Balance the budget

Victor Perlo

In the Sept. 25 People Before Profits column, Fred Gaboury did a good job explaining the shortcomings in the Congressional Budget Office's estimates and of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' warnings of the danger of a budget deficit instead of surplus.

However, he omits the most important factor: the huge increases in the military budget and the desirability of cutting it in half, an action that would eliminate anyk possibility of a deficit.

But there is yet anoth;er principal point: a moderate budget deficit is desirable, reflecting the capital investment spending of the government: It is actually so treated in the Commerce Department's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) accounts. Let me explain:

Outlays to increase the country's road network, school construction, etc. are investment projects. In a capitalist economy similar private expenditures are also investments, not paid for out of current revenues.

The federal, state and local governments have fallen woefully behind in such projects. E.G., the failure to provide anti-hurricane measures that were fully worked out and projected by experts is a case in point. As is the decades-long failure to complete the West Side Highway in Manhattan. And, most basically, the racist, anti-labor shortfalls in school, hospital and public housing construction are striking examples. The need to balance the budget is an attack on people's demands for social expenditures, capital and current..

Of course budget deficits must be kept within reasonable bounds so that the national debt doesn't go up faster than the GDP. This can be guaranteed by tax-the-rich programs of the CPUSA, progressive and labor union movements.

BNY continued:

The Bank of New York Chair Thomas A. Renyi has assured the public that BONY's participation in the foreign transfer of Russian monies was done by lower level employees of the bank.

However, as I showed in my Sept. 4 column, Natasha Kagalovsky, who handled the transfer, was high up in BONY's hierarchy. There is no doubt that the bank's top executives knew and approved of thesignificant fee income obtained from the Russian shell companies that carry out the money transfers.

BONY's branches on Cayman Islands in the Caribbean are exactly for the purpose of offering the bank's corporate clients - American, Russian and others - havens for hiding billions of dollars from tax collectors, prosecutors of money launderers, etc. Of course, BONY is not unique: similar activities are carried out by City Bank, Chase and Fleet Financial.

Biritsh companies play their own hand in this game, including the export of capital from Russia. A prominent haven for such transactions is the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea.

It is nominally an independent country: it has its own Parliament, language and laws. But it has a "vague" relationship with Britain, similar to that of Canada, Australia, etc. in the British Commonwealth

The Isle of Man, as well as Sark, Jersey in the English Channel, along with the many Caribbean islands - Bermuda, Bahamas, Cayman, etc. - are vehicles through which the financial giants of the imperialist countries operate without effective government regulation.

Among other benefits that accrue to the runaways are the billions of dollars in taxes that are withheld from their home countries. To reiterate a point I made in the 9/4 column, the political significance of the Russian money laundering is the export out of the homeland of the billions in profits by Russia's monopoly capitalists.