Bipartisan Budget Deal to Scrap Jobless Benefits. Condemning Five Million People to Poverty and Destitution!

• Bipartisan Budget Deal to Scrap Jobless Benefits. Condemning Five Million People to Poverty and Destitution! 
  by Andre Damon and Barry Grey, http://www.globalresearch.ca/
  The White House said Friday it would agree to a budget deal with the Republicans that excludes an extension of federal benefits for the long-term unemployed, which are scheduled to expire at the end of the month.
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  By the administration’s own figures, allowing the federally-funded extended benefit program to expire will end cash assistance for 1.3 million people immediately after the holidays and impact an additional 3.6 million people in the first half of 2014.
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  With this cruel and callous act, Obama and the Democratic Party are prepared to join with the Republicans in condemning nearly 5 million people and their families to destitution. In prior recessions, emergency unemployment benefits, beyond the standard aid offered by the states, have never been terminated when unemployment remained at such high levels as those prevailing today.
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  Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisers this week pointed out that long-term unemployment in the US is 2.6 percent, more than double “any other time that we have allowed benefits” to lapse.
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  White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made clear at his Friday press briefing that Obama would not make an extension of long-term benefits a precondition for reaching an agreement in current talks between leaders of a House-Senate conference committee tasked with coming up with a budget by December 13.
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  The conference committee, headed by Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Democratic Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, was set up as part of the agreement that ended the partial government shutdown in October. The temporary federal spending authorization that ended the 16-day shutdown expires on January 15.
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  Exuding the cynicism that typifies the Obama administration, Carney said it would be “terrible to tell more than a million families across the country just a few days after Christmas that they’re out of benefits,” while making clear that the White House was prepared to do just that.
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  Friday’s announcement came just two days after Obama gave a speech in which he called income inequality the “defining challenge of our time” and declared that “over the course of the next year, and for the rest of my presidency,” his administration would “focus all our efforts” on narrowing the gap between rich and poor.
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  His readiness to end jobless benefits for millions of out-of-work people has already given the lie to his absurd pretense of championing working Americans and opposing concentrated wealth. It reflects the real substance of the policies he has pursued since taking office, which have been devoted to further enriching the ruling elite at the expense of the broad mass of the population.
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