by Chris Townsend, UE Political Action Director
The political leaders of our nation - the politicians from both parties in Washington - stand in pretty low esteem these days with working people. Public opinion approval ratings for Congress are the lowest in living memory, hovering near single digits. President Obama does better than Congress, but his rankings continue to slide month after month. C-SPAN reports that than 80 percent of the public agrees that our rigged and undemocratic two party "system" is not working to fix our problems.
It's no wonder. The economic disaster created by big business, the banks, and the Bush-Cheney administration still hangs heavy around the necks of working families. Unemployment officially hovers at about 9 percent, but we know the real rate is significantly higher. Home foreclosures chug along at the rate they have for about four years. And astronomical military expenditures for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest still threaten to break the federal budget. As for young people, with or without a college education or advanced training, they face the worst job market in 75 years, and many are saddled with insane levels of student loan debt that will take them many years to repay even if they find a good job. It's no wonder that pessimism and frustration have trumped any sense that the future will be more prosperous and secure for working people, young or otherwise.
On top of all this workers have faced a blizzard of attacks on the political front. Only 10 months ago we were scrambling to our battle stations to resist Republican attacks at the state and local levels. Extreme anti-labor Republican governors - the best-known being Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio - launched a war against workers, the public sector, unions, livable wages, pensions, affordable health insurance, you name it. These attacks, in various forms, are taking place in more than half the states, as well as at the local government level.
Then in late August, we got hit with more. Added to all the inherited and unaddressed problems created by the corporate crime wave of the past decade, the federal government threatened us with more hardships to be imposed by an undemocratic scheme called "the Supercommittee."
The Supercommittee (sometimes also called the "SuperCongress") consisted of 12 members of Congress, with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, and equal numbers from the Senate and House of Representatives. It was the result of the Republican's blackmail last summer, when they refused to extend the federal debt ceiling without the Obama administration agreeing to massive cuts in Social Security and other essential programs. The Supercommittee was to meet in secret through the fall and agree on a package of cuts, which would be unveiled the week before Thanksgiving. They were charged with coming up with $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years, and then the House and Senate were to ratify the package by a simple majority vote. Amendments would be prohibited, so the rest of Congress would really have no say over these massive changes to the federal budget. If the Supercommittee failed to reach a compromise or if Congress failed to rubber-stamp it, according to the legislation creating the committee, $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts would then go into effect starting in 2013, equally affecting military and domestic spending, with Social Security and Medicare exempted.
Most members of Congress agreed to this unconstitutional evasion of responsibility in their stampede to get to the airport for their month-long summer vacation. With the economy still on the skids and the deficit running to a trillion a year, the Supercommittee is the latest effort to stick working people with the bill for a mess we didn't make.
This was the last straw for millions of working people, and in the midst of this anti-democractic dysfunction in Washington, the democratic "Occupy Wall Street" movement was born. We know things are bad when tens of thousands of Americans start camping out, for weeks on end, in hundreds of cities and towns, to protest big business greed. And it is hard not to notice that, while thousands are being arrested across the country for protesting Wall Street's crimes, no more than a handful of Wall Street bankers and speculators have been arrested for the massive fraud that caused the economic collapse. Even the corporate media have a hard time hiding the growing anger and disgust among the 99 percent of Americans who are not the super-rich, against the 1 percent who own most of the nation's wealth and have dragged us into economic disaster. We can thank the Supercommittee for helping to awaken working people - an awakening that we see not only in the Occupy movement but also in the recent election results in Ohio and Iowa and in the Wisconsin recall campaign.
To create an illusion of fairness, the Supercommittee's mandate said it might also consider tax increases - not just spending cuts - in crafting its deficit reduction plan. But Republicans on the committee announced from the beginning that tax increases - especially taxes on the rich - were "off the table" and "non-negotiable."
From the very start the "Supercommittee" was a dangerous fraud. We have seen previous attempts by Congress to dodge its constitutional and democratic responsibilities with similar inventions. Something called "fast track" is the procedure typically employed when shoving job-killing "free trade" deals through Congress, with no amendments and very little debate allowed. We have also experienced countless "Blue Ribbon" commissions, all designed to do the corporations' dirty work while taking Congress off the hook. The latest variant of that species was the failed Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission, also known as the Catfood Commission. The goal of this outfit was to dress up massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare as the "fiscally responsible" and "bipartisan" thing to do. Protests from unions, seniors, feminists and other voices of working people helped prevent this commission from reaching its required supermajority to make an official recommendation.
