If Obama didn’t want it to happen, if he didn’t want to “negotiate”, he would have:
1) raised the debt limit during the lame duck Congress. He could have raised it enough to get him through 2 years.
2) Accepted the clean debt-ceiling bill, offered by McConnell, as noted by Stewart M.
3) simply refuse to negotiate. “I cannot say what bills will or will not be paid if the US Congress does not increase the debt ceiling, but whether the debt ceiling is raised or not is a matter for Congress.” I am quite sure that Wall Street and other corporations would bring the Republicans to heel so fast your head would spin.
This is all Kabuki. Obama wants massive cuts. He always has. This “negotiation” is occurring because he wants it to, and would not occur if he did not want it to.
Further, if something like the Gang of Six suggestion passes, Obama will only win reelection if the Republicans nominate someone completely and utterly beyond the pale. And maybe not even then. Cuts of that magnitude will be to the economy what a nuclear bomb is to a city.
This blog isn’t exactly known for casual posts, but I thought I’d make an exception and share the music I’m currently enjoying.
The first one is via Samuel Smith at Scholars and Rogues:
The next one is a bit monotonous but the strings and the buildup suit my mood. A good blood-pumper.
This next one by the Black-Eyed Peas I like more for the video (the guy’s costumes), though the song gets better as it goes on:
though it’s a pity about our leaders.
I feel bad for the Anonymous hackers who were arrested today, but it’s also a good thing, in that it will radicalize the hacker community even further and force them to adapt and change their tactics. They are the bleeding edge of real resistance, and they have moved far from their libertarian roots and become left wing in their sympathies (targeting a city for refusing to allow the homeless to be fed is as left wing as you can get.)
Since, of course, the DOJ has shown no interest in pursuing those who did DDOS attacks against Wikileaks, it is yet another confirmation that the law, as it exists now, is used as a bludgeon against people the government doesn’t like, while those who the government does like are left alone, and crimes against the government’s “enemies” aren’t investigated. Laws which do not have at least the appearance of being evenly applied are not just, are not perceived as just, and become legitimate targets for breaking.
Meanwhile in England, the Cameron government’s massive slashes to education hit virtually all at once, making an entire cohort of young people know exactly who just did their level best to destroy their lives. This is important, to put it bluntly, young males who don’t have enough money to settle down with a young female are extraordinarily dangerous to the state.
What is interesting about both of these things, and many others recently, such as the austerity bills and various legal rulings from the Supreme Court which don’t even pretend to follow precedent, is how the velvet glove has come off the iron fist of state and corporate repression. The elites think that there is nothing ordinary people can do. Whatever the elites do, no matter how harsh, the hoi polloi can only submit. And if they don’t, well, so much the worse for them.
And yet the system is cracking up. A large part of why all of this is being done is to create ever bigger corporations and ever richer western billionaires, so they can compete with the oilarchies. But recently Russia been minting billionaires faster than US. It’s really hard to state how startling that is. America’s rich have done everything they can to rig the game so they will get richer, they have a bigger base economy to work off of, and they’re still losing the Red Queen’s race. No matter how much they repress their own population, they can’t keep up with the folks who have the real gold of the modern economy: black gold.
Unfortunately, as stupid, venal and brutal as our enemies are (and if they aren’t your enemies you’re a fool or getting a pay check, or I hope you are), our leadership is even more stupid, venal and cowardly. This entire generation of leadership on what passes for the left is beyond contemptible. If they are not outright sell outs of the interests of those they claim to champion, then they are willing to betray anyone but their members, and if with rare exceptions (in the US, basically, the gay leadership) they are cowards, unwilling to risk themselves in any way, unwilling to actually fight. They cavill and moan and condemn anyone who actually fights back. Watching fools demanding that the man who threw a pie at Murdoch be condemned for violence was beyond sad, it was a farce. Violence? It reminded me of all the hand wringing when an Iraqi threw a shoe at George Bush, a war criminal and mass murderer. Oh dear.
