The budget crisis in the US is stunning in its political theatrics and in its indication of the direction the US state is headed. The deal has been settled in the halls of power that will greatly cut all basic government aid programs, particularly Medicare and Social Security while only slightly scaling back military spending. Medicare pays health care providers and provides key support to the health care industry along with paying for the medical care of the elderly, permanently disabled and other populations. Social Security gives a monthly check that elderly workers, the disabled, the mentally ill and orphans rely on for basic survival. Cutting these “entitlement programs”, social wage measures, means in effect they are refusing to invest state capital into the reproduction of a workforce. Much money will be cut to the states, further exacerbating their While the imperialist butchery of US imperialism continuing indefinitely it is clear that the bourgeoisie is seeking to liquidate a chunk of its human capital. Thus it is entirely convenient that the US regime has had this spectacle of open conflict between rival political factions both of whom are committed to restricting the consumption of their own national labor force and devoting all possible available resources to financial profit and imperialist warfare.

Standard and Poor's recent downgrade of the US states credit rating explicitly slapped the divided American bourgeoisie for its inability to reach a deal and lack of aggressive cuts to medicare. The cuts agreed to by the US Government were a little over half the $4 trillion that the S & P wanted. What was not on the table is cuts to the US military. While a few token cuts to the military were made in the last budget, these were spread out over the course of several years and the majority of them were in soldiers' pay and benefits.

While the loyal left opposition among the bourgeois political class attempts to paint the entire budget ceiling debacle as though it were a right-wing plot, it is the culmination of years of internecine strife that is motivated in large part by the crisis of capitalism as it impacts the US. From the Bretton Woods agreement to the present, the dollar has held on as the world's main trading and reserve currency. Today rivals of the US, like China and Russia, who are themselves holders of US debt, now howl about the failure of the Washington regime to back up its debts.

While the political expression of the left-wing of bourgeois political thought has not faltered or lost its unerring capacity for self-delusion. Much media talk has focused explicitly on the Tea Party court idiots role in the latest Washington power struggle. The idea that there is a “democracy” out there that “we citizens” are losing, that it is a vast right-wing conspiracy is a potent bourgeois lie. The open yet unspoken facts are that the regime has always been a bourgeois regime, has always defended bourgeois property and power while hypocritically robbing workers of their meagre personal property. The truth is that the constant austerity and warfare are the expressions of a capitalist crisis of profit accumulation meeting its own limits. The awareness of a crisis to which they have no answer has paralyzed the US bourgeoisie. As the conflict within the bourgeoisie intensifies the impulse to shoot its way out of the crisis will be a temptation too great for American capitalists to resist.

Whether it is the regime's official poverty figures, or the increase in homelessness or child hunger, the working class in the US is facing a long road of increasing hardships and must recover its consciousness under the weight of the most intensive and sustained bombardment of bourgeois anti-communist propaganda in the world. This can't wholly stop workers from taking up their own struggle, nor must it stop revolutionaries from participating in the struggles of the class and drawing out the lessons of past struggles and pointing the way forward.

AS