by Len Hart, The Existentialist CowboyWhen Bush Sr fought against, perhaps vanquished 'supply-side economics', it was hoped that the horrible Reagan years could be, would be consigned to the 'dust bin of history'! But no! It was left to 'Shrub', George W. Bush, to unleash unholy forces in order to breathe life into "trickle down theory" otherwise called 'supply side economics!
As it was taken off life support, it was surely Dick 'cyborg' Cheney who may well have yelled: It's ALIVE!
Cheney, of course, professed the Reagan doctrine: "Deficits don't matter". This is a bona fide case of terminal denial and accounts for supply-sider control of the Republican party. But what about Obama? He inherited a run-away train in search of its wreck. As Obama prepared to occupy the White House, the debt grew. Meanwhile, the caped villain (Cheney) and his budding monster(Bush) were still at work licking their chops and dreaming of fight night!
It's ALIVE! It's ALIVE! Debt had accelerated during Bush's last two budget years. Although Obama had not been directly responsible for that acceleration, the train wreck had been left to him.
As the GOP are wont to do, Bush set records, in fact, the all-time record by increasing the debt by $1.1 trillion in a mere 100 days between July 30 and Nov 9, 2008.
Then there was the not-so-small matter of recession. To be expected, recessions cut tax revenues significantly and this fact may account for the GOP's sorry record of running up the highest debts and deficits! This has been the case since prior to the Great Depression. It is the pattern that is repeated in every GOP administration since H. Hoover's "Great Depression".
In this case, however, GOP mismanagement accounts for almost half of the deficit. We can be sure that the GOP were prepared to blame Obama for the deficit though his only crime was that timing. Machiavelli might have advised him to sit it out, let the GOP take the rap! Let the GOP face the music and dance quickly out to the door to oblivion. Blaming Obama for the full deficit was said to have been akin to "blaming him for not raising the tax rate to keep tax revenues up".
In times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift or joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of
appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property. -- Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
In the U.S. it is the GOP which consistently advocates, perhaps fronts, the interests of its primary sponsor: the ruling elite of just 1 percent of the total population. In effect, every real person but those among the top 1 percent are without representation in what is said to be the world's largest "Democracy". Is it really a 'democracy'? It is ironic that while Marx is most demonized by this unholy alliance, it is the existence of the unholy alliance itself which proves Marx to have been correct about almost everything.