And so, while the young are being radicalized, the leaders of the left are unable to provide leadership. They have been selected to be weak and cowardly, to be unwilling to fight, to be compromisers trying to get the best deal possible as long as that deal doesn’t upset the status quo in any real way.
This varies by country. I have more hope, say, for Greece (after they set the finance ministry alight) than I do for the US. But the first job of the left in most countries is not to fight the right, it is to destroy the leadership of the left. To drive them out of power and into the wilderness and either to replace them or to create new forms of organization. And it is to understand that class war is like war, there will be casualties. People will be beaten, people will be killed, people will go to jail. That is what will happen. It can be avoided in only one way, surrender. Suffer exactly what the oligarchs want you to suffer and you will be allowed to live and die in what passes for peace. It will be a peace filled with suffering, hunger, deprivation, and violence not primarily from the authorities but from each other, but if that’s what you want, it’s available. Always understanding, of course, that anyone who won’t fight will have to accept anything the oligarchs do. Anything. When you won’t fight, you only get even scraps if it is someone else’s interest.
There’s an old saying about living on your knees or fighting on your feet. The problem with that is that once you’ve said you’re willing to live on your knees the next question is “will you crawl on your belly?”
And so, in this, not the twilight of the post-war era, for that has passed, but in the dawn of what the oligarchs hope is a new conservative order, that is the question you must answer, “will I crawl on my belly, will I fight, or will I try to make a separate peace?”
The cost of a separate peace, of course, is a sliver of your soul.
One a day.
It is a recipe for another 10 years of depression. Yes, this is another episode of obvious things Ian wonders why he has to point out.
You can find Marcy’s new home here. Her goodbye post from FDL is here. Bmaz is going with her. I have added their new home to my blogroll.
If you haven’t read Marcy in the past, you should start, she’s able to dig down into stories and find what matters. Bmaz’s legal analysis is also excellent and not to be missed, though he writes less often than Marcy. The last year or so I’ve found that when I visited FDL I spent most of my time at Emptywheel, their blog.
(Same link will probably work for listening after the fact, will update if not.)
Then we’re going to get entitlement “reform.” Since Obama is promising this to Blue Dogs, this isn’t going to be anything you’re going to like.
So you’re far more likely to see Medicare and Social Security gutted, than you are to see the military budget cut in a third or Medicare-for-all enacted.
(What is Obama?) A man who wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.
Let me state the obvious, which we all know, one more time.
Obama intends to gut social security. Republicans failed, it requires Democrats.
The question about SS in the Villagers minds is not whether it should be cut, but how. That’s not to say it’s hopeless. The last attempt to cut SS failed, after all. But there wasn’t a Democratic president pushing for it that time. Obama has proven very adept at arm-twisting Democrats.
2011 – Bush’s tax cuts are extended. Social Security is slashed. This is done at Obama’s behest, so that Dems get blamed for it.
The blogosphere appears aflame about Obama being willing to cut SS. Oh please. Oh, and Obama still needs to be primaried, but by waiting this long, it’s become much more difficult to do, if not impossible. Everyone who is whining about SS who wasn’t willing to primary him, was complicit in this.
Adults don’t believe in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, or Barack Obama being anything but a right winger whose legacy is institutionalizing Bush, then going even further to the right on many key issues. They don’t believe that Obama responds to anything from the left but pain and threats that are backed up with the sincere willingness and ability to see them through.
I hate the word “deserve” because lord save us all from what we “deserve”, but lately I find it hard to remember that one good person is worth saving, or that most people are just weak, not evil. The world will burn, in war, and famine, and revolution, and climate change and it will burn because we are so contemptible we refuse to do anything to stop it from burning. And maybe that we now includes me, but I’m so very tired of dealing with stupid, cruel, selfish people. Heck, forget selfish, people who won’t even look out after their own self-interest, or even understand what it is.
