Few people realize how radical the new U.S. budget law was. Budget laws are supposed to decide simply what to fund and what to cut. A budget is not supposed to make new law, or to rewrite the law. But that is what happened, and it was radical.
Wall Street’s representatives in Congress – the Democratic leadership as well as Republicans – took the opportunity to create an artificial crisis. The press called this “holding the government hostage.” The House – backed by the Senate – said that it would shut the government down at some future date if two basic laws were not changed….
The recent Congressional budget act states that pension funds with more than one employer – such as construction industry funds, teamster funds for truckers and public service workers funds – can be scaled back in order to pay Wall Street creditors.
Labor now is told to go to the back of the line behind Wall Street. If the economy is too debt strapped to pay everyone what is owed, then the new motto is Big Fish Eat Little Fish.
Wall Street is eating the pension funds.
This goes hand in hand with Obama’s fight to scale back Social Security and, ultimately, to privatize it. Now that Republicans are in a majority of both the House and Senate, the Democrats will be able to take an anti-labor position and then try to blame it on Republicans.
Yet Democrats themselves were the leading advocates of the anti-labor, anti-pension fund policy. This special “rider” to the budget bill was known last spring to the House Budget Committee. Yet something tricky happened: While the committee approved the anti-labor pension rule, no record was taken of which members and which party voted for the radical change, and who opposed it.…
So this is the problem: the supposedly liberal Democrats are in the lead for scaling back pension funding, Social Security and labor protection in general.…Michael Hudson
Big Fish, Little Fish
