It's a little less cute when the kick me sign is on your back, and mine. Photo: Pasukara76 via Flickr.
It’s hard to know what we’re supposed to think, know or feel in reaction to the news that deadlocked Washington may be on the precipice of a debt ceiling deal designed to avoid certain default.
What we do know is that in order to get all parties to agree, apparently only spending cuts were on the table, with billionaires, jet owners, jet setters and Bush-tax-cut recipients remaining free from all sacrifice. But hey, with corporate socialism you come to enjoy bailouts and avoiding paying anything at all in taxes. Was it fair to expect a change there? I mean, have a little compassion for the billionaire in your life.
You’ll get yours, alright
If you’re inclined to swallow the line coming out of the Washington punditocracy on the pending deal, any failure for Obama and Democrats now is no real problem, because it all signals victory sometime down the line.
But I don’t live or write in Washington and I find it hard to believe that, having been thrown under the bus — or more aptly if not more indelicately for some of us, sold down the river — that we’re supposed to be on hand at some mythic future date naively believing that the super committee will ride in with white hats on to at last address plutocracy. Or less ambitiously, simply to require Big Business to forsake their accustomed tax loopholes and corporate socialism in favor of pulling their own weight.
Has Obama earned so much political capital from the piddly citizenry that we can believe with confidence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, he really, really is on the side of the average schmoe?
To quote with some degree of tragic irony the comedian Jon Stewart, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me eight times, ‘Am I a fu#king idiot?'”
What gives?
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses
Does the American populace have some kind of giant Post-It Note on our asses saying “kick me?” Can our passivity be so relied upon that we’re expected to eat this one, too? Or can our majority willingness to favor compromise over ideological absolutism be twisted into a belief that we actually want to be mugged in plain sight?
Or is it our stalwart distraction that is the old reliable here as Washington cynics chomp cigars in back rooms, throw back a brisk whiskey shot and confidently hold forth that, “Joe Six Pack will forget about this by midweek, mark my words. Then it’s the August recess my friend. Golf as far as the eye can see. And bikinis. Oh, the bikinis.”
#StandUpFightBack
I don’t know about you, but for me, this plutocratic class war has gone too damn far. I’m not a sucker. I don’t want to be abused by an elected government that is supposed to be accountable to me, not to Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Pharma, Wall Street and the other corporate interests behind Grover Norquist and his no-new-tax pledge.
I don’t want decisions that offer temporary fixes whose compound problems in peak debt are equal only to the inability of peak oil to deliver a counter measure in cash down the line. And I don’t want to be seen by my president as a voter who will be there for him no matter how many times he jilts me.
If anyone out there really thinks this government is working in our best interest simply because it reached a non-compromise compromise that Johnny Citizen can suck up, well I’ve got some rich fertile land to sell you in Texas. Or Pakistan.
Meantime, learn the phrase General Strike. And work on your stamina. Nothing but taking to the streets until change is guaranteed is going to bring about a recalibration in a government that has been bought and paid for by corporations and now operates wholly independent of the American people.
The only way to fight a bully is to stand up to him.
#standupfightback
–Lindsay Curren, Transition Voice
Lindsay, i’d like to believe this is where the citizenry “draws the line” and the outrage leads to the decline of our industrial society, a change in attitude and actions from the White House down to the state house and my house, but i’m afraid that I can’t believe that our sheeple will do anything to change the course we’re on at this point. Not after 8 years of Bush junior setting the tone by ignoring everybody but the powerful and connected, going to war despite world-wide protests not to, and driving the economy to the point where it is now – almost completely gutted. Obama snuck in as a Democrat but is just as Republican as anyone else now.
No, the real reason nothing will be done (or even CAN be done) is that we’re at the very beginnings of a bottleneck now involving world-wide collapse of civilization due to Peak Oil and the fact that there is no longer a cheap energy source to fall back on. Between our unsustainable lifestyle based on fossil fuel use and the on-going environmental degradation we’ve come to “accept” over the past at least 50 years we’re looking at a very bleak “future.”