Vol. 77/No. 37      October 21, 2013

Workers have no responsibility for how the political representatives of the propertied rulers decide or run their budget, but their “shut down” effects millions of us and we should fight to stop the layoffs and cuts to programs workers need.

They run their state to maintain and defend capitalist social relations against competitors abroad and against workers and farmers at home. That’s why such a big part of their budget goes to the military, the spies, the cops, the courts and the prisons. That’s why they are “essential.”

It is a trap for workers to get caught up in their debates on how to raise and allocate their budget to cover their ever-expanding administrative bureaucracy or pay the interest to wealthy bondholders or how much they should cut social programs, or anything else. They claim there is a shrinking pie and we should argue over who gets what piece, in order to deter working people from fighting for the interests of our class against theirs.

After Congress could not agree on a budget, the government laid off hundreds of thousands of government workers without pay and cut off funds for programs affecting millions of workers, disproportionately those with the lowest incomes, including Head Start and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. Many federal workers deemed “essential” are being forced to work without pay.

Here workers do have a big interest. We need to organize workers and our allies to fight for unemployment pay and health care for those laid off and for restoration of social programs slashed.

The shutdown occurred as the Republican Party majority in the House of Representatives sought to halt or at least postpone the Affordable Care Act, known as “Obamacare,” by blocking payments for it in the new fiscal year.

The promise of Obamacare is that it will provide health care to the tens of millions without access because they lack insurance.

But the reality is that Obamacare was set up as an alternative to universal government-funded health care. Instead, the Affordable Care Act sets up a profit boon for insurance companies while giving restricted health care to some and imposing high fees or penalties on others.

While the government did a partial shutdown, the press tried to get workers excited about an Oct. 17 deadline to raise the federal debt ceiling or trigger a U.S. government credit default on some of its $12 trillion in bonds.

A default “has the potential to be catastrophic: credit markets could freeze, the value of the dollar could plummet, U.S. interest rates could skyrocket,” the Treasury Department wailed in an Oct. 3 report.

But the propertied rulers have no intention of damaging the “full faith and credit” of U.S. imperialism.

In case any of their Washington mouthpieces had forgotten this, a high-powered phalanx of 14 CEOs and executives from some of the largest U.S. banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Wells Fargo trooped down to the Capitol Oct. 2 to set them straight. “There’s a precedent for a government shutdown. There’s no precedent for default,” Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told the Wall Street Journal after the meeting.

From 1978 to 2013, Congress has voted 53 times to increase the debt ceiling, which ballooned from $752 billion to $16.7 trillion.  
 
 
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