Published on Thursday, December 23, 2010 by In These Times
The ‘Repo-Demo’ Party’s Three Phase Austerity Plan for America
Get ready for more of the same failed “job creation” policies, enacted by an increasingly unified political eilte
by Jack Rasmus
The Bush tax cuts are now extended. What cost $3.4 trillion over the past decade, 80% of which accrued to the wealthiest households and U.S. corporations, will now cost another $802 billion over the next two years and a projected $4 trillion over the coming decade.
But the Bush tax cut extension just passed by a political elite increasingly united on economic policy—a ‘Repo-Demo’ Party dominated by corporate interests—is only the first of three phases in a new policy offensive designed to protect the incomes of the wealthy and corporate America for another decade, to be paid for directly by middle- and working-class America. Together, the three phases represent the emerging U.S. variant of a general austerity strategy, similar in objective but different in content to other austerity programs now emerging as well in the Eurozone, Japan and elsewhere.
Phase two: draconian spending cuts
Same wine in same bottles, with new label
The key question: Will any jobs be created?
Obama’s 2011 ‘Stimulus 2’ will thus prove no more effective than his 2009 ‘Stimulus 1.’ The past decade has produced repeated tax-cut heavy policies targeting the rich and corporations: Bush II and a Republican Congress 2001-06. Bush II and a Democratic Congress 2006-08. Obama and a Democratic Congress 2008-10. And now Obama and a de facto Republican Congress.
The recent Bush tax cut extensions show the corporate-dominated political elite of both parties are now closing ranks as the economic crisis continues with no resolution for all but the wealthy and corporations. The ‘Repo-Demo’ Party, newly aligned around the same old failed policies, has just begun to do its work. Get ready for more of the same.
Jack Rasmus is the author of Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression, published in May 2010 by Pluto Press, Palgrave-Macmillan.
Phi Beta Iota: In the 1990's Tim Hendrickson, at the time one of the best and the brightest at the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) conceptualized GRAND VIEW, a program to look at each couintry in holistic terms to determine a) what direction their science & technology was going in; and b) what their economy could afford in the way of military spending. This was before NGIC was caught fabricating the threat to justify the purchase of weapons and mobility systems that were unaffordable and not needed. We wonder what GRAND VIEW would say about the USA's future, and we wonder if the restoration of integrity within US intelligence might not have an immediate positive effect on personnel, training, concepts & doctrine, and acquisition.
