No, it's not a military conspiracy as such. But read on.
It is a secret meeting of a carefully selected group of congresspeople. No incoming calls. No outgoing calls. No visitors.
The "overworked, harassed" congresspeople are meeting in dead secrecy to come up with a compromise on cutting next year's budget by $100 billion — and they have to do it by the deadline of Oct. 15. That's the automatic cutoff date set by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, but it's also the date that the U.S. military buildup in the Gulf region is supposed to be completed.
The congresspeople are supposed to roll up their sleeves and work until they have arrived at whatever is required to end the government's deepening budgetary crisis.
But why, the reader may ask, are the members of Congress meeting at Andrews Air Force Base? Why the secrecy?
The Constitution requires open sessions. It requires a simple list of the income and expenditures of the nation. This is then supposed to be sent to the White House for approval. The Constitution makes it very clear that the Congress has the power of the purse. All the electronic inventions and high-tech gadgetry now in use are supposed to make it easier, not more complex, for them to arrive at a detailed list of the expenditures and the income, and then vote on it.
So why is only a select group of these people meeting secretly and why at an Air Force base?
The reader may remember that just a couple of years ago, another group of "overworked, harassed" congresspeople dealt with a gargantuan budgetary crisis after the stock market crash. They seemed on the verge of nervous collapse from all the pressures put on them by the banks and the giant multinational corporations to make sure that when Congress passed the budget on to the president, it would suit the powers that be, those who really control the vital arteries of economic life in America.
That group of congresspeople was expected to smooth the way to a new and reduced budget which would hide the crisis (even though it might deepen it in the long run). This required deep cuts in urgent social programs, particularly for the needy, while substantially helping the greedy.
But how did the big banks and corporations, with their vast army of lobbyists, accomplish this? Instead of clubbing the Congress into line in the usual way, forcing them to do what was considered politically so risky, they thought of a better approach. Why not put in motion a stroking operation? You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Give the networks a contract for weeks of TV ads, as Citicorp did, profiling most of the congresspeople. Instead of bad-mouthing them, find something inane about them, conservative or liberal, and make them look good.
Who is going to complain? No one is going to ask who pays for the ads. It's a public service, you know. In that way the banks and the multinationals got what they wanted by putting the congresspeople in a good light.
They got about 35 congresspeople and sent them away to one of those beautiful, luxurious hideaways in the mountains of Maryland, free from the small-time lobbyists and small "special interest" groups (but not the really big ones). They came up with a budget that made up for some of the losses suffered in the stock market crash of 1987 by creating new debt, while cutting deep into social services, especially for those most in need.
Why didn't anybody ask how the press could be kept out of such a meeting? How come nobody shouted, "Freedom of the press! We want to hear what's going on." ?
Forget it. Once a decision is made by the financial oligarchy of the U.S., in conjunction with the military-industrial complex and the mighty multinational industrial corporations, there is no appeal except through the mass movement.
Failing that, the congressional conspirators got easy sailing back at home. There were a few grumblers, but who heard them and what in effect were they grumbling about? Not about the right of the people to know how the appropriation process, the most sensitive and delicate work, is being violated. No, it was over some local problems here and there. And so the budget was passed.
All the noise made after the compromise was irrelevant. Those who delivered speeches inside and outside of Congress after the conspiratorial meeting at the hideout knew that it was fruitless. Room was made only for minor changes. Any of the 535 members of Congress who didn't know this was either a fool or totally uninterested in what was going on.
The capitalist media was full of scare talk that unless a compromise was reached, the mandatory, across-the-board budget cuts mandated by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law would kick in. The government would run out of money, federal employees wouldn't get paid and ordinary debt payments would be halted. The bankers and industrialists pull this tactic every so often when they want budget cuts passed.
But there is really nothing automatic about it. Congress is the supreme law-making body. Any law they make they can change, abolish or ignore. The idea that Congress is in a straitjacket because of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings is just to scare the public and make sure that the cuts go through while expenditures demanded by the super-rich, the millionaires and billionaires, particularly the military-industrial complex, grow, although with a few cosmetic changes.
