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I live in a high-rise on the north side of Chicago. My building is full of older people. When the elevator comes, I hold the door for the people with walkers, people wearing braces and casts from falls, and people who move too slowly to exit or enter. It’s safe to say that not one of them had anything at all to do with the Great Crash. They didn’t vote to cut taxes during a war. They didn’t vote to cut taxes on the rich. They didn’t vote to destroy the regulatory system that protected us from the financial sector. They didn’t push fraudulent loans on unsuspecting homebuyers. They didn’t create innovative securities to sell to unsophisticated investors. They didn’t shortchange pension plans to benefit executives and shareholders.
The same plutocrats who despoiled our economy are trying to steal social security and other benefits from their victims.
We know who did this. It was craven politicians whose votes opened the door to destruction of the economy. They did it to benefit a small number of very rich people, and their servants in the financial sector. Once the doors were open, the rich burst through and wrecked the economy.
The plutocrats and their servants in the financial sector have paid no price. They are richer than ever, and their control over the public discourse and national and state legislatures is stronger than ever. The politicians paid no price either. They got re-elected time after time, and continued on the path of rewarding failure, and refusing to help the people whose lives were destroyed. They created phony crisis after phony crisis, trying to find a way to protect the wealth of the arrogant plutocrats, and push the losses off onto the people in my building.
Now, in a lame duck session, following an election in which the people began to kick out the Blue Dogs and some of the worst of the Tea Party conservatives, a re-elected Obama has one more chance to accomplish this goal. He wants to cut Social Security benefits in an ugly and sneaky way. He wants to cut Medicare and health programs that disproportionately benefit poor and sick. He wants to cut food stamps at a time when food insecurity is greater than ever. In exchange, he gets some magic beans from the Republicans that will magically improve the economy. Dday explains the miserable deal in more detail here.
Obama won’t be able to do this next year. Speaker Boehner can’t deliver the votes he needs in the House, so a bunch of defeated Blue Dogs are necessary to get to a majority in this lame duck session. In the next session of Congress, there may not be enough craven Democrats to allow the President to act out his inner Ronald Reagan/Bill Clinton, and end Social Security as we know it. None of these evil ideas would be enacted if Congress had to vote on them one at a time.
Can you imagine the outrage if people realized just what will happen to them? Young people would have to face the prospect of helping their parents when their own income is stagnant to falling. Old people will be faced with unpalatable choices of catfood. All of us will be looking at an uglier society. Maybe Obama can deliver one of his patented emotional outpourings over the death of the Great Society, and the misery of the innocent.
Nobody has explained why the innocent should suffer because of the unpunished crimes of others. Bankers and others in the financial sector aren’t investigated or prosecuted. Ousted legislators come back to haunt us as lobbyists for their true owners.
Maybe someone could ask our leaders this question instead of chasing details about the theater of negotiations.
Image by DonkeyHotey released under a Creative Commons license.
40 Comments
masaccio, I hope this won’t seem too much of a tangent to your excellent diary, which I recommend to all. This is clearly what is happening, and it must be very difficult for the hopeful supporters of the ‘lesser evil’ to realize they have only assisted in such changes, if they are not already in the upper echelons of power. That will be a hard realization but a freeing one when it comes. Those of us who supported Obama’s first candidacy know the feeling, and I think it will be even worse this time around.
I want to give an ancillary thought – you say:
“Can you imagine the outrage if people realized just what will happen to them?”
We need to imagine precisely this.
Given the shock of Friday’s brutal assault upon innocents, some realization is probably already happening. That is, a realization on the part of the rich that no walls or barbed wire fencing or guns or stockpiles of caviar are going to protect them from their own progeny. Will they now lock up their own youth as they mature and start thinking for themselves? What is all their wealth for, if it is not for the generation after them?
That generation, I propose, will not be like their parents. They will deviate from the course that has been set, just as a natural outcome of growing up. We now know that there are no placebos. Drugs don’t work. Incarceration – well, that is no way to make your mark upon posterity with the inheritors of your wealth. And mark my words, there will be many of said inheritors who will divest themselves of such as rapidly as possible, to be free of the burden you are leaving them. Just as there will be many who will attempt to continue to carry it, and be crushed.
It is really no different from the inheritance we humans leave to the planet. We will ultimately not be here, just like the 1%, and then it will be a different ballgame. What comes after will be better. If we don’t become part of the Big Picture instead of pretending we are On Top Of It, we will destroy ourselves. Our very own precious selves along with our very own precious children.
