"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Grover Norquist has a picture of Lenin prominently displayed in his office. For decades, the corporate lobbyists have thought this a hilarious prank. Now, he might finally be losing his influence; but he is alive and laughing all the way to the bank. The worst that can happen to him is that he retires rich for being the chief buyer of rope for the 1% lynching of American democracy.
Unfortunately, there are also a lot of Democrats making rope donations to the oligarchs.
the president and his advisers proposed cutting the discretionary part of the budget devoted to everything except defense and other security agencies to 1.7 percent of economic output by 2022, down from 3.1 percent last year...According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, even going over the so-called fiscal cliff would not cut it as deeply.
This is not irrelevant spending. It accounts for every government expenditure except entitlements, security and interest...Without such spending, the government becomes little more than a heavily armed pension plan with a health insurer on the side.
- Say Goodbye to the Government under EITHER fiscal plan
New for New Years Day: And now, we have the latest behind-closed-doors, under a phony deadline, sellout by Obama - breaking his simple promise to hold the line at $250k tax cuts (which translates to yet more "starving the beast"), setting us up for yet another hostage taking in two months.
Come below the orange surrender monkey flag to read more about rope and who is selling it.
Almost four years ago I diaried about the coordinated theft being perpetrated on the middle class. Here are the numbers from my old diary:
War....................$1,560 B/yr (DOD = $1,449B; WarOnDrugs = $50-70B; Prisons = $60B)
Outsourcing .......$...240 B/yr (under-estim.(cuz not cumulative) wage loss in US manufacturing)
Trickle-down .......$....90 B/yr (Tax cuts for top 5%)
Privatization........ $..600 B/yr (30% rakeoff of $2T healthcare system)
Auto-mania..........$..245 B/yr ($100B highway construction; $145B oil@$40/bbl)
Casino-capitalism. $..375 B/yr of Bush ($3T of asset destruction in 2008-9)
TOTAL =...............$3,110B/yr --- almost twice this year's obscene Federal deficit.
Let's walk thru them.
1. WAR
Here is a chart of government spending (of dubious provenance, but consistent with everything else a Google search turns up.) I'm going to use it because it is easy to digest. I will point out that their $700B number is half of what I used four years ago; so if anything, I am being conservative. Total budget numbers are always open to criticism, no matter what the source, so I'm keeping it simple.
Looking at the bar chart, FY2008 spending was a little over $700B. The last non-estimated budget was FY2010, with a budget a little over $800B - for an INCREASE of about 14% in two years. The two-year-old projections are for the spending to level off about now at around $900B, or an increase of almost 30% during Obama's time in office.
So, "defense" spending has continued to rise under Obama, despite the "ending" of the war in Iraq. We continue to spend more than the rest of the world combined on weaponry. A study by Tom Dispatch estimates we spend over $200 B/yr just to maintain the thousands of overseas bases we have.
We are a hyper-militarized society. The police SWAT teams are ridiculously over-armed to fight the War on Some Terrorists -- because they have decided peaceful protest is terrorism: Banks ran Occupy crackdown. Obama and the corporate Dems just renewed Bush's FISA warrantless surveillance law.
Obama has proactively pushed the prosecution of whisteblowers harder than any other president. So, its clear he doesn't want to rock the DoD boat.
We continue the absolutely futile War on Some Drugs, despite two states having legalized marijuana and many Latin American governments bailing out of the Drug War.
The privatization of prisons continues apace.
And yet, in all the kabuki disguising the in-progress lynching of the middle class behind closed doors (oops, I mean the "fiscal cliff" negotiation), no one is proposing to reduce the bloated, wasteful, counterproductive spending on military, police, and prisons. What was revealed about the lordly lifestyles of the top brass by the Petreus scandal has no moral traction, instead we continue to pillory old and sick people for being lazy moochers.
On the moochers front, Obama can't back away from his $250K income tax increase number fast enough. And he is willing to lower the estate tax as well. All of this while claiming that Social Security MUST be "fixed".
Also on the lazy moochers front, the Obama administration has done nothing about WalMart's blatant abuse of the MedicAid system. It is estimated that the taxpayers contribute billions of dollars a year to WalMart employees' health care. That's on top of the gigantic impact WalMart has had on the part-time labor practices, de-industrialization, and the off-shoring of American manufacturing. WalMart has indeed put rope on sale for the 1%. They've been doing it for decades. Obama hasn't done anything about it.
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About this time, if you are slow, you might be wondering why I've spent more time talking about Obama than about the rope analogy. So, let me spell it out.
1. The election is over, and I have done my duty to vote Democratic.
2. Obama has taken the mandate we have just given him and gone back to his previous plan to trash Social Security, instead of reducing the military, breaking up Wall St., or seriously raising taxes on the looting class. The man took our votes and went straight back to selling rope to Pete Peterson.
Obama's behavior reminds me of Abraham Lincoln's line about General Burnsides: "Once again, he has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory." Only Obama is not an idiot like Burnsides, he has been a consummate actor playing the role of bipartisan sucker.
But, now that he does not face re-election, he is becoming more candid. He called himself a moderate Republican (I am not going to step into that catfight). Yesterday on Beat the Press, he said he initiated the discussion of Social Security in the FC negotiations. A lot of suckers said, after the election Obama will move to the left. WRONG. After the election he is moving to the right.
How many ways do people have to hear it before they get it. The Africans have a proverb for it:
you can't wake a man who is pretending to be asleep
A famous muck-raking American said it:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
– Upton Sinclair
And here's one I just made up:
Just like in the dictionary, bipartisanship is somewhere between appeasement and collaboration.
President Obama is a corporatist to the core. He was funded by Wall St. from day one. He staffed his administration with Goldman Sachs men, and his DOJ couldn't prosecute a bankster if he f---ed a horse in public.
The banks suck $635B/yr out of the real economy, which is about twice the number I used four years ago for "casino capitalism. So, we have gone the wrong direction there as well.
The Obama SEC has never looked into the crooked computerized "front running" that goes by the name of "high frequency trading". The Obama administration has never even floated a trial balloon about a Tobin transaction tax that would stop this crap cold.
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In closing, here are a few more facts, instead of happy talk and 11-dimensional chess:
Obama's DOJ decided not to prosecute HSBC for drug money laundering. Instead they got a slap-on-the-wrist fine.
Obama supports Murdoch grab of TV stations.
Behind very closed doors, Obama continues to negotiate the global corporate coup d'etat know as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
And on and on. Taxpayer-subsidized school privatization despite massive corruption and failure. Rahm Emmanuel leads the charge to bust teachers unions.
So here is my summary:
America today is run like a mob bustout for Wall St., the military / police / prison complex, and big oil.
And Obama greenlights it all.
We need to take the Democratic Party back from the Wall St./billionaire crooks who fund and run BOTH parties.
My New Year's Resolution is to stop giving sellout Democrats a free pass. I want my party back. The DLC/Third Way are not for the working man. They are part of the selling out/auctioning off/looting of America.
Yeah, being sold out slowly, relentlessly, cold-bloodedly, dishonestly is better than being murdered outright. But, somehow that is not a great consolation. Its like being told that you have a life sentence at hard labor instead of that you will be executed tomorrow.
I'm here to fight for the middle class; and if the leadership of the Democratic Party is fighting against that, I'm not going to let it slide. You want to tombstone me, be my guest.