The downgrading of US bonds by Standards’s and Poor’s credit rating agency signals a demand for even deeper cuts than those just agreed to by Congress and Obama. Richard Seymour puts this together with the austerity in Western Europe and concludes “we have an astonishing spectacle. The political leadership of the dominant capitalist states is now trying to shred the public investment that has hitherto acted as a lifeline to their economies. They are talking about savagely reducing labour costs, ostensibly to compete with China or India. And they’re being urged on by the banks and business federations despite their awareness of the tremendous peril involved. This is actually going to undercut the conditions that led to their dominance in the first place.” Read the rest of his article here.
