SocialistWorker — Washington's warring brothers

This month's battles over the budget and the Tea Party Republicans' fanaticism about the health care law obscure the two parties' common commitment to austerity....

So it will be all the more important for those who want an alternative to the status quo in Washington to remind themselves and others of a hidden-in-plain-sight truth about American politics--that the Democrats and Republicans agree about much more than they disagree.

They agree on imposing sweeping cuts in most government programs, though not the Pentagon; they differ on how deep the cuts should be. They agree on a health care system where the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex calls the shots; they differ about parts of a law designed to preserve the industry's profits and power. They agree on a system where Corporate America piles up record profits by driving down the living standards of working-class people; they disagree only on the details of how that system should operate....

The pattern has been for Republicans to demand savage cuts and right-wing social policies, and for Democrats to offer to meet them halfway. The Republicans then insist they'll never compromise--and the Democrats offer to meet them two-thirds of the way. Fast forward to the end, and the outcome is rarely very far from what Republicans wanted in the first place.

Actually, the Democrats sometimes don't offer to meet the Republicans halfway--because in the era of neoliberalism and austerity, they've already started out there....

This month's battles over the budget are obscuring the reality that Washington's commitment to austerity politics is thoroughly bipartisan. It's easy for Democrats to blame the Tea Party for the government shutdown. It's harder for them to face the truth that the Tea Party has leverage because Obama has accepted the need to "get the deficit under control," mainly by cutting government spending to the bone, rather than raising taxes on the rich. 

The mainstream media's simplistic analysis--Democrats vs. Republicans, Tea Party conservatives vs. the GOP establishment--camouflage what's really taking place: a bipartisan drive for austerity where both parties ignore what the public wants.

 Add another group that doesn't get that taxes don't fund government and that there is no need to get the deficit down.

SocialistWorker.org
Washington's warring brothers
Staff