How about you politicians and 1%ers start looking now at the faces of your already frightened to the death children? We all know you can’t take it with you; what you need to realize is that your kids will be like those lottery winners who have their lives ruined by the ‘empowerment’ of wealth. You may think you are doing it for them; think again. We saw their legacy being written at 9:30 Friday December 14. You, they, are in it with us.
I don’t think they want that legacy. I honestly don’t think they can bear such a legacy. Your big, secret plan – if there is one – is not going to work.
We are all Marxists now.
The Overton window has moved right. I haven’t moved left, but I feel more common ground with the Marxists than I do the right.
I’m also very aware that of the Marxists ruled, I’d not be welcome at all, and would probably go the way of many in Lenin’s Russia.
Is there any such thing as a progressive revolution? I think not.
thank you, excellent post.
Everything being “bargained” right now makes sense based on your post. Obama and Boehner work for the same people and just like the Paulson?Frank/Dodd dire financial crisis getting pushed through with the known stooges at the time they want this “bargain” while the CLIFF looms ahead and death awaits for all and their votes are already bought and paid for.
Who among us is not tickled pink to see punished the true miscreants who created our economy’s failure? I’m delighted the real culprits are getting justice from Obama: a sneaky, underhanded, hard-to-explain-and-understand attack on their cushy state pension benefit. Less Bingo for you, oldsters and the infirm, widows and orphans!
Jacob Marley would be proud.
Catfood for all!~
The ‘bots are still calling this a “concession.” Obama wanted this all along, and so now is his chance. Watch as arms are twisted to make it happen.
Thanks. In the 1850′s and beyond rose a powerful progressive movement against the Railroad Barons. It was led by Main Street business owners and farmers who were being blackmailed and gouged through the price fixing of freight and other shipping necessities. Obama gave a speech about this in Kansas last year. But, as usual, the oratory and actions didn’t amount to much. The circumstances here are different, but hey, it beats heck out of doing nothing. However, I think a way forward exists to use their struggles productively. But among the first things we must do is stop the last, worst attempts of this Congress to enrich themselves. And, collect campaign money in 2014 for their votes. I’ve e-mailed people and asked them to call House members about these atrocious cuts. The Social Safety Net is still the 3rd rail of politics. Thanks, again, your writing is top notch.
Am I correct in assuming we’ll be mobilizing on this issue?
Awaiting instructions…
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P.S.: Just called my Congresswoman’s office and remonstrated with the charming young woman I met when I walked into her Capitol Hill office last summer.
No cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid over the so-called Fiscal Cliff, I said.
The Congresswoman hopes there won’t be cuts in the final package, she said.
The Congresswoman can’t control what’s in the package but she can control how she votes on it, I said, and if I’m unhappy with her vote, I will act accordingly.
The villainy and duplicity knows no bounds. They are utterly devoid of shame or conscience. How can he look his two daughters in the eye knowing how he has totally fucked over so many powerless people and families?
I sent off a note to the WH earlier today. The address is here.
There will be anger, yes–and, sadly, it will be impotent. People are going to have to learn the hard way that a president who spends his entire first term threatening to cut Social Security and medicare is not the lesser of two evils, and that they must not vote for such a candidate. Period.
I’m sure he’ll do it quite easily.
1) It’a a fiscal BLUFF, made by Obama so he could go after SocSec and Medicare. He’s playing liar’s poker and figures we can’t stop him making whatever play he wants to make. Plus, he told us, way back in 2007 (maybe earlier?) that he wanted to go after SocSec and Medicare.
2) He does not care if we punish the Dems — he may have been brought to the Oval Office to not only do damage to SS/Medicare, but to make the Dem Party take the blame and then get wallopped in the next elections.
Destroying the party is a ancillary benefit of screwing up SS/Mediocare. But the main objective is to get more money into Wall street’s hands.
Obama is doing what he said he would do, and he’s doing that which pleases his paymasters on Wall Street and elsewhere among the Uberweathly.
I don’t believe in a hell, so he’ll get away quite nicely with screwing over most of the people who voted for him and thought he was a, well, Democrat.
He is not. He is a Corporatist.
One third of the debt was caused by the unfunded tax cuts for the wealthiest.
But old POTUS POS (POS is pronounced to rhyme with “pus”) is going after SocSec which contributed nothing, zero, zilch to that deficit.
