The "Fiscal Cliff" Swindle In A Nutshell

The shrill calls for suicidal austerity by those who continually enrich themselves at the public trough have gone well beyond lunacy. While our deficits and national debt are real enough, the attribution of causes for them by our politicians and pundits is a cynical exercise in base propaganda. Perpetually unmentioned in the false debate are the real drivers of debt, prominent among which are the following:

(1) The private medical system, unique in the industrial world, which allows parasitic middle-men to siphon off more than $1 trillion dollars annually to perpetuate hugely redundant HMO bureaucracies. Much of our pension costs are owed to this.

(2) A world-wide network of U.S. military bases that has nothing to do with legitimate national defense needs, but is a gargantuan waste expenditure.

(3) The continual off-shoring of production, which reduces the U.S. tax base, while providing tax havens for large corporations wishing to avoid paying taxes on their operations remaining in the U.S.

None of this is mentioned in the "fiscal cliff" hysteria, which is a phony debate designed to hand over Social Security and Medicare to the folks who have looted our pensions, exported our jobs, and sucked the equity out of our homes. Don't fall for it.

Market Demography, Political Democracy& Capitalism

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Market Demography is not Political Democracy:

Capitalism is Anti-Social   

The most expensive election campaign in american history ended with more good than bad results, given the choices allowed. Voters defeated the possibility of cancer, but were unable to cure the polio we still suffer. A reactionary effort to take us further back than we have already gone was mostly unsuccessful. But the advances made were smaller than some wishful thinkers suppose. We need radical change in substance and got nothing more than stylistic moderation in form.

A host of seeming victories result from a system so critically diseased that anything short of terminal condition is seen as positive remission.

While many still claim a healthcare triumph in obamacare they fail to see the program as primarily an aid to profit making private insurers. More access to financial entities who make money from illness is hardly enabling more access to better health. As in every other economic aspect of life , some will certainly profit while others will most assuredly lose.

The rush to lesser evilism provoked by paid fear mongers and amateur hysterics cost the alternative left dearly in that the Green Party was unable to gain a mere 5% of the vote. This would have insured public funding of up to 20 million dollars and an organizing possibility in all 50 states for the future. In an election which saw both corporate parties getting even less votes than last time and more than 90 million citizens totally opting out and not voting at all, shame and disgrace are kind words for the performance of something calling itself a democracy, let alone for an entity calling itself  a “progressive” left . That group did gain a small group of democrats who will at least stand for domestic forms of equality, even while continuing lock step support for Israeli  brutality, imperial global rule and the threatened future slaughter of Iranians. The master race/chosen people/american exceptionalism syndrome embraced by both corporate candidates continues, with might makes right policies in command.

Even some Obama lovers have become skeptical, no longer politically orgasmic over the great half-white hope and demanding that his feet be kept to the fire. Such a liberal inferno might be extinguished by one glob of conservative spit, but there are signs of an awakening public, already being smothered in analysis by demographic dividers. While unions have shown new life and citizen social movements a  new spark, individually oriented, ego centered, identity focused politics induced by market research and advertising maintain dominance over the sales process that passes for electoral democracy in the USA.

Growing inequality is bringing greater changes that showed up electorally but were quickly placed into minority packaging lest people see their similarities, a dangerous tendency toward real democratic action. Our ruling marketeers isolate us by ethnicity, race, sex and any other divisions that can help perpetuate minority rule by the 1% and its servants. They have us laud progress when members of forced-into-minorities are elected to support entrenched political economic relations.

The 1% deities will be happy to have a pot smoking Rastafarian running the Defense Dept, a married gay couple on the Supreme Court, a Transvestite Asian-American heading the Justice Dept and an Arab-American lesbian HIV positive Rosicrucian in the senate, as long as these house servants carry out the dictates of profit and loss excess at cost of public losses which grow greater and more global every day.

The presidential campaigns of the corporadoes never mentioned climate change, poverty and a host of issues critical to the future of our nation and the world in which we occupy a minority position. That was their job and remains so; to keep the public unaware of the failing of a system that threatens most of humanity while it makes a small segment more comfortable and at the very top, wealthy beyond the wildest nightmares of a perverse democracy.

Millionaires of only a short time ago have suddenly become billionaires, their numbers and intellects shrinking as their fortunes expand at public expense. While fabulous wealth accrues to a smaller and smaller group, poverty in america is growing as the working class dubbed a middle sees increasing hardship. This is true all across the capitalist world, with Europe currently suffering a greater contradiction than the USA between its moneyed and working classes, but with america catching up all to quickly.

The problem of minorities living as royalty based on the work and total lack of power of majorities who support them was not mentioned except by alternative candidates who were barely heard, according to corporate plan. The next election had better be countered by an organized plan and party for the majority of the electorate or the storms of the marketplace and nature will grow more fierce to the point of making us finally equal in our helplessness to withstand what we may help unleash.

We’re about to become the major fossil fuel producers on the planet. Sea levels are rising while thought levels are sinking. We have military bases in hundreds of locations all over the world and an anti-terrorist program spending billions in what is called homeland security, but we cannot protect our people from the ravages of a storm that wreaked havoc, death and destruction in the largest city in the nation. A media inflated alleged war hero slated by some for the presidency is deflated by a sex scandal with no attention paid to his open criticism of the US-Israel relationship as being detrimental to our interest almost at the same moment as Israel resumes killing Palestinians in Gaza and Syria approaches breakdown under inside and mostly outside assault. Austerity is called for with belt tightening not only for the rich but all others in a bi-partisan bargain with feigned equality between billionaires and pensioners, rich people and workers, the affluent and poverty stricken. But let us give thanks for small favors, even if we have to be stoned, drunk or on an induced  messianic high to locate or identify them.

