by BRUCE A. DIXON
After signing off on the biggest military budget in human history, and giving 23 trillion dollars of free money to Wall Street, much of it directly through the Federal Reserve without Congressional oversight, the president is expected to announce a “spending freeze” in his State of the Union address tonight. In keeping with his policy of waiting for “all boats to rise” the First Black President will not announce any special measures to address joblessness in African American communities, which in many urban areas has reached 50% of working age males, and has historically been double the white jobless rate, and is rising faster than unemployment among whites.
White House spokespeople assure us that the freeze will not apply to the military budget, or the uniquely American combination of policing, surveillance and corporate welfare programs they call “homeland security.” Also exempt are veterans affairs and the State Department, impossible to separate from the military and our lawless mercenary armies, and social security, and Medicare, except for the $400 million cut that program will feel if either version of the president’s health insurance reform package ever clears Congress. The corporate press describes all federal programs that don’t fit into the slots just described as “discretionary,” and the Obama White House, corporate to the core uses the same terminology. The budget freeze, they say, will affect all the federal government’s “discretionary” programs.
With the adoption of NAFTA under the previous Democratic president, the US government became a full partner in corporate America’s drive to relocate its factories outside the U.S., first in low-wage Mexico, and now in lower-wage China. That caused a radical shrinkage of local tax revenues across the country at the same time that wages fell and joblessness rose. Corporate Democrats (and Republicans) had a solution for that too — selling off public assets like highways, parking meters, water systems, public hospitals, even jails, government fleet management and payrolls, even birth and death records to the same investor class that caused the shrinkage by offshoring as much of the US industrial sector as they could.
“Black America can expect to reap enormous benefits in self-esteem at the sight of a well-suited black man at the podium delivering this august address.”
Black Agenda Report for more