News

Last week, Democratic governors in New York and Connecticut repeated the austerity politics of Greece's Prime Minister Pappandreou and Portugal's former Prime Minister Socrates. In doing so, they likewise imitated the austerity politics of their Republican and Democratic counterparts across virtually all 50 states.Austerity for labor and the public is everywhere capitalism's Plan B. Even capitalists now see that capitalism's Plan A failed.You will recall that Plan A entailed a crisis-response program of bailing out the banks, insurance companies, large corporations and stock markets to achieve "recovery". The theory behind Plan A – we used to call it "trickle-down economics" – was that recovery would spread from financial markets and financiers to everyone else. It never did. So now the same servants of capitalism who imposed Plan A are dishing out Plan B.