The political system is in silly season mode. What with a YouTube video showing a pathetic Nick Clegg endlessly apologising for his failure to deliver on the Lib-Dem manifesto, or the Sun-orchestrated campaign against a Tory grandee for bad-mouthing a copper! Whatever next?
As if, in the meantime, the capitalists' crisis had somehow melted away! When in fact, it is getting deeper. On this account, the ConDems are in a state of total denial. Isn't Osborne still boasting about the "achievements" of his austerity policy? Never mind the fact that, in addition to savaging the jobs and standard of living of the working class, it has even failed to achieve its proclaimed objective of "deficit reduction"!
Let them open their books!
Indeed, contrary to the optimistic prognosis of the coalition's "Office for Budget Responsibility" (OBR) and, above all, despite drastic cuts, the August figure for the government's deficit was the highest since records began, in 1993. As a result, the deficit since April is now officially £31bn.
But even this is an accounting trick. Because when the Royal Mail pension fund was taken over by the government, its £28bn worth of assets were counted as a government receipt. So the government's real deficit for this period is £59bn - 22% more than in the same period last year!
Yet, cuts have been implemented as planned - in fact, they have been even harsher than planned. Instead of the 66,000 public sector job cuts which had been announced by the OBR for the first two years of the coalition, 372,000 jobs have been cut! Likewise, targets for welfare payments cuts have been exceeded by several billion.
So, where does this ballooning deficit come from? Part of the answer is obviously that, as the wage receipts and living standard of the working class falls, it pays less in income tax and VAT.
But isn't the standard of living of the wealthy still rising? And what about big companies? Their overall profits have increased. So why is it that they paid 10% less in corporation tax over these five months than over the same period last year? What handouts to big business and the wealthy - paid by the rest of us - are really hidden in the government's accounts?
There is only one way to find out - by imposing our demand on politicians that they open the accounting books of the state to the full scrutiny of the working class, at every level, from local to central government. The tens of thousands of low-paid public sector workers who still have their jobs in accounting departments, could play a vital role in unravelling the financial web of the state for us. Then we would see how our taxes are actually used and in whose pockets they end up.
And guess who's the next scapegoat...
When the ConDems' have missed their targets in the past, they always found some convenient excuse - whether it was the cold weather, the queen's jubilee or the eurozone crisis.
This time round they say it's due to the lack of economic "growth" and, guess what - they blame this on us, workers! As if we were cutting our own jobs and closing down our own workplaces!
To back this up, the Bank of England argues that given the drop in national production since 2007, employment should have dropped by 8%, instead of being virtually at the same level. This is supposed to reflect a drastic fall in workers' productivity in Britain. Therefore, it's the working class which is responsible for the fact that the economy is not growing. QED!
However, it doesn't take a Bank of England "expert" to know that employment analysis has considerably deteriorated over the past years. There's a lot of double-counting in the number of "employed workers" (those having to do several non-jobs to make a living) and a lot of workers who are officially considered as "employed" despite being in zero-hour or part-time jobs.
In fact, in the vast majority of workplaces, the crisis has resulted in the same work being done by fewer hands - meaning that each one of us has been made to work harder and produce more per hour of work.
But never mind. For these so-called "experts", the criminals responsible for this deepening crisis are not the capitalists whose crazy profit system caused it in the first place, but the workers whose jobs, wages and conditions are being cut! And the medicine that these quack doctors are proposing is that companies should stop "hoarding workers", as they dare to say, and cut even more jobs!
So, now, we know what to expect, if they and their capitalist masters get their way. Our only possible choice is to stand ready to fight them.