Austerians At the Gate

The neoliberal deficit hawks are already sharpening their talons in anticipation of the dessert to follow their multi-trillion dollar CARES feast at the Chateau Fed. But since our fine upstanding plutocrats and overlords must never be seen as the gluttons and exploiters and predators that they truly are, they have already made the "tough choice" of forgoing the Baked Alaska in favor of eating the wait staff themselves for dessert

In case you still hadn't heard, "we" are all in this together. And therefore, it is you who will pay. You, the designated wait staff of America, were in proximity to the table, were you not? And after all, you're (maybe) getting those $1200 stimulus tips.

Before it begins to dawn on you that this isn't a fair outcome, and that those promises of a better life after you're dead are palling, the media-political complex is only too happy to gaslight you.

They're playing their usual divide-and-conquer games to keep your attention safely diverted from the reality that they want to eat you. This week's spectacle is an endless loop of astroturfed Tea Party throwbacks blocking hospital entrances and traffic and even accosting the doctors and nurses who are trying to take away their freedom to bear arms and spread their germs and get back to work serving the plutocrats.

Pick a side, any side. It'll take your mind off mourning for your relatives and friends if only you can simply learn to direct all your anger at the people the Overlords have carefully selected for you to hate.

If you're getting tired of hating Trump, now you can hate the orchestrated mobs of Confederate flag-carrying patriots. Conversely, if you're getting tired of helplessly hating Dr.Anthony Fauci and the health experts telling you to socially distance and cover your faces, now you can direct your wrath at all the scary nurses and orderlies, the designated co-opted darlings of the liberal elite.  Celebrities are even staging virtual concerts and fundraisers for these "front line warriors" and doing nothing at all for you.

But back to those plutocratic plans for your not so distant future.

The plans are ugly, but thanks to the propaganda skills of the New York Times, they are presented seriously and with as much obfuscation as they can muster. As I hinted at the beginning of this piece, somebody has to pay for all the gastric pain that will afflict the currently non-existent Unborn as mysteriously as the coronavirus is afflicting millions of people right now. All of our children and grandchildren, whether they be rich or poor, will eventually all be as #All In This Together as millionaires and bus drivers are in it now.

Veteran Timesman and maitre d' to the oligarchy Carl Hulse solemnly explains:

Just last month, Congress allocated and President Trump signed into law a series of bills that spent an estimated $2.6 trillion — the equivalent of twice the annual discretionary federal budget. And that does not take into account the certainty of much more spending on the way, including the $250 billion currently teed up to replenish a small-businesses aid program and hundreds of billions of dollars more sought for hospitals, states and cities. Something will eventually have to give. (my bold).

Hulse immediately turns to Maya McGuineas, the D.C. queen of the austerians and one of the lizard brains behind the Bowles-Simpson "Catfood Commission" tapped by Barack Obama in 2010 to cut the deficit by having the trillion-dollar war industry "share the sacrifice" with struggling Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid recipients.

A brand new "eye-popping" report by her lobbying organization, the Wall Street-financed Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget, reveals that as a result of the pandemic and the bailouts of the already-rich, the annual federal budget deficit will quadruple. And even though the cost of federal government borrowing is zero and the money need never actually be paid back, the wait staff will have to pay it back. The little people must be disciplined to accept their punishment both now and forever.

Taxing the rich would "crater the economy" Hulse uncritically quotes Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania as saying. And since the Social Security trust fund is dwindling and Medicare is "broke," the beast of old and sick people will have to be starved so that the rich may live.

And quoting another CRFD board member:

“Once we get beyond this disaster, some very hard choices will have to be made, or you will have a federal government that is simply crippled in terms of being able to respond to crisis — whether it is a coronavirus or a natural disaster or a military conflict or economic downturn,” warned Mr. (Senator Kent) Conrad.

This, of course, makes no sense. Punishing the poor and the sick will not enhance our oligarchy of a government's ability to respond better to future emergencies. It will do the exact opposite. As the neoliberal politics of the last 40 years have demonstrated only too well, it is public program-destroying austerity that cripples the ability to respond to a crisis. Thanks to austerity, there is even a shortage of cheap cotton swabs with which to test for Covid-19. Thanks to austerity, hospitals have closed. Thanks to austerity, nurses have resorted to wearing garbage bags as protective gear and even being fired if they complain. Thanks to austerity, celebrities donate money to deliver pizza to the nurses as a substitute for safe working conditions and universal guaranteed health care for all.

But Hulse is sympathetic to the lie. These poor politicians currently have no choice but to spend with abandon. Because it's an election year!

"There is no choice now, but there are tough decisions ahead," he concludes in a piece posing as a straight news article.

You might remember Carl Hulse as the Times server-scribe who was honored by, among others, Pete Peterson/CRFB acolyte and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at the infamous Georgetown house party thrown last summer by Times columnist Maureen Dowd. It's a small world and a big club, etc.

But take heart, Times readers. Because right below Hulse's plutocratic propaganda was printed a fiery oppositional op-ed by none other than Bernie Sanders. He boldly ripped the gluttonous austerians a brand new one -

Should we really continue along the path of greed and unfettered capitalism, in which three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the nation, and tens of millions live in economic desperation — struggling to put food on the table, pay for housing and education and put a few dollars aside for retirement? Or should we go forward in a very new direction?In the course of my presidential campaign, I sought to follow in the footsteps of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s and 40s, understood that in a truly free society, economic rights must be considered human rights. That was true 80 years ago and it remains true today.

Now I will do everything in my power to bring this country together to help Joe Biden defeat the most dangerous president in modern American history. And I will continue to make the vigorous case that we must address the inequalities that contributed to the rise of Donald Trump, whose cruelty and incompetence have cost American lives during this pandemic.

Oh. I guess Bernie forgot that Joe Biden was a big loud vocal supporter of Maya McGuineas's Catfood Commission and had even publicly blamed the Republicans in a speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention for squelching its efforts to cut Social Security, raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and reduce corporate tax rates. He bragged on many occasions that he was willing to make the "tough choices" that even too many members of his own party were not.

So, my published response to Bernie's op-ed:

(Sanders writes) "If there is any silver lining in the horrible pandemic and economic collapse we’re experiencing, it is that many in our country are now beginning to rethink the basic assumptions underlying the American value system."

I'm curious whether Joe Biden, whom Bernie urges us all to "come together" to support to overturn Trump, is among those beginning to rethink those basic assumptions underlying the value system whose noxious end-product is Trumpism.

 If not, a President Biden will only enable the subsequent rise to power of somebody a lot smarter and more dangerous than Trump.

  Last I heard, Biden only goes so far as lowering the Medicare age to 60. If we're lucky, that negotiating starting point might end up with Republicans grudgingly agreeing to not raise the age to 67 as Barack Obama himself suggested back in 2011 as part of his own ill fated "Grand Bargain" with the GOP.

  Biden has spent the last nearly half century of his political career trying to cut Social Security and Medicare and calling such cruelty "tough choices." He recently vowed to veto M4A if by some miracle it ever passed Congress and arrived at his desk.

I'll consider voting for Biden if he copies this excellent op-ed by Bernie Sanders word for word and then signs his own name to it.

The keyword there is "consider." I might think about it seriously if he signed the editorial in blood, but given his history of serial lying, probably not even then.