Tweet
Image: Davidd / Flickr
There is a U.S. unemployment crisis that no one is doing anything about that. There is no fiscal crisis …
… but the Republicans and Democrats are using that lie, that fantasy, to continue high and higher unemployment, to pillage Social Security and Medicare, and to pursue their main goal, the prime directive of the upper class: redistribute the economy’s wealth to the 1%.
Read Dean Baker and once again weep. How can the Washington Post write the following, in its lead editorial:
“THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE for the next president will be putting the nation’s long-term finances on sounder footing. The failure to do so is the biggest shortcoming of President Obama’s first term.” [capitalization in original]
All-caps, yeah right. This is a class warfare editorial of the most obvious and aggressive sort. Baker responds with faux naivete:
people who had access to data on the labor market would have to believe that the fact that tens of millions of people are still unemployed or underemployed in the biggest failure of President Obama’s first term. These people and their families are seeing their lives ruined.
The worst part is that the devastation they are suffering is not due to their own failings. Its due to the incompetence of people with names like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Robert Rubin and the people who have the opportunity to express themselves in major media outlets like the Washington Post. This disaster would have been 100 percent preventable, if anyone in a position of authority had been able to recognize an $8 trillion housing bubble and understand that its collapse would have a devastating impact on the economy.
Which gets us back to the layers of tragedy. Not only is the real economic crisis ignored and class warfare fantasy put in its place, but no one is allowed to point that out in a major news source. A further layer is that both major political parties are selling the fantasy and ignoring the real economic crisis. As Serge Halimi writes,
Once again, with a political system operating for the benefit of two parties falling over each other to grant favours to the business community, millions of Americans disenchanted with Obama’s weakness will still be forced to vote for him. So they will resign themselves and make the usual choice offered in the US, that between bad and worse.
8 Comments
The debt/deficit crisis is the nations biggest and most damaging lie since the invasion of Iraq. And both parties and the media are going along with it, just as they did in 2003.
In fact, since 1996, 31USC5112(k) has authorized the Treasury to issue money to pay appropriated expenses without borrowing. So why not?
Reason #1: Some people need treasuries (bond, bills, notes etc.) to safely invest in. In fact, yesterday Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider implied that the lack of lack of treasuries to invest in during the Clinton surpluses led to the boom in subprime mortgages, which led to our current economic woes.
Reason #2: Some believe that spending borrowed money raised through sale of Treasury bonds, note, bills, etc. (treasuries) is less inflationary that issuing new money. But, there are always banks willing to monetize your treasuries, i.e., buy them from you with freshly issued bank money, which is just as inflationary as money freshly issued by the Treasury.
Reason #3: The interest payments on bonds is an excellent way to make money trickle upward in the U.S. economy. I’m talking class unnoticed class warfare that the middle class is losing.
If you want a class war narrative, it goes something like this.
The fraction of the 1% (just consider Pete Petersen, for example) currently buy US debt along with corporations, foreign governments, and the Social Security and other intragovernmental trust funds. The interest on that debt gets compounded the longer the debt stays around (thus the terror on Wall Street at the idea Gore would pay down the debt). Heads they win.
But, there are $4 trillion in intragovernmental trust funds that are not in the Wall Street casino to be “risk-managed” (think the credit-default swap type or “risk management”. Voucherizing Medicare and securitizing Social Security would put that money in the market with no guarantees to the folks for whom this is the safety net in old age. That’s what “risk” means; elders wind up holding the empty bag. Tails you lose.
And, if the budget can be stripped down to just the subsidies for corporations–military, farm, oil, …..Tails you lose.
There can be a deeper tax cut on capital gains. Heads they win.
Unemployment. Meh. They don’t need as many employees to make money if they squeeze the few they have harder. And keep the threat of unemployment around. Tails you lose.
Ain’t that precious.
The financial-services industry has had a hardon for those trust funds for decades.
Exactly. These are the debt managers, private and public. Too much gov debt means more risk for them. Too little means too much risk. Their objective – to find just the right balance. Now that the neo-liberal con game has ended, time to put the screws on the population – more debt is more risk.
Really, if capitalist whiz-kids can’t tell what’s happening, then they’ve just got another con going.
Obama will announce his intent to,cut $4trillion from the debt over the next ten years. How is that for a good sound finance? I can only hope he offsets that with new spending. On the other hand, if that includes taxes on the 1% then game on!
“President Obama is committed to reducing the national debt.”
If you think this guy has been a Republican up until now, just wait until you see his second term.
I am terrified of what he will do, when he no longer has to worry about getting the votes of the left, for whom he and his minions have so much utter contempt.
IMO, those who swear he will finally do good things during his second term are delusional. For one thing, he will owe Democrats big time and Democrats have been working double time to eliminate the left.
A man is mercilessly run out of Congress by his own Party, the party that adores Bill Blow Job in the Oval Office Clinton, for tweeting a PHOTO of himself with his shorts ON? Are you kidding me?
I don’t know who is left in Congress to stand up to the right.
Bernie Sanders is great, but there is only so much he can do all by his lonesome. And even Sanders won’t be around too much longer.
Good bye, Democrats and Republicans. Hello, Corrupt Party One and Corrupt Party Two.
So, despite OWS and how it has increased awareness among some, there are no grounds for optimism about the next several years. The problem as always is that this media/political system doesn’t allow an alternative to right and far right. When people get hopelessly frustrated sooner or later with Obama and the right, we already know that the manufactured alternative provided them will be far right loon Paul Ryan. That looks like the next five years or so to me.
Not blaming anyone here (of course) but D#@MN!
They won’t be happy till 50% of us are unemployed and all benefits are cut and then they’ll complain were all slackers and need to be put in work camps, because as we all know, Arbeit Mach Frei, right?