The following report from US shows the real meaning of the Govt. shut down due to the fight between the Democrats and the republicans and the consequent non-passing of Finance Bills. The victims are the poor and the workers.
“The shutdown will have a punishing impact on millions of workers and poor people. At the same time, the government functions considered essential by the corporate-financial elite will be largely unaffected. The uniformed military, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and the rest of the agencies involved in US imperialist aggression and subversion abroad and domestic spying and repression at home will be virtually unscathed.
The Federal Reserve will continue to pump $85 billion a month into the financial markets, inflating stock prices and underwriting corporate profits.
But over 800,000 of the 2 million federal employees will be furloughed without pay as long as the shutdown lasts, including half of the 800,000 civilian Pentagon workers. Hundreds of thousands more federal employees will be compelled to work without pay. These are workers who have already suffered the consequences of a three-year pay freeze imposed by the Obama administration as well as weeks of unpaid furloughs resulting from the automatic “sequester” cuts proposed in 2011 by the White House, which began to take effect last March.
Personal income for federal workers across the country dropped by an average of 0.8 percent in the second quarter of this year.
The most vulnerable sections of society will be particularly hard hit. The federal Women, Infant and Children (WIC) program, which provides food for low-income women and children, will shut down. Veterans Administration disability claims will cease to be processed.
All national parks and museums will close, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Entire federal departments—including Commerce, Education, Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, NASA and the National Institutes of Health—will virtually shut down.
The shutdown will have a particularly devastating impact on the Washington DC area, where the federal government accounts for one-third of the local economy. It is estimated the nation’s capital will lose $200 million a day and over 700,000 jobs will be affected. Trash collection and libraries could be impacted.
The Washington region already lost 26,500 net jobs in August as a result of sequester cuts and furloughs.
The funding deadline and shutdown may be the prelude to an even more consequential crisis over the federal debt ceiling. At some point towards the end of October, the federal government will reach its current debt ceiling. House Republicans are threatening once again to tie a bill increasing the debt limit to provisions defunding or delaying “Obamacare,” raising the specter of a national default.
Both the government funding and debt ceiling crises are entirely manufactured. Since 2010, there have been three similar government crises—in 2010 over extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, in 2011 over the debt ceiling, and in 2012 over the so-called “fiscal cliff.” In every case, behind the partisan “gridlock” and recriminations there was a significant element of bipartisan manipulation to drive the austerity agenda further to the right. The result was trillions of dollars in spending cuts.”
