Blogging for the 99% and the preservation of our Democracy against the Corporatists and the Citizens United ruling.
Are you ever struck by the notion that perhaps the unemployment insurance debate is really just a responsible approach to addressing the huge federal deficit? Do you believe that continuing the tax cuts for the wealthy is the key to job creation in this country?
Despite the tons of disinformation about this debate, our government is not being reasonable or responsible with the taxpayer’s money. The GOP is not secretly trying to help the economy, even if you do buy into the “trickle down” theories of David Stockman, the budget director under Ronald Reagan. By the way, even David Stockman says that the tax cuts for the rich are “a bad idea”. That’s right. The inventor of Trickle-Down Economics says that tax cuts for the top 2% will not help the American economy: Reagan Budget Director Says U.S. Can’t Afford Tax Cut Extension .
The Obama Administration and the GOP are pissing on us, and they don’t even have the decency to call it “trickling down”.
In his usual blunt style, Robert Greenwald speaks to the lie of how responsibly the government handles taxpayer money:
While unemployment insurance payments are running out for millions of Americans who lost jobs due to no fault of their own, the Afghan ambassador to the UN is living in a $4.2 million Manhattan condo on our dime.
While Americans are standing in line for the local food pantry, we’re paying for this guy’s mahogany kitchen cabinets.
It’s outrageous, and it shows the warped priorities in Washington, D.C. Are our politicians really so out of touch that they don’t realize how angry this kind of thing makes us? In case you folks inside the Beltway haven’t noticed, we’re falling apart out here. The last thing we need to be funding is this guy’s access to “private Pilates and massage rooms.” But hey, if we’re going to be blowing taxpayer money on massages, I know several million people who could use a neck rub.
We are spending about $2 billion a week on the Afghanistan War, all without consideration of the bad effects on the economy and its effect on the federal budget, but when it comes time to extend unemployment insurance payments for people who lost their jobs, we get quotes like this:
“Things just got worse for the millions of Americans who have been unemployed for up to 99 weeks. At the stroke of midnight Tuesday, a short-term extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed expired. …[Illinois Republican Senator Mark] Kirk took a stance most Republicans take: “If it’s paid for by cutting other items in the budget, I will be a yes vote. If it’s added to further debts of the United States, no.”
So we can’t go into debt to keep people from going hungry in the U.S., but we can go into debt to make sure Ambassador Zahir Tanin can live in a 3-bedroom Trump Tower corner suite with “‘iconic views’ of New York City through floor-to-ceiling windows with remote control curtains.” Got it.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans are worried that the costs of the Afghanistan War will make it harder for the U.S. to address problems we face here at home. They’re right, especially with the current crop of legislators in Congress. When you throw huge piles of money at the failed war in Afghanistan, you create debt and deficits that politicians like Kirk use as a cudgel to cut public structures here at home. So thanks to the war, we get ridiculous, broken priorities that have room for spending that stocks Ambassador Tanin’s office suites with “expensive Scotch Whiskey and French wines,” but no room to help people who lost their job when the economy tanked.
But let’s assume for a second that we had all these resources to waste (which we absolutely do not). Just who are we getting for our money?
“Employees neither trust nor respect the ambassador, and claim he is an ‘opportunist’ unqualified and unwilling to properly carry out the duties of a representative of 25 million suffering Afghans who face daily bombings, kidnappings, and a decrepit infrastructure.”
Ambassador Tanin is a poster child for the broken U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. We are spending huge amounts of money propping up corrupt warlords and petty criminals in the Kabul government. In return we’re getting decreased security. That’s why roughly 60 percent of us want our troops brought home.
We need to fix our priorities so we can spend our resources on getting people back to work instead of wasting them on Sex-in-the-City lifestyles for corrupt Afghan officials.
Bob Cesca, in his typical more-than-blunt style explains that a tipping point has been reached with Barack Obama’s love affair with GOP proposals. Now, he is proposing that the deficit be reduced on the back of the middle class working for the Federal government. That’s not Richard Nixon calling for a two-year Federal pay freeze in 1972, but Barack Obama, supposed Democrat, saying this in 2010.
Obama either has no interest in governing and making things better for the middle class, or he is totally incompetent, or perhaps it is both of those things. It is clear now that he did not believe any of the words his speechwriters put into his mouth in speeches before thousands of adoring fans. The crowd roared when Obama said, “Yes, we can!” or “We are the ones we have been waiting for” or that we have to believe in “The Fierce Urgency of Now”.
Obama’s FISA vote should have told us that here is a capitulator, a person without any firm principles of his own. Rather, he is a pragmatist, and tries to find the path of least resistance and follows that. Have you seen Barack Obama become impassioned about anything? Have you seen him make a statement about how firm he is going to stand against the Republicans and actually back that up with his actions? When Obama voted to support Bush’s unconstitutional Patriot Act, Obama said, “I know that for some, this is a deal-breaker”. In other words, even during the campaign, pleasing his Progressive base was of secondary importance, and even the Constitution played second fiddle to Obama’s winning an election.
As Cesca notes, if Obama has some supreme master plan, now is the time to let us in on it. Otherwise, we wasted our votes and our efforts for this weak, unprincipled person, who is not only ineffectual in his support for Democratic causes, but who is overtly making sure that the GOP wins on every issue that arises. Sorry Democrats, we can’t do anything more than put you in control of the Senate, House of Representatives, and the White House. If you can’t find your way to do what you have been voted in to do, then you are NOT the “people we have been waiting for”, seeing as how you expect Progressives to get used to the “Fierce Urgency of Never”.