I fear I’ve come full circle. As a teenager, subject to constant cruelty, I hated humanity. Contemptible. The human love of cruelty was clear to me, the way we encourage it, the way we nurture it, the way we inculate it. The way group dynamics require scapegraces and outsiders, the way most people, to feel good about themselves, like to watch others squirm, how they enjoy tormenting the weak, how they secure their own position in whatever little pack they belong to by showing that someone is below them. They make those people into something less than human, or worse, the truly evil know they’re human and derive pleasure from the ability to inflict and relieve suffering as they choose.
As I grew older, I learned how to defend myself, learned how to make those who would hurt me, hurt instead, so they would find their prey elsewhere, would prove their place in the hierarchy by humiliating someone else. And I learned that some people are good, that some people will do the right thing even when there’s nothing in it for them. I learned, also, that most people are of weak character. In their weakness they will do what they think the group approves of. A few good leaders I saw made of those around them good people, by expecting nothing less. Oh, the pettiness never goes away, but the deeper cruelty was not tolerated, and it was not tolerated by even the lower ranking members of the packs, for so they had been trained, so it was expected, and they knew that disapproval would come from the pack, and the Alpha, for cruelty, not kindness.
But we have selected, to rule our societies, sociopaths at best and psychopaths at worse. They have contempt for those they rule, do not see them as even truly human, and enjoy hurting them. They feel tough when they make the hard decisions, which are somehow always hard for others, but never for themselves. They encourage cruelty in society, from the ground up, and routinely subject the population to humiliating surveillance, force them to abase themselves to the least appearance of authority, whether legitimately used or not, and condone murder and torture and routine humiliation. They don’t do these things to themselves, of course, the rich, for example, don’t get groped in airports, but they routinely do it to those below them.
And in so doing they teach those below them, to do it to those below them, and below them, and below them, and so on. The sickness comes from the top, a rotten poison which has altered the character of nations. But it came from the bottom, first. It came from a population who became lazy and complacent and thought they had rights they didn’t have to guard like a dog with a bone; who thought they could just live their lives and leave politics to other people except for pulling a lever or marking a ballot every four years. It came from people who felt “I’ve got mine, who cares what happens to anyone I don’t know?” Unable to see themselves in others for longer than the gossamer blink of an eye, they were also unable to understand that what was done to others would also be done to them.
We have become contemptible. Our leaders, perhaps, are most contemptible of all, but we continue to consent. Oh perhaps polls might say we’re not happy, but who cares what polls say? We do nothing, we let our leaders do as they will, and we take on their mores, becoming cruel and debased and uncaring of what happens to our fellows, not even the care of enlightened self interest, the clear understanding that what is done unfairly, cruely, to someone else, could, probably will, one day be done to us. We pretend to care most about our children, making such a fetish of it that allowing children to roam unattended is virtually treated as a crime, yet we are creating a world in which they will suffer, unimaginably, a world in which hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of our grandchildren will die.
Lord save us from what we deserve, because what we deserve is what’s going to happen: war and revolution, famine and drought, climate change on a scale we truly don’t understand.
In particular the Greek “bailout” was a mistake. A horribly punitive measure, with virtually the entire “Socialist” party voting for it, it wasn’t a bailout of Greece, but a bailout of investors. As part of the response, the Greek ministry of finance was set alight.
The oligarchs, by making peaceful revolution impossible, have, as Kennedy pointed out, made violent revolution inevitable. Since democratically elected representatives are more concerned with doing the will of the rich, rather than the public, and since there is no party willing to do the will of the population (or even live up to their own principles, a socialist party voting for an investor bailout is not socialist), my expectation is that during the next bailout (and another one will be needed), that what representatives will be killed, to get through to them the message that no matter what the rich are offering, or threatening, there is a price for voting against the interests of the majority of the population.
Oh, and I notice that the prosecutors admitted the case against Strauss-Kahn was falling apart after his successor as IMF president was appointed and the Greek bailout passed. Immediately after, even though the prosecutors knew it was weak before then.
Word is he was opposed to the Greek bailout, by the way.
What a remarkable coincidence.
They may have just elected him President of France.
