remarks ahead of a meeting
Friday of the finance ministers of the Group of 20, which brings together the
major industrial and trading nations. At the end of this year, he said, “It will
be a big test … how Washington deals with those challenges.” He added,
“Hopefully, we use it as an opportunity to make another significant step towards
long-term fiscal reform at that time.”<BR>Geithner was referring to the period
after the November 6 election, when the US Treasury again reaches the legal
limit on borrowing and the Bush tax cuts expire December 31, as do other stopgap
measures adopted over the past two years, including the extension of
unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut for working people and the
deadline for $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts.<BR>These deadlines will
be used to create a crisis atmosphere and claim that sweeping austerity measures
are unavoidable. The measures that will be brought forward after the election
will go far beyond anything proposed publicly by either party.<BR>According to
<EM>New York Times</EM> columnist David Brooks, Obama administration officials
have given private assurances of support for major spending cuts after the
elections and have already proposed, in the most recent budget, to cut
discretionary domestic spending from 4 percent of US gross domestic product to
only 2.2 percent, far below the level of the Reagan administration.<BR>The 2012
election is a political fraud, used by the big business politicians of both
parties to give the American people the illusion of choice, while behind the
scenes the two parties are preparing measures so unpopular that they cannot be
discussed openly for fear of a public backlash.<BR>The American two-party system
is a political conspiracy against the working class. The two parties defend the
interests of corporate America and the super-rich. The people have no say in the
policies that are carried out.<BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>