The proposed 2012 federal budget will leave working families
out in the cold—literally. An estimated 3.5 million households receiving
federal assistance to heat their homes in the winter will now be cut off, if
the proposed budget stands. That federal assistance was the last line of
defense in the winter for those families. But the giant banks and corporate
owners have gotten themselves into a financial crisis. As a result, they’re
saying that 3.5 million families and their children must freeze next winter.
With the release of the budget, the theatrics began in
Congress. Democrats and Republicans pointed their fingers at each other,
accusing the other of holding up the process, of being unreasonable. At first
glance one could think that there was a big battle being waged over the budget,
between two groups with vastly different interests. In reality, they are in
complete agreement that solving the budget crisis means taking away basic
necessities for poor and working people. They only disagree about how much to
cut. Both parties want millions of schoolchildren to go home to no heat in the
winter, to avoid the slightest increase in taxes on the super-rich. They only
bicker about how many millions of schoolchildren they should sacrifice.
Of course, the one thing that the millionaires’ club
Congress never bickers about is the “national security” budget, which must
constantly grow to the most obscene levels. The Pentagon generals—not long
before they actually work in the defense industry themselves—get a blank check
to rack-up orders of unlimited fancy new toys that they like to show off every
time they bomb another country. The more than 2.5 billion dollars cut from
federal heating assistance, which will leave millions fending for their lives,
is spent in just one week on the wildly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
alone.
But what do they really mean by “national security” anyway?
Whose security is benefiting from 700 U.S. military bases around the
world, or from drones and tanks roaming Iraq and Afghanistan? It’s simply the security of the fat cats who
want to conduct business in those countries, with a very heavy upper hand.
Apparently it’s not a “national security” issue when millions of families have
no way to stay warm next winter. The security of those living in cars with
their children because their homes were taken by the banks don’t count.
“National security” clearly means financial security for a tiny group of people
in this country, at the expense of the real life security for the rest of
us.
When the economic crisis hit and the super-rich were faced
with a decline in living standards—maybe having to sell-off a couple of
Caribbean vacation homes—the U.S. government did back flips to save their
investment portfolios for them. The politicians’ solution was taking trillions
of our tax dollars and dolling it out to the country’s richest with no strings
attached. Those who received bailouts and stimulus funds made record profits,
gave million-dollar bonus checks to their CEOs, then still laid off tens of
thousands of workers. But when working
families are faced with a real blow to living conditions—like freezing to death
in the winter—the politicians want us to believe that there’s “no other
choice.”
The public-sector unions in Wisconsin, and around the country, have a
big fight ahead of them. They are under attack just like the rest of us. But
those public-sector workers at least have an organization with which to fight:
a union. They are in an organization of fellow laborers, with the weapon of
collective bargaining, which exists to defend their interests as working
people.
However, the millions who will have their heat shut off in
the winter have no organization with which to fight. Neither do the unemployed
and underemployed, the evicted and foreclosed, the uninsured and the victims of
health insurance vultures, the students in debt and those who can’t afford to
start school at all. That is our task as a Party, to build such organizations.
These can be weapons for those who the politicians put on the chopping block,
so that we do not have to take the cuts laying down, but standing, fighting,
and winning.
