Obama’s FY 2012 Budget Is A Tool Of Class War
Paul Craig Roberts
February 18, 2011 "Information Clearing House" ----
Obama’s
new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the
poor and middle class. Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the
banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds,
wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700
billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of
millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet
with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for
newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets. The effect of
the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest
rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit. When they
do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.
Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again,
this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge
military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of
the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets
account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama
administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit
spending serves only one purpose--the enrichment of the private
companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies,
along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.
The U.S. has no enemies except those that the
U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing
foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.
China does not conduct naval exercises off the
California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off
China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the
U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to
create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of
the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.
The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a
year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers
can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by
former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large
profits selling the scanning equipment.
With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the
military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of
America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.
The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert
Gates, declared: “We shrink from our global security responsibilities at
our peril.” The military brass warns of cutting any of
the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, two
functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”
But what are “our” global security
responsibilities? Where did they come from? Why would America be at
peril if America stopped bombing and invading other countries and
interfering in their internal affairs? The perils America faces are all
self-created.
The answer to this question used to be that
otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist
conspiracy.” Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our
airplanes, train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists”
and by a newly created imaginary threat--”domestic extremists,” that is,
war protesters and environmentalists.
The U.S. military/security complex is capable of
creating any number of false flag events in order to make these threats
seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall
experiences, and football games.
So Americans are stuck with enormous budget
deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money,
money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the
dollar and its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes,
American power goes.
For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to
save their power.
Their answer is: make the people pay.
And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama,
is doing.
With the U.S. in the worst recession since the
Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald
Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget”
takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work. The American
elites are transforming themselves into idiots as they seek to
replicate in America the conditions that have led to the overthrows of
similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to
U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.
All we need is a few million more Americans with
nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East
home to America.
With the U.S. military bogged down in wars
abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.
American politicians have to fund Israel as the
money returns in campaign contributions. The U.S. government must fund
the Egyptian military if there is to be any hope of turning the next
Egyptian government into another American puppet that will serve Israel
by continuing the blockade of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza
ghetto.
These goals are far more important to the
American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an
education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income
energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are
forced to give to Israel).
There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and
other health programs over the next five years.
Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit,
these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury
financing needs. They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need
to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.
These cuts serve one purpose: to further the
Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of
the poor: The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason
unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.
A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent
middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them,
because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at
home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out
of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a
Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get
job interviews is that they do not want them.
What all this leads to is an assault on
“entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites
have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the
population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives,
to conflate “entitlements” with welfare. America is going to hell not
because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because
people, who have paid 15% of their payroll all their lives for old age
pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years.
Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be
forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of
the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for
their own retirement?
The elite’s line, and that of their hired
spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in
trouble because of its retirees.
Too many Americans have been brainwashed to
believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees.
America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of
taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits,
American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.
The American elite’s solution for America’s
problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs
were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans
with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the
university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to Chine
and India.
Of all the countries in the world, none need a
revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of
selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a
lifetime.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27513.htm
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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