While deficits and a large national debt are not good things in the long run, it is not the case that it is the greatest problem right now. What is clear is that they are being used as weapons by the oligarchy to strip people of their basic rights and benefits and destroy public services in order to further enrich the few obscenely wealthy people in this country.

Paul Craig Roberts looks at the numbers and argues that we are witnessing a great rip-off.

Rachel Maddow explains what is happening in Michigan as emblematic of what is going on nationwide, which is the wholesale assault on democracy itself. (Thanks to reader Norm.)

As is often the case, what I see happening in the US has precursors in Sri Lanka a few decades ago. In Sri Lanka, elections used to swing back and forth between left-of-center and right of-center political parties, with the range being much greater than in the US. As a result, the government’s economic and social policies would change every few years. Since we had a British parliamentary system, governments would sometimes get a landslide, which would later be reversed.

In 1977, the right-of-center party won by a huge landslide. Its autocratic leader decided that he wanted to play for keeps and create a new system that would entrench his party in power indefinitely so that his policies would not be reversed. Using his huge majority, he forced through major changes in the constitution and government and elections and the judiciary system to make it hard for another pendulum swing to occur and reverse his policies, and that even the judiciary would not be able to rein in the anti-democratic measures.

It worked, at least for a while. But eventually people got tired of the government and its corruption and voted in the opposition, despite the rigged system. And now the other party is using those very same powers to entrench itself and its cronies in power. But because of the weakened democratic system and the removal of safeguards, corruption is now endemic and political thuggery and intimidation commonplace.

The lesson in this? It is that we are entering a new phase in politics in the US. The people who are attacking unions and undermining the public sector and the watchdog role of government are playing for keeps. They too want to change the rules of the game so the oligarchy has total freedom to do what it likes and that there will be no going back. They are using the ignorant tea partiers as a wedge to claim popular legitimacy but the tea partiers will be tossed aside once they have served their purpose. The tea partiers will realize only too late that they vociferously cheered on the very people who will turn around and destroy them.

The Democratic Party is too feckless to vigorously fight this assault on democracy, because they are also, with a few rare exceptions, part of the oligarchy. The Democratic Party will only do the right thing if they are forced to do so by an angry public. This is why the mass demonstrations of ordinary people occurring around the country are so important. In the March 2011 issue of Z Magazine, Paul Street quotes the late, great historian Howard Zinn:

There’s hardly anything more important that people can learn than the fact that the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeteria, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.

Street also quotes C. Derber in his book Hidden Power (2005):

The leading agents of significant policy change in U. S. history have not been parties glued to the next election, but social movements that operate on the scale of decades rather than two- and four-year electoral cycles. Political parties have historically become agents of democratic change only when movements infuse the parties with their own long-term vision, moral conviction, and resources.

We have to support the demonstrations in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan and elsewhere that are opposing this attempt to radically reshape the democratic structure to allow total control by the oligarchy.