Obama's monumental betrayal of the American people

While RW whackos call Obama a 'socialist' and a 'communist' as a sort of misdirecting political chaff, he's doing what he's done from his first day in office: serve the banksters and the corporate state and betray the American people...


Randsom Paid
https://www.truth-out.org/ransom-paid/1312207122

Anyone who characterizes the deal between the President, Democratic, and Republican leaders as a victory for the American people over partisanship understands neither economics nor politics.

The deal does not raise taxes on America’s wealthy and most fortunate — who are now taking home a larger share of total income and wealth, and whose tax rates are already lower than they have been, in eighty years. Yet it puts the nation’s most important safety nets and public investments on the chopping block.

It also hobbles the capacity of the government to respond to the jobs and growth crisis. Added to the cuts already underway by state and local governments, the deal’s spending cuts increase the odds of a double-dip recession. And the deal strengthens the political hand of the radical right.

Yes, the deal is preferable to the unfolding economic catastrophe of a default on the debt of the U.S. government. The outrage and the shame is it has come to this choice.

More than a year ago, the President could have conditioned his agreement to extend the Bush tax cuts beyond 2010 on Republicans’ agreement not to link a vote on the debt ceiling to the budget deficit. But he did not.

Many months ago, when Republicans first demanded spending cuts and no tax increases as a condition for raising the debt ceiling, the President could have blown their cover. He could have shown the American people why this demand had nothing to do with deficit reduction but everything to do with the GOP’s ideological fixation on shrinking the size of the government — thereby imperiling Medicare, Social Security, education, infrastructure, and everything else Americans depend on. But he did not.

And through it all the President could have explained to Americans that the biggest economic challenge we face is restoring jobs and wages and economic growth, that spending cuts in the next few years will slow the economy even further, and therefore that the Republicans’ demands threaten us all. Again, he did not.

The radical right has now won a huge tactical and strategic victory. Democrats and the White House have proven they have little by way of tactics or strategy.

By putting Medicare and Social Security on the block, they have made it more difficult for Democrats in the upcoming 2012 election cycle to blame Republicans for doing so.

By embracing deficit reduction as their apparent goal – claiming only that they’d seek to do it differently than the GOP – Democrats and the White House now seemingly agree with the GOP that the budget deficit is the biggest obstacle to the nation’s future prosperity.

The budget deficit is not the biggest obstacle to our prosperity. Lack of jobs and growth is. And the largest threat to our democracy is the emergence of a radical right capable of getting most of the ransom it demands.

https://www.truth-out.org/ransom-paid/1312207122
From the comments section of the above link;

What does an industrial country look like after committing suicide, as we apparently are about to do?

Infrastructure dies. Schools die. Parks and libraries close. Trains derail and highways turn into gravel paths. University graduates face 40% unemployment. The rich build giant McMansions surrounded by barbed wire and 24 hr. armed security. Oil and chemical companies can resume their 1960s practices of just dumping crap into the nearest stream. There are examples - 1994 Russia, for starters. Do you really want to play that movie? For what - an abstraction?

As Paul Krugman eloquently put in today's NYT, we are going Banana Republic, but not in the fashion sense. We are about to legislate ourselves into a depression, a self inflicted wound.

Just when we are about to coast pass the global warming redline, we are torching every program and regulation to try and mitigate the damage. If it were not so tragic it would be an enormous joke.

The Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame, just as the parties in 1933 Germany were to blame for the eventual triumph of Hitler. The Republicans have sold their collective soul to a cadre of Millenarian bible-thumping know-nothings who not only expect, but crave for, the end of Life as we know It. The Democrats, led by the Clintonist DLC, are the sort that would triangulate their way to the end of civilization if they thought that polls would oblige. Worse, lacking any ideological anchor (other than what gets me elected next year), they are swung as if on cords by the deepest pockets, whether big pharma, ADM, or banks. But don't touch the Pentagon. And, by gum, don't end the three wars we are already in.

Even 1990s Japan didn't suffer from such an abject will to self-destruct. They called it a "hollowing out", a 15 year economic hell they have yet to recover from. But even they had the sense, even at the absolute nadir, to refrain from blowing their own collective brains out as Obama and the "super group" of self-appointed Congressional denizens are about to do.

sputnik99

The idiots have won the debate, once again.

