http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33261.htm
Austerity, Obama-Style
The Plutocrats and the Placeholder President
By Rob Urie
December 08, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - In Quentin
Tarantino's movie 'Jackie Brown' the illegal arms dealer played by
Samuel L. Jackson laughs as he recounts the sales slogan used by the
manufacturer of the 'Tech Nine' semi-automatic weapon-"the most
popular gun in American crime, like they proud of that shit." Mere
weeks after Barack Obama was re-elected farce is added to tragedy
with his supporters complaining that while the Republican proposal to
cut Federal government spending and social insurance programs is
all bluster and misdirection, their guy (Mr. Obama) has a real plan
to do so-like they're proud of that shit. Thanks just the same folks,
but I'll take the fake plan.
The moment when the New Deal as we knew it became history by
bi-partisan consensus was a long time coming. A trans-generational
core of inherited wealth and right-wing cranks has been trying to
undo the New Deal since Social Security became fact in 1935. Ronald
Reagan echoed anti-New Deal cries of 'socialism,' first as a paid
spokesperson of the AMA (American Medical Association) against the
implementation of Medicare and Medicaid, and later through his racist
caricature of the 'welfare queen' living fat on public largesse.
Despite the fact that Social Security is an insurance program paid
for by its participants, much the same as private insurance but
without the executive looting, the charge has always been of an
undeserving public sucking on "a milk cow with 310 million tits."
Democrats first joined the effort in earnest with Bill Clinton's plan
to partially privatize Social Security. The idea was to let our good
friends on Wall Street manage a bit of the money for us, for a fee of
course. That proposal faltered when Mr. Clinton was impeached. As was
the fashion in European Central Bank circles in 2009, Mr. Obama took
up the torch of fiscal austerity of his own initiative by creating
his very own deficit commission. This should have come as no surprise
to anyone paying attention-Mr. Obama publicly stated his intention to
'fix' Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid when he allied himself
with the Wall Street friendly 'Hamilton Project' in 2006.
(In Between Democrats Clinton and Obama came Republican George W.
Bush who also tried to partially privatize Social Security. Mr. Bush
quickly retreated when he saw the depth of political opposition to
the effort. As the saying goes, it takes a Democrat to gut the New
Deal).
For the uninitiated, the Hamilton Project is the demon spawn of the
Clintonite contingent of the Democratic Party led by former Treasury
Secretary and disgraced Citicorp Board member Robert Rubin. The
kindest take on the Wall Street lootocracy populating the
organization is that they don't know how money is created (the U.S.
has a fiat currency), making them morons. The less kind take is that
their greed has no limits. Whichever is more applicable (neither is
mutually exclusive), if one group of Wall Street politicos bears
responsibility for the economic catastrophe that an unregulated Wall
Street has visited upon the world in recent years, the Hamilton
Project is it.
Never one to let the wish list of the entrenched plutocracy go
unfulfilled, Barack Obama chose Democrat, inheritance baby and Wall
Street 'welfare queen' Erskine Bowles, to co-head his (Mr. Obama's)
very own 'deficit commission.' Of course Mr. Obama knew nothing of
Mr. Bowles experience leading the earlier effort to (partially)
privatize Social Security when he appointed him to the position. In
his speech welcoming the Hamilton Project into existence (link
above), Mr. Obama additionally described himself as an enthusiastic
'free trader' committed to globalization. And of current relevance,
he ascribed fiscal 'discipline' as the proximate cause of the Clinton
economic 'boom,' deftly ignoring the greatest stock market bubble (as
measured by price / earnings ratio-twice that of 1929) in human
history.
One could be forgiven for believing that Mr. Obama, or any other
placeholder Democrat for that matter, has something of a point
regarding 'entitlement' spending if his words are the only that are
listened to. People in the U.S. are living longer and a strapped
citizenry simply cannot afford the lavish promises made in an earlier
age of plenty goes the toxic bullshit. By leaving out class divisions
this formulation simply furthers the shift in social resources upward
from poor to rich. As economist Paul Krugman has effectively argued,
the rich are living longer and the working class and poor are not.
Additionally, unless those in the 'gap' years between the old and new
eligibility ages for Medicare simply forgo health care, the change
will force them to purchase private health insurance under whatever
terms the 'market' will bear. But of course, private insurance
companies always act in the public interest when people's backs are
to the wall.
At the end of the day this charade is a struggle over social
resources. The 'too-big-to-fail' guarantee of the banks, which is the
only reason why insolvent, predatory Wall Street remains in business,
is an entitlement program for connected bankers-for which they pay
nothing. The bloated, murderous, military industry that lobbies the
U.S. into unnecessary wars for their own benefit and that of
corporate welfare receiving multi-national corporations is an
entitlement program. And the aforementioned corporate welfare that
perpetuates the puffy, gray corporate executives behind the 'Fix the
Debt' campaign for whom official Washington now apparently works is
an entitlement program. So if we want to have a public 'discussion'
of entitlement spending, by all means let's do so.
And as far as entitlement programs go, government guarantees and
redistribution schemes are only a starting point. As economist Dean
Baker has argued, America's professional class retains monopoly
pricing power for their labor through trade restrictions while the
working class has been thrown to the wolves. The Federal Reserve has
spent upwards of four trillion dollars to entitle the fortunes of the
investor class since 2008, returning the already rich to their former
wealth. And corporate executives have entitled themselves to
robber-baron sized paychecks through the combination of trade
policies that have so reduced the fortunes of the working class, tax
abatements that have bled the public weal for some forty years, and
through the financialization of the economy that has favored, along
with Federal Reserve policies, the financial wealth that executives
pay themselves with. All of these and more are entitlement programs
that have redistributed ever more social wealth from the working
class and poor up to the Washington establishment's beloved
plutocrats.
But the trillions of dollars in health care expenditures that we
deadbeats intend to sponge off of the blessedly deserving rich is the
really big money, right? When Erskine Bowles wakes with night
terrors, it is my herniated disk and your gall bladder operation that
will sink the country, right? The U.S. pays 30% - 50% more per person
than other first world nations for health care that is of
substantially lower quality because we have a largely private health
care system. Were the system totally public-Medicare for all, we
would realize some material proportion of these savings and most
likely vastly improve the health of the citizenry. Were the monopoly
entitlements of doctors and pharmaceutical companies reduced or
eliminated, further cost reductions would be realized. So quickly,
who are the main beneficiaries of America's 'bloated' entitlement
programs?
As Mr. Obama will offer, his proposals include reducing payments to
health care providers and negotiating lower prices for prescription
drugs. However, the private health care system in America is the
global leader in shifting costs to those with the least social power.
Cuts in public payments to private providers have a long history of
popping up elsewhere, as health insurer profits will attest. For
instance, Mr. Obama's health care 'reform' program, the ACA
(Affordable Care Act), requires insurance companies to spend fixed
percentages of their revenues providing health care or to rebate the
difference to their customers. As corporations constitute the
majority of their 'customers,' corporations apparently now have an
incentive to shop around for health insurers that provide the lowest
proportion of health care to their employees to maximize the rebates.
(The central business of insurers was already to provide the
appearance of coverage without providing actual coverage). And health
insurance providers can gain market share, if at lower margins, by
doing exactly this. Welcome to America.
Last, any honest discussion of 'entitlements' would be to the benefit
of America's poor and working classes. The globetrotting plutocrats
behind current 'discussions' see working class product as their due.
This is the very definition of entitlement. We can either disabuse
them of this notion or roll over and play dead. Or better yet, roll
over and vote Democrat.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.
This article was originally posted at Counterpunch.
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