What was different about the recent Supercommittee, and what made it far more dangerous, was that as a body of Congress granted legislative superpowers, the Supercommittee had the capacity to make cuts. What was also very troubling was that many of the Democrats on the Supercommittee were ready to agree with Republicans on major Social Security and Medicare cuts (along with slashing other needed programs), if only the Republicans would go along with some additional taxes on the wealthy.
Despite corporate media efforts to scare the general public into buying the Supercommittee and its toxic mandates, we didn't. Polls have repeatedly showed that public rejects cuts to Social Security and Medicare as the way to reduce the deficit. The voter repeal of anti-worker legislation in Ohio and the surging Occupy movement showed that working people are increasingly ready to fight back. The Supercommittee's super-deadline of November 23 came and went. The economy did not crash. The sun still came up the following morning. The only danger we ever faced from the Supercommittee was that they might actually reach an agreement, not that they might fail!
So now it's time to bury the Supercommittee, as deep as we can and for all time. The politicians from both sides who cooked up this dangerous waste of time must be held accountable. Our budget problems can be fixed, but not unless the Democrats grow some spine and confront big business and the Republicans head-on. They have to raise taxes on the wealthy and on the corporate tax scofflaws. They have to plow massive additional federal money into job creation and support for local governments, to keep the economy moving. They must defend Social Security and Medicare, and stop giving credence to the lie that these programs have anything to do with the deficit. And most of all, our massive and costly military machine has got to be dramatically scaled down. We must extricate ourselves from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately, and not by moving our troops into other Middle Eastern countries. If President Obama continues to start new wars - like Libya, with all of its massive expense and complications - he must be stopped.
It is time to say "never again" to the Supercommittee and any kind of secret closed-door "bipartisan" end-run around democracy. History shows that it is in these settings that Democrats are tempted to throw us to the wolves and surrender the programs we depend on, such as Social Security and Medicare.
Related kinds of all-powerful anti-constitutional shortcuts are moving down the political food chain, from the federal to the state and local levels. Two shadowy, unelected "accounting standards boards," FASB and GASB, issue new accounting rules every few years that lead to more attacks on pensions and retiree healthcare, in both the private and public sectors, by threatening to ruin employers' credit ratings. Towns and cities whose local tax base was already decimated by plant closings now face the destruction of local democracy. In Michigan, for example, anti-worker Governor Rick Snyder claims the right to impose financial martial law on local governments by appointing an "emergency manager" with the power to cut budgets, tear up contracts, sell off assets and override elected officials. Cities in other states face similar rollbacks of democracy. The trend is very dangerous - replacing elected representatives with unknown "financial czars" whose mandate is to slash jobs and services, to make sure the bankers get paid.
The Supercommittee is dead, but you can bet that the 1 percenters will be back with new plans to "streamline" decision making through secretive and undemocratic procedures, so the corporations always get what they want. On the other side, the Occupy Wall Street movement comes not a moment too soon. Fresh reinforcements are here, and we in the unions owe them debt of gratitude to the Occupy campers and marchers. By its very nature the Occupy movement not only has impacted the current political debates, but its democracy, inclusiveness and openness are a challenge to the secretive and undemocratic nature of corporate-corrupted politics. We in UE, who have accomplished great things over the past 75 years by being even more democratic than most other unions, can see the great value of the Occupy movement.
Where the Occupy movement goes from here is not exactly clear, but we hope that with labor's help it will gain strength. For workers the next round of battles will start in January with new attacks on the state level. It looks like sometime next spring workers in Wisconsin will get their chance to recall Governor Scott Walker. A lot has changed in the past 12 months, and now working people are fired-up and fighting back. That's hopeful news as we enter the Holiday season.
For this round of the fight, the scoring was Occupy 99, Supercommittee 1. Now let's get ready for Round 2. The bell is about to ring.