At the altar of capitalism

There has been much discussion since the election about the general outlines the "grand bargain" and the pending "fiscal cliff" and all business is in favor of "shared sacrifice". But who is really being thrown of this cliff? The "Fix the Debt" campaign has raised $60 million and recruited more than 80 CEOs of America's most powerful corporations to lobby for a debt deal that would reduce corporate taxes and shift costs onto the poor and elderly. The 63 "Fix the Debt" companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals – a "territorial tax system. The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. Of the 63 "Fix the Debt" CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes.

These days people may be led to think that the main cause of the economic downturn is the state benefits and pensions. Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, infamous for describing his financial activities as “God’s work”, talks about the need to cut Social Security benefits and raise the retirement age. "You're going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people's expectations -- the entitlements and what people think that they're going to get, because it's not going to -- they're not going to get it." In case it’s necessary to remind people, the economy plunged due to the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also the large deficits of the last five years. The reason that we suddenly got large budgetary deficits was the economic downturn, which caused tax revenue to plummet and increased spending on programs such as unemployment insurance.

Because of a bubble that Goldman Sachs helped to create it was facing a bank run that pushed the company to the edge of bankruptcy. It took a government bail-out to save it. Now its CEO wants to cut our living standards. Blankfein expains "Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career." When he refers to a "25-year career." perhaps some Goldman Sachs employees retire in their early 40s, but most workers do not--and they certainly don't get Social Security retirement benefits when they do so.

Another culprit of the recession, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan who was insisting that there was no bubble, and that even if there was a housing bubble, its collapse would pose no special problem for the economy, is now telling us that another recession (albeit "moderate") would be a price worth paying, if it led to spending cuts on entitlement programs. Had the economy not collapsed, there would have been no reason for his policy.

To appease the God Mammon, human sacrifices are required. Socialists think we have already sacrificed enough, through the loss of our jobs, our health, our homes, our net worth, our drop in real wages and  from paying some usury-bank extortionate interest on our pay-day loans. The proper amount of additional sacrifice for us is, precisely, zero. There’s nothing to negotiate. Enough is enough!

Details from here