At the end of the process, only the Internal Revenue Service would really know who got how much. Such information is not readily available to the public. That's the democracy of the financial-industrial-military plutocracy.
Now, on top of another gargantuan budgetary crisis over how to throw the burden on the masses, comes the U.S. war against Iraq. It will multiply the financial and economic problems facing the country and may trigger an economic debacle which has only been magnified by the delay.
Nevertheless, the capitalist-controlled congressional gang had to meet once more. But now it's wartime. To again pick one of those luxurious hideouts in the mountains of Maryland could be hazardous. The contrast between their luxurious setting and the growth of homelessness, poverty and unemployment might be risky, especially with even conservative economists themselves saying that a recession is virtually on.
So the idea of meeting at Andrews Air Force Base is much more proper. With that kind of setting, the public will get to understand that the war crisis entails the spending of billions of their dollars. Of course, the legislators are not exactly meeting in a barracks, but in the plush officers' club.
The base has another advantage. It is more easily accessible to the military. They can openly be in communication with the legislators.
A third advantage is, of course, that it is not accessible to the masses at all. And no one to date has asked why this is not happening in public hearings.
All the masses have heard is that there must be a compromise on the budget. Compromise whose interests? Those of the needy, or those of the greedy?
The Bush administration has proposed a budget that gives new and even bigger tax breaks to the wealthy through a lowered capital gains tax. This tax is not just on small gains in real estate, such as happens when a family sells its home. No, it is the tax that primarily affects stock speculators, who make multimillion-dollar fortunes in the financial markets. These used to be highly taxed, but over the years this has been steadily reduced. Bush is now arguing that the tax on these parasitic earnings must be lowered even more while making social cuts even deeper so as to stave off a recession.
This has scared the clandestine grouping of congresspeople, so they have now decided to delegate their authority to a smaller group whose constituencies are safer.
The administration even has the effrontery to call for "tax incentives" for the huge oil monopolies! This at a time when they are wallowing in profits from price-gouging since the war crisis began.
In fact, the big dilemma for the oil companies right now, according to an article in the Sept. 16 New York Times, is how to conceal their swollen profits, which the public will view as blood money at a time like this. So they are carrying out all kinds of accounting tricks to cover up the enormous wealth that has flowed into their coffers this year.
We won't even know what's in the budget until the whole thing is signed, sealed and delivered to the White House amid much pomp and ceremony. Once that is done, the rest will be mere chatter, each congressperson covering his posterior to some extent. But the burden of the war will have fallen squarely on the masses.
Already the so-called "peace dividend" is history. Promised reductions in military spending have been forgotten. Nor is any one of those sequestered on the Air Force base talking about this. Bush is in fact asking for an extra $1.2 billion for the Mideast deployment — just the tip of the iceberg. Star Wars, which is supposed to be obsolete now that "the Cold War is over," is making the high-tech military companies happy with its usual $4 billion per year for research and development.
Gramm-Rudman-Hollings notwithstanding, the debt of the government will have ballooned. The cuts that affect the masses in such vital areas as health, education, housing, drug rehabilitation, etc., will go through. Federal, state and municipal employees will lose their jobs. And the civilian economy, which is already slowing down, will take on a faster downward momentum.
The hopes of the bankers, the industrialists and the military-industrial complex is that the war will stop the downward slide of the capitalist economy. They are looking for signs in the price structure of the economy. But then there is the Federal Reserve Bank to help them with an inflationary injection of money, cutting deeper into the mass of the people who purchase consumer goods for day-to-day living.
To inject adrenalin into the economy, a really big war is necessary. And whether that can arrest the economic decline is questionable, even according to the most conservative bourgeois economists.
Relentlessly, remorselessly, the automatic processes of the capitalist economic system are driving it into an abyss. The situation cries out for a twofold struggle on the part of the masses: to at the same time, in a closely knit effort, struggle against both the new imperialist war, which is being pushed relentlessly, and the economic crisis which will fall squarely on the masses.
Never was it more necessary to combine the economic and political struggle into one mighty, united front of all the oppressed masses, all the workers, all who have suffered the brunt of poverty and homelessness.
Last updated: 23 March 2018