debt ceiling - Represent Consumers

It all feels eerily similar to the atmosphere leading up to the 2008 bailout with warnings of looming government collapse and Wall Street and its cronies threatening doom.

Instead of a no-questions asked payoff of bankers, this time it’s the looting of Social Security and Medicaid, and cuts to other programs that benefit the aged, sick, vulnerable, in other words, society’s least politically potent, that’s at stake.

There’s another familiar aspect of the scenario: under the terms of the emergency, because the cuts are opposed by a majority of the people in the country, democracy has to be stifled, open argument limited. It’s more debacle than debate.

Anybody in Washington who isn’t for these cuts isn’t considered serious.

While the media portrays the debt ceiling standoff as a partisan nightmare, the quest for budget cuts is more of cooperative bipartisan effort with each faction playing its part.

The Tea Party raises holy hell about funding the government at all, so President Obama and the Democrat’s proposed draconian cuts to social programs and infrastructure look like the least bad alternative.

But make no mistake: the Democrats’ drastic cutbacks don’t represent compromise. They represent the goals of a financial and corporate elite that has been fighting for these goals relentlessly and methodically for years.

And they’re using this trumped up debt ceiling crisis as their latest gambit to achieve them.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California’s description of the first hastily put together bailout plan, could easily apply to our current predicament.

It wasn’t legislation, Sherman said at the time, it was a ransom note.

While our politicians tell us the country is broke, they themselves are doing fine.

In the midst of debt ceiling hysteria, President Obama and the Democrats bragged they’d raised an eye-popping $86 million so far for his presidential campaign.

The various Republican candidates who have reported their cash have raised about $35 million so far, but it’s early yet.

Meanwhile the Republicans oppose any revenue-raising or loophole-closing that would be favored by a majority of Americans. Republicans continue to insist that increased taxes on the wealthiest would be job-killers, even though there’s no evidence to support their position.

For his part, President Obama, in an effort to appease Republicans, offered up a variety of cuts to Social Security and Medicaid that would be opposed by a majority of Americans.

Cutting services for those that need it most is what Obama calls “shared sacrifice,” though no one who could actually afford it is actually being asked to make any sacrifices.

As to the major challenges facing the nonrich – joblessness and foreclosure – those are beyong the skill and imagination of our leaders to grapple with.

The Republican strategy seems to be standing pat in the belief that the president will eventually cave in.

The president’s strategy appears to be to tie the aged, poor and vulnerable to the train tracks and then blame the Republicans when the train runs them over.

President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, was proud that most of the $86 million was coming from small donors. I don’t doubt that a big chunk of that money comes from people who are justifiably scared stiff of turning the country back over to the Republicans, who never complained about the deficits when the previous occupant of the White House when he was running them up.

I understand the big donors. They get access and influence. But do the small donors have any influence? Do these small donors really believe that having the aged and infirm give up a chunk of their security amounts to sharing sacrifice? Can they make their voices heard along with their $5 donations? Or do they just have to go along with the president and the Democrats and whatever deal they make?

On Saturday morning we got news that the president would not appoint the stalwart consumer advocate to head the agency she dreamed up to protect financial consumers, and which she has been working to set up.

I wonder whose interests the president was thinking about when he made that decision – his Wall Street and corporate donors or those small donors his campaign manager was bragging about?

Bailout Redux

While Country Suffers, Politicians Rake it in