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The Controlled Dialectic of the "Debate"

One small point, I think, needs to be made and driven home: This passing "Debate" - apart from being one more Round in an escalating, ever-more-frightening yearly Ritual - was also a controlled dialectic & a silly play-acted Charade. Off-camera, a good part of the real action must have been between Bernacke and his Constituency, for whom he is Chairman of the Board: I refer to the Bond-holding Class, who were impatiently waiting, hollerin' and clamoring! for their past-due Quarterly dividends from that part of the portfolio of the Wall Street { & European, Japanese & Chinese } Prime Banks that is held in tax-exempt U.S. Government Securities.

Thus the Democrats, who argued the pros of raising the debt ceiling, especially stressing that the system would break down if the Debt Ceiling was not raised quickly {hup! Bernacke is cracking the whip!} were not actually serving the highest interests of their electorate - the People - whom they falsely claim to represent.

Neither have the Republicans, who in this instance, theatrically opposed raising the Debt ceiling, been either consistent or honest. Obviously, W. was spending faster and more furiously than any president before him ever dared to; practicing "Rabid Keynesianism," as Chompsky [sic] once put it. Actually there are several factions in the Republican Party. For sake of brevity, I'll just deal with two: the First, and oldest of which is the Wall Street, plutocratic-inclined wing, whose current Agenda is debt-collection; service for the bond-holders; population-reduction of useless eaters; + {plus} + war-mongering & prison-mongering for the military-industrial & prison-industrial complexes. These are the people who won this Round.

The Tea Party Congress-people are actually lesser villains - there are still other villains - because they are mostly new to Washington, and are naifs, and come from places like Wisconsin and Kansas, and are green-behind-the-ears. They either did not get =OR= haven't yet processed the Information that Nixon let out forty years ago when he said "We're All Keynesians Now."

To the Tea Party Folks - still being nineteenth century, Romantic Republican throwbacks - the Republican Party still stands for "balanced budgets..." They are easily manipulated and herded, and often marched around the block a few times, as useful idiots on the Right.

To give them some credit, they are mostly True Believers - mostly - sans a few well-placed control agents. As Ernest Haberkern of the Center for Socialist History said of the tea party folks, early on into Obama-Rama: "At least the Tea Party People know that they are being screwed - Some of the same people who are doing the screwing may be among the people who are financing the tea parties - but at least the lumpanized Tea-Partiers know that they are being screwed."

The Plutes who run the Republican Party have always both needed & used useful idgits like these in the hinterlands, listening to the beck and call of the Rush Limbaughs and other paid hacks who have always served as the whips for the discontented masses in the Red State Interiors. The tea party folks are right about One thing - there is in them the vestigial memory of what once was a noble tradition in Republicanism - the tradition of Honest Money and balanced budgets; the ethic that "You Pay as You Go - or Never."

Outside the dialectic of whether TO Raise the Debt-ceiling or NOT, is the whole other issue of the Legitimacy or Illegitimacy of the National Debt itself. I for one state, without any Qualms, that the so-called "National Debt" is not a legitimate Entity, and should not be serviced any longer. And that, folks, is a position that the "radical fringes" of both left and right, {that the New York Times affiliate, our own dear Times Light, so despises,} can agree upon: as we can all also agree - and even Transcendentalists, like myself, can agree - that the National Debt is Illegitimate, & that the Power Elite have been in charge of the terms of this charade of a "debate."

And that the only ones who have won this round - and yes, they almost always win, because they are the heirs of those who wrote the Rules; and now They make the Rules and keep the rest of us in the dark - are the two percent of the population who happened to have been 'lucky' - or Something - to have been born into families which inherit and pass down the Capital, " Class A Stock " of the {Wall Street, Money Market} Prime Banks,whose vaults are stuffed with piles upon piles of U.S. Treasury Securities, which these Prime Banks have purchased for cents-on-the-dollar, by multiplying Other People's Money at bond-auctions conducted by the Federal Open Market Committee - the Fed's Window on Wall Street.

: Here is a Picture of the Plutocrats & their Pie :

Included in the various possessions and investments listed in the script on the surface of the Pie should be the words: "INTEREST IN THE NATIONAL DEBT" - I'm sure it was just an oversight of Art Young not to remember to mention this very essential aspect of ruling-class Sovereignty.

Mark Walter Evans
www.paleoprogressives.org

One very interesting factoid concerning Barack Obama should cause wonder to everyone who learns the truth of it: Barack Obama was supported for President, in 2008, by the Ku Klux Klan: https://www.google.com/search?q=Obam...afe=images&tbs=