Where is the logic? Oh, yeah. Money, money, money.
Damn Obama and the Wall Streeters who funded him.
Completely agree with masaccio. It’s just dumbfounding how the people of this country can accept this. We’ve been robbed, and now we’re negotiating with the thieves.
And the middle and lower classes are made to suffer more. It has been this way for three decades. We are losing more than entitlements. We are losing America. We are losing ourselves. And it is all in service to profit and the uber wealthy. No one stands for the 99%.
Geez if only McCain and Romney had of won we’d all be so much better off. I mean I agree with masaccio but I fail to see how things would be better with the GOP in charge.
” In the world of the blind, the one-eyed Bandit is king. ”
Obama is an evil man who has the unique ability to look the people in the eye that he needs to vote for him and not care a bit about them. It takes a special person to go on stage and ask people to trust and vote for you all the while knowing you were going to betray them the first chance you got. How do you look yourself in the mirror knowing that you have willingly cut benefits for so many people who were counting on you? In my opinion he is far worse than Romney or Bush. His legacy will be that when it came to protecting the least of those in our society he was one of the worst presidents we have had.
I didn’t.Either one of them.
Inside an oligarchy, that is just how it is. The innocent and those who have been stolen from, must pay continually for the crimes committed by the criminal class that operates at the top.
Here’s an example:
Bill Clinton signed off on the Banking “Reforms” that ended Glass Steagall and the vast protections that Act had offered our economy. He was basically broke the moment he signed off on those bills. Funny how less than nine months after leaving the White House, he is making $ 150,000 bucks a pop for each speech he delivers to some Big Corporate Wall Street entity. And about nine years after he put his signature on those pieces of reform legislation, our economy went belly up! But hey, he was the BEST REPUBLICAN the nation has ever seen (or so some of my cynical Democratic friends told me.)
Life is grand if you are a crook gone big time. Or if you are a member of the Political Class. For the rest of us, not so much.
The helmswoman of this very site once called it as she saw it and declared those partisans who couldn’t see through Obama’s evil machinations as “dumb motherfuckers.” Hard to believe but the apologists are becoming even dumber and more motherfuckerish.
I don’t see how maintaining it has to be shit sandwich on rye or shit sandwich on wheat discussion is necessary. We need to get it together and stop the nation from being an oligarchy. Period. Get the money out of politics via a Constitutional Amendment.
I simply refuse to vote for anyone with a “D” or an “R” after their name. If every one of the many who told me, “I’d love to do it, to vote for a third party person, but this time it is simply too important to waste my vote” simply showed some courage, we could have had a Jill Stein. But people are too afraid and too uninformed to choose to behave as anything but SHEEPLE.
Really. What is necessary is some justice in our society. Obama? We must condemn his actions against the heart of our society. We care, even as he spews lies and cheats our elderly, sick, young. And Pelosi is vile and two-faced. Ugly people.
You get another “Amen!” from me, elisemattu. I can kinda, sorta understand desperate people trying to figure out which shit might taste better or be a little less pathogenic, but what kind of dumb motherfucker — to continue a theme — thinks shit is going to stop being served when they continue to sit at the table and lap it up.
The defeated .. like that insufferable bully Blanche Lincoln? Or the opportunistic Mary Landreau? Or the AIPAC flack, Joe Lieberman? Or the bad numbers guy, Kent Conrad? God, they really suck. Pathetic leaders.. senators! Where in the universe is a leader like Paul Wellstone? This is what America has become?
To make use of the current House membership, this will also have to pass the Senate this month.
If it does, please recall these next two weeks whenever you hear the cognoscenti lamenting how “dysfunctional” Congress, and especially the Senate, is. Congress knows perfectly well how to send their masters’ legislation through on greased skids when it suits them.
Where is the 60-vote requirement now? What about those secret holds and procedural whatsits that always seem to pop up in the Senate when right-wing priorities are being challenged?
I will say this about the House: there are always a few people in it who don’t seem completely bought and paid for, even if a depressing number of them are Teabag lunatics.
There’s not a one in the Senate I trust to do here what those arcane procedural rules supposedly allow: delay until January and a new Congress.
And I include in my distrust Bernie Sanders, who can always be counted on to say the right things on the TV in his adorable accent, but never seems to show up when he’s needed for a real fight in his chamber.
