Patrick Martin: Obama Returns to the Fraud of: Equal Sacrifice

As usual, our idiotic "President" is full of bullshit. If we compare Obama's huge salary to mine, there is nothing equal in our paychecks! The back-to-back nationally televised speeches delivered Monday night by Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were a political fraud on every level! The so-called "debate" in Washington on the federal deficit was rigged in advance! All of the participants took as their principle the imposition of massive cuts on programs that benefit our working people. The Democratic administration and the congressional Republicans were using an orchestrated crisis over the raising of the federal debt ceiling to create the conditions for an unprecedented attack on the living standards and social rights of working people! The two parties do NOT represent the American people, but the American financial aristocracy, whose wealth and income they defend at the expense of the broad masses. They will see basic social programs on which they rely: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, devastated by spending cuts!! Obama delivered a "cynical" speech, whose purpose was to appeal to the American people to support spending cuts that will drive millions of them, including our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq into abject poverty, while leaving the gargantuan wealth of the financial aristocracy untouched!! Virtually every sentence in his 15 minute address was a lie!! Obama described the two sides in the debate in terms that underscored the essential unity of the two big business parties. He noted that "both sides agree on the amount of deficit reduction" but, looking once more to "his ubiquitous teleprompter", disagree on what form that should take! One approach, he said, was based on painful cuts in spending, including basic programs like Medicare, but asked the wealthy and the corporations "to give a little," and he treated this as a "balanced approach". According to Obama, "his stubborn opponents" insist on a "cuts only approach" with nothing from the wealthy, including his own huge salary and perks as our "president". In order to conceal the dimensions of the cuts endorsed by both sides, Obama was careful to give no figures. Both the White House and the congressional Republicans have proposed cuts as high as $4 trillion over the next ten years, including devastating attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and federal programs supporting education, transportation, housing, environmental protection and consumer and worker safety and health. As for taxes on the rich, Obama has proposed only a few hundred billion dollars to serve as a "fig leaf" for the anti-working-class character of his overall budget policy.