Good stuff from Charles Blow, who took the extraordinary step of talking to people:
Last week I spent a few days in the Deep South — a thousand miles from the moneyed canyons of Manhattan and the prattle of Washington politics — talking to everyday people, blue-collar workers, people not trying to win the future so much as survive the present.
They do hard jobs and odd jobs — any work they can find to keep the lights on and the children fed.
No one mentioned the asinine argument about the debt ceiling. No one. Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe. They just want Washington to work, the way they do.
I've witnessed several outbreaks of corporate-sponsored Beltway horribleness, when politicians, seizing a chance to realize their political and ideological fantasies, surpass their normal everyday plutocratic pursuits and baldly, in broad daylight, really stick it to non-rich people. Among the worst: NAFTA, the invasion of Iraq, and the bank bailouts.
But I don't know that I've seen anything more appalling than this latest offensive in the class war disguised as a debate about debt.
There is no crisis. There is no crisis. Do you feel me yet? There is no crisis. Everyone knows the ceiling with be raised. The Republicans have acknowledged as much. Wall Street and the Chamber of Horrors will not allow their GOP puppets to default.
But (millionaire) pols of both parties are exploiting this phony crisis to cut government spending. Why? Because they want to cut government spending. Because Wall Street wants them to cut government spending. Because conservative Republicans and their kinder gentler cousins in the Democratic Party known as neoliberals have wanted to cut government spending, including Social Security, for years. Because it's Grover Norquist's world and we're just dying in it.
The austerity (but not for wars or Wall Street)-mania would be harmful and right-wing even if the economy were humming along. But you probably know firsthand that we're having a spot of trouble on the economic front, like history-making trouble that's sending analysts back to the nineteen-thirties for precedents. Noting that Goldman Sachs is predicting an unemployment rate of 8.75 % at the end of 2012, Paul Krugman says:
[T]his really does look like the Lesser Depression, a prolonged era of disastrous economic performance.
Yes, it really does, and what should the government be doing about it? Common sense, liberalism, and basic macroeconomics tell us it should increasing spending. Why is government doing the exact opposite? Certainly, it's largely because Wall Street owns Washington. Krugman's (related) explanation is that rich people pursue policies than benefit rich people, and politicians listen to rich people, because they're rich. Like the politicians.
Mike Konczal ratchets up my rentier argument, arguing that what we’re seeing is
a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense.
That has to be right. It doesn’t necessarily take the form of pure cynicism; it’s more a matter of the wealthy gravitating toward views of economic policy that make immediate sense in terms of their own interests, and politicians believing that only these views count as Serious because they’re the views of wealthy people.
So under cover of a concocted crisis, pols are negotiating over how much spending to cut -- a debate between conservatives and radicals taking place in the sealed-off capitol of a country where poverty and the potential of poverty are, to steal Blow's metaphor, suffocating tens of millions of people. This is a humanitarian catastrophe, and rich politicians are determined to take steps that would make it worse and inflict further pain on Americans.
Are you pissed off yet?
If not, why not?