…X 2
But enough people did that we’re being dragged along for the ride. Now we’ve got to hang on tight and try to convince people that it’s in their best interest to vote third party.
…yes … this goes and gets to the middle … too late now with Obama
… inadequate political reasoning and choices have consequences
Political simpleton R vs. D junk and 3 Monkey Zealot politics and political conduct are not the way forward for Usians towards 2025 and then on to 2050.
USian national politics and economic pie slicing need to change and then change some more. Peacefully and legally would be the better way to do so but it is unlikely the current regime in WashingtonDC would/will accept any big and real changes by USians on/under such terms.
The big amounts of money and raw power at stake for Wall St.,Federal Reserve and Pentagon,CIA and Corporatists that current UniParty in WashingtonDC fronts for while staging D vs. R junk will make “legally brought about” changes by USians unlikely and not likely to succeed in any actual way(s). Obama shows and is showing why. Obama is doing what Bush/Cheney were doing/wanted to do. Has been since 2009.
Point is either you get this or you don’t. Either stop the Bushes and Cheneys or Obama’s and Clintons or see and know the consequences.
Do not vote for any of them. Must not vote for any of them.
R vs. D junk is just that — political junk. It is good for sucking in team/color tribal political zealots and partisan political simpletons. Since 1980,1988,1992,2000,2004,2008 and now 2012 R vs. D junk has served Wall St.,M-I-C/USA M-I-C well in the WH. Common USians? Not well.
Common non One/Ten Percent USians are facing genuine deep problems here in late 2012 that no amount of R vs. D junk has been or is able to address or remedy since 1980. Obama having done/doing more G.W.Bush and R.B.Cheney since 2009 shows why. Obama is choosing to dance with this so called fiscal cliff BS and mounting attacks on SS/MC and sabotaging MediCareForAll. Obama is making a choice. Obama did not need to do this.
Time to stop Barack Obama doing this deception laden political dance was in November 2012.
Too late now. Too bad. Now we get to wait until 2016?
Tampering with SS while being deceptive about USA national wealth in so much that USA is not a poor or barren nation should open on POTUS Obama being impeached. Obama being a war criminal should have led to this being done but the O/DBots wanted to do 3 Monkey politics instead. Still is a ways and means to stop Obama and what Obama seeks to do. This is the legally sanctioned political way to now stop Obama but who still does not get UniParty will not be doing it? Instead we will get some endless talk/no walk about what is on the table aka Doing A Nancy Pelosi 2007.
Would have made more sense to not elect Obama again to sit in the WH in November 2012.
It really is now too late. O/DBots own this — they wanted to play 3 Monkey Politics so damn bad during 2012 WH election. Still want to play 3 Monkey politics about Obama? Consequences of Obama being re-elected now plain to see. Seeing SS attacked and undermined because of told and accepted lies by those who claim(ed) to be members of FDR’s D Party is painful.
Not fer nuttin, but why do we call greedy, murderous, fucks without a conscience “elites?”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/elite
Same reason we call Oliver Twist Democrats “progressives,” I guess.
I voted for Jill Stein. I figured the only way to send a clear message to the Dems was to vote for the person who best articulated my vision for the country. Period. It sure as hell wasn’t Obama.
Sorry to say it, and I’ll understand if I’m modded, but the only thing that will change these fuckers is to put the fear of god in them, fear for their own personal safety. I’m so angry I’d like to physically drag them out of their offices and throw them into the street, then dump their desk drawers out in front of them. *Spit*. They are no more than sorry, thieving bastards, below contempt. Nancy Pelosi would be first on my list.
Eli has a post up about raising the cap. I’d like to see us organize into large groups who will fill the streets in front of the bastards’ homes over the holidays. Not let anyone in or out. Just stand there with our cans of cat food and signs in hand. Simple signs, meaning perfectly clear.
NO. RAISE THE FUCKING CAP.
x2
The Preamble to the IWW Constitution states,
“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.”
Just substitute ‘employing class’ with ‘political class’ and there you essentially have it.
Actually, I use the term elites to refer to the combination of the plutocrats and the governing powers. Separately, I refer to the political elites, which would include the likes of Geithner and Bernanke, SEC and FTC chairs and so on, as well as legislators. It also includes the powerful people in state and local government.
Then there are the financial elites, which include the oligarchs and their faithful servants in the financial sector. Obviously there is some overlap.
I like your definition of political elites. Wish I had used that instead of ‘political class’ in my comment @38.