Written by Don Washington   

I try not to lose my mind too often but then I, like you, have been watching the political theater of the blind, leading the stupid at the direction of idiots, around the debt ceiling. It’s times like this when I wish to God that we had a media capable to doing its job the hardest. Because if they were on their game they would tell us the Republicans are in gross dereliction of their sworn Constitutionally mandated duty to abide by the 14th Amendment. You see it says that once we say we make an obligation we have to live up to it. I’d like to see the 4th Estate take the time to explain that using the debt ceiling to force deal on other issues creates government by blackmail and it will keep happening all the time. That’s about as good for democracy as corporations counting our votes… son of a bitch… but I digress. I’m not that smart and this is just the stuff I find myself screaming at the television.

You know what I else I would like? I’d like if maybe the media would tell us more about what happens IF we default. You’ve heard that there may not be SSI, Medicare and Medicaid checks and soldiers’ families may not get tended to. Small potatoes, you ever heard of the Repo-Market, no? Give this a read and get dangerously informed about the Repo Market. http://wfhummel.cnchost.com/repos.html. Now imagine this market going cock-eyed so that Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell can blame the President and tell me that you’re not thinking of buying more canned food. If that’s too far above your head how about guarantees like the FDIC that underwrites your bank account?

Whenever I think about this I find myself wanting to get a group of homeless Veterans who won’t be getting their checks in August together with enough baseball bats for all of them and a dark room set up somewhere far from help. Then, inviting Sen. Mitch McConnell, Rep. Eric Cantor, Rep. Eric Cantor and Pres. Barack Obama to come visit with them; this is not a threat, the veterans might just turn on the lights and talk to them... then the violence would likely start. It would start because this entire thing, the specter of a long-term deficit that is looming over us is absolute bulls&#t.

The Congressional Budget Office’s deficit projections are not nearly as dangerous to the health of the country as the unemployment rate, the foreclosure crisis, our energy issues, our environmental issues, our crumbling infrastructure and the corporate corruption of capital in our political system but here we are watching the cynical work with the evil to do the political untenable, destroy social programs as if that’s what they should be doing because that’s what the President wants to do. What, you say; how can I say that the Democratic President of the United States of America doesn’t care about the disabled, old and poor? Because he’s not an idiot so he has to know that Social Security has nothing to do with the debt ceiling or the existing deficit but here he is bringing it to the table like an Aztec priest with a thirteen year old virgin!

The deal is that all of this is a ginned up issue that is being used to spread panic and allow everyone at that table to get to the ulterior motive of making the cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that Obama promised our G-20 partners he’d get to back in Toronto. This ain’t conspiracy theory. Read all about it right here where the British government’s deep cuts to social programs are being held up as a model for what governments should do the peasants now that the world’s spent trillions of dollars to bail out the banks. http://www.forextv.com/forex-news-fullstory/forex-g20-world-backs-britain-over-age-of-austerity. It’s really upset the British citizens http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/ and who knows; maybe having a Democratic President help our elites impoverish old people and deprive the poor of their medical supports is what we’ll need to finally become “ungovernable”... a man can dream can’t he? In more serene moments I think: “It took Nixon to go to China apparently it will take Obama to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

I realize that this hypothesis; that the Republicans are giving the President cover to do something that should be politically untenable but that he really wants to do, is like something out of a Bond film but I’m pretty sure that no one in the room talking about the debt ceiling; Obama, Boehner, Cantor et al gives a good g*@da#*med about you, me, disabled people, old people, poor people, the existing economy and possibly every American who has yet to be born I’m understandably nervous and angry! If the President was really a Democrat and really talking about the debt and deficit we might hear things like this coming out of his mouth: Let’s back Bush’s tax cuts and we’re 25% of the way to a balanced budget. Roll back the Reagan Era Tax cuts and we’re sitting pretty. Place a STET tax of say 1/10th of 1 cent on every stock transaction and we could raise a trillion dollars a year. That puts us up to our asses in ice cream!

Hey, a Democratic President would just be getting warmed up. He’d say: Give everyone Medicare for all and we save billions every year. Repeal Medicare Part D and wipe out something along the lines of $700 billion over the next damn decade! We could eliminate $150 billion, every year from the military budget by doing real damage to these evil private contractors like Haliburton and the rest of these less than reputable folks… Look at me fixing the deficit, all by myself but I’m not in that room and you’ve not heard anyone mention any of the above because no one in that room is interested in dealing with the national debt including the President. So what is the point of this endless monkey dance where the Republicans ask for 2 trillion in cuts, the President offers $4 trillion and throws in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and they still say no? The point is that the Age of Austerity is coming just like Naomi Klein warned us about in the Shock Doctrine and this is just another opportunity for gangster capitalists to grab a little/lot more of the pie.