Here’s Bob Cesca’s commentary in the Huffington Post:
More often than not, I’ve attempted to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt, both in terms of policy and politics. That’s not to say I’ve embraced every idea — I most certainly haven’t. But even when I’ve vocally disagreed with a policy position, I’ve attempted to see the wisdom and pragmatism behind the president’s choices.
But this week I have no blessed clue what the hell he’s up to. I’ve tried to look at this from every angle and each one leads me back to weak, weak, weak.
He’s following rules that no longer exist, pandering to voter attitudes that will have zero consequence in terms of both his approval numbers and his reelection chances. He’s completely off the rails — well beyond any notion of post-partisanship. In fact, if his intention has been to “change the way Washington does business,” he’s currently and epically failing because I simply can’t believe that the new and improved way is this way.
Within roughly 24 hours, President Obama preemptively capitulated to the Republicans and proposed an unabridged GOP idea — freezing federal worker salaries, then, almost as if on cue, the Senate Republicans put their unflinching childish obstructionism in writing and pledged to block everything unless the president extends the deficit-ballooning Bush tax rates. And in that mix, the Republicans blocked extensions of unemployment benefits. Twice.The upshot? The president looks extraordinarily weak. Weaker than at any other time in his presidency. It probably didn’t help that he was literally beaten and bloodied when he announced the pay freeze, due to his weekend basketball fracas.
Of course the intention isn’t to appear weak. The intention is to appear magnanimous. The intention is to secure support from voters who buy into the ridiculous “both sides are the same” meme and who tell pollsters that they want more bipartisan cooperation, while incongruously voting for total gridlock and the potential of a government shutdown. During his pay freeze address, the president said the American people didn’t vote for gridlock. Really?Unfortunately, however, bipartisan cooperation in this era has been entirely redefined to the point of virtual extinction. There’s no such thing as mutual cooperation between both parties. Modern bipartisanship is all about one party, the Democrats, flailing around and desperately struggling to appease the Republicans who return the favor by smacking the textbooks out of the president’s hands then kicking him in the ass while he picks up his crap off the floor — embarrassed and chuckling while muttering, “Oh, you guys.”
That character doesn’t look cooperative at all. He looks like a very smart and very serious… wimp.
He looks like he’s unable to handle negotiations. He looks like George McFly. He looks like he’s capitulating to a fraternity of hooples who are wrong about everything; who deny basic economics; who deny basic math; who exist for no other reason than to, as DougJ at Balloon Juice described, win elections “by fighting hard over imaginary issues.”
In other words, the Republicans have constructed a political and media machine that allows them to function with impunity. All of cable news is packed wall-to-wall with Republicans who robotically repeat the same false, fact-free ideas over and over — and they’re given complete latitude because of the press’s self-flagellation over the “liberal media” myth. They’ve managed to guilt the press into supporting and repeating unvarnished bullshit like “tax cuts stimulate the economy and unemployment benefits don’t” and “allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will hurt jobs” and “the stimulus didn’t work” and “the Democrats are spending us into oblivion.” None of that is true. The Bush tax rates for the wealthy don’t stimulate the economy, but unemployment benefits do. The Bush tax cuts haven’t created any jobs in ten years, and middle class wages have stagnated. The stimulus worked (not well enough, but it worked). And the Democrats slashed the budget deficit by record numbers.
You’d never know it, though, because whenever a Democrat — say, Bernie Sanders or Anthony Weiner or the outgoing Alan Grayson, for example — steps up and forcefully tells the truth, they’re assaulted by political hipsters who harrumph and bitch about “both sides” acting insane and shrill and why can’t we all just be nice! You know, nice like the glorious olden days when there weren’t witch hunts or duels or beatings or civil wars. Meanwhile, the Republicans line up in lockstep on television and repeat the same lines over and over and over. The media repeats and validates during Sunday morning “smackdown” often featuring John McCain. The Democrats concede. And the Republicans win the debate — usually by grinding it into the ground with nonstop crazy and by filibustering everything.
The Republicans are on television every day admitting that their entire goal is simply to screw the president by sabotaging the economic recovery. This is unbelievable. Eight years ago, these were the same people who insisted that merely criticizing the commander-in-chief during wartime would endanger the troops. Now these same bastards are not just criticizing the president, but they’re questioning his religion, his citizenship, his loyalty to America — and they’re endeavoring, as their primary goal, to make him fail by dragging the economy down. They’re doing this by filibustering policies that stimulate economic growth (unemployment benefits, for example), while promoting ideas that don’t stimulate economic growth at all (Bush tax rates, for example).
The president, meanwhile, appears to be operating under the frustratingly obvious misapprehension that the Republicans will reciprocate his generosity, and, if they don’t, the American people will punish the Republicans accordingly. The Republicans won’t reciprocate at all, of course, and the American people won’t notice their grabassery. And the ones who do will get caught up in the Fox News, AM radio tsunami and somehow end up blaming the president for being overly partisan.
At this point, I’d really like to see how the White House intends for their calculus to unfold. If they’ve figured out a path around the Republican filibusters and their disassociation with reality without unilaterally giving away the store, then it might be nice to have a hint about the plan. And I’m not suggesting they reveal their strategy, but maybe just show us some results. Show us that this is process of appearing wimpy in the face of Republican intransigence will actually work to undermine the Republicans and pass the president’s agenda. If not, we can only assume that they’re just giving up their principles and letting the Republicans drive. I can’t imagine anything more destructive. Especially now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/why-exactly-is-president_b_790819.html
