Burning Down the House b4in.org/bRs For some forty years before this week’s government shutdown the governing class in the U.S., Democrats and Republicans, has been playing ‘good cop, bad cop’ with public policy. Lest we forget, the bi-partisan cuts in public spending under sequestration were already underway when the current partial government shutdown began. And the disinformation campaign by Republicans against ‘Obamacare’ only serves to shift that wholly inadequate debacle into the realm of ‘reasonable’ in the spectrum of public policy debate. In fact, getting liberals and progressives to heartily endorse health care ‘reform’ designed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation with the intent of precluding universal health care ties to the decades old move rightward by ‘liberal’ Democrats under the guise of pragmatism. Democrats play the good natured but ineffectual sops—the good cops, while Republicans play the crazies with their guns to our foreheads to divert attention away from the fact that actual policy differences between the two are but marketing ploys. The economic pain caused the poor and vulnerable by the government shutdown is real. But the assertion that Democrats object to this is ludicrous on its face. President Barack Obama has spent his last five years in office studiously ignoring the plight of the poor and unemployed while he has actively pursued policies that benefit America’s richest through unconditional bailouts of corrupt bankers, mortgage ‘settlements’ that allowed banks to steal the entirety of accumulated black wealth, secret trade agreements (TPP– Trans-Pacific Partnership) that reconstitute predatory political economy and intricate state spying on citizens by the NSA to secure and maintain corporate-state control over us. President Bill Clinton before him ended ‘welfare as we know it’ without providing offsetting economic empowerment for America’s most vulnerable, ‘freed’ the banks to destroy the global economy, brought to fruition the NAFTA ‘free-trade’ agreement that has decimated middle class jobs and he pushed for cuts to Social Security. The illusion that the plight of the poor and vulnerable is a lever to which the political class will respond is now forty years past its expiration date. More b4in.org/bRs
Posted on: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 10:03:23 +0000
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