More important than any individual or party we may support is the system we need to change. It is profit and loss capitalism that is the obstacle to peace and humanity, not one or another capitalist servant, whether Romney for Bain or Obama for Goldman Sachs . A wonderful person who owns a bandage business can only profit when people are doing lots of bleeding. Everything we produce, distribute, buy and sell shows a benefit for some, at a loss for others. That’s the problem, not a particular villain on Wall Street, Main Street or in the White House.

So while there is always much to be thankful for, there is even more to be wary and mindful of lest we face the future with a full belly but an empty mind and an increasingly barren planet. Whether you dine on turkey, tacos or tofu, remember that your elite doesn’t care what you eat so long as they profit from its sale, and if it profits them more to feed dogs, cats and the military-prison industrial complex, that’s what they will do. Until and unless we create a better way of organizing society. That calls for system change and the sex, race, religion and political philosophy of those who affect that change is far less important than that they act in unity to transform capitalism into humanism.

SHOCKING BULLETIN!!!

HEROIC MASS MURDERER OF THOUSANDS SHAMED BY HAVING SEX

An idolized hero of the savagery of war was brought to his knees - sort of - by revelations that he did the unthinkable and had sex...with a woman...we can't go any further, this is all too much...

Change You Can Believe In: No Change

Post-election news bulletin:

"After $6 billion, two dozen presidential primary election days, a pair of national conventions, four general election debates, hundreds of Congressional contests and more television advertisements than anyone would ever want to watch, the two major political parties in America essentially fought to a standstill.

When all the shouting was done, the American people on Tuesday more or less ratified the status quo that existed at the start of the day: they returned President Obama to the White House for another four years, reaffirmed Republican control of the House and kept the Senate in Democratic hands. As of Wednesday morning, the margins in the House and the Senate had each changed by just a seat or two."

And this:

"Majority of Voters See America On Wrong Track"

........NBC News poll, November 6, 2012

Election Day Bulletins

 

Shocking Entrance Poll Results:

Ahmadinejad Elected President of USA!

A brand new polling technique that questions possible voters as they enter parking lots, shopping centers, gas stations or public toilets prior to possibly voting has revealed surprising results. When confined to Iranian-Americans, critics of Israel and lovers of Iranian food, the overwhelming choice of possible voters was Ahmadinejad for president of the USA.

“We’ll have to go back to the drawing boards and reconstruct our surveys. This form had worked in animal food and media daytime tv questionnaires but something obviously went wrong here” said a representative of the Center for the Study of Centers, which created the revolutionary new polling technique.

Shocking Vote Suppression Bulletins From All Over America

Minnesota:

Voters forced to disrobe, stand in freezing ice and snow before being allowed to vote. Poll watcher who forced them apologized and claimed he was only part-time and had previously worked at airports .

Arizona:

Multi-Billionaires pay homeless Americans to get green cards and pose as legal immigrants in order to vote for Romney. Plan backfires as Ahmadinejad carries state.

Pennsylvania:

Republicans   were accused of beating children, sexually abusing puppies and eating raw cat food in order to sicken, frighten and deny decent citizen  voters who would have chosen Obama had they not been beaten, abused and sickened away from the polls.

Democrats responded with claims that Republican mobs molested Women-Americans, African Americans, Gay-Americans, Latin-Americans, , Jewish-Americans, Irish- Americans , Italian-Americans and Dreamer-Americans who were sleep walking to the polls, interfering with their constitutional right to dream, walk, be hyphenated and vote.

Washington D.C.

Citizens of the nation’s capital who wished to vote were subjected to body searches, forced urine analysis and questioned on the meaning of the Koran in an effort to exclude terrorists, HIV positive people and Muslims from voting. The ACLU was considering a law suit defending the HIV positive people from this kind of harassment.

Oklahoma:

Voters were asked to show ownership of oil wells or stock in petroleum companies before being allowed into polling places in Tulsa and other major cities.

Early Exit Polls Show Americans Losing…Again…As Usual

Rash of Suicides Among Undecided Voters Mars Elections

Search For Vote-Worthy Difference Between Candidates Ends In Despair

"I tried; I really tried," reads a suicide note left behind by wanna-be voter Karen DeLeon of Dayton Ohio. "But the more I studied, the more I couldn't distinguish between Rombama and that other guy on war and peace, the 'free market,' education and the environment - the crucial issues. I'm sorry. I guess I'm just not smart enough to vote." The note was dated the same day she was found dead in her home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Unfortunately, DeLeon's is not an isolated case. In recent days thousands of undecided voters have turned up dead in Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, in what psychologists are calling an "Electoral Jonestown."

"The phenomenon appears to be similar to induced schizophrenia in dogs," says Dr. J. C. Hertz of Johns Hopkins University, an expert in bipolar depression. "For years we have been developing 'double-bind' studies requiring rational discrimination between two increasingly similar alternatives. Experimental dogs, for example, will be forced to distinguish between an oval shape and a circle, and administered an electric shock when they choose incorrectly. As the oval shape is gradually rounded out to more closely approximate a circle, the dogs experience the canine-equivalent of a nervous breakdown. Something similar appears to be happening to this year's undecided voters."

A particularly tragic case involved a young man in Telluride, Colorado, who was sure that a careful study of U.S. health care, on which the two candidates were said to be sharply divided, would steer him to a rational basis for choosing between them. His anguished last words were, "Obama care is Romney care, created by the Heritage Foundation. Aargh$@%*&@#!!"

Equally distressing is the case of a young Pennsylvania woman who blew her brains out several days after being told that there was a "Grand Canyon of difference" between the candidates on environmental issues. "Oh my God!" reads her suicide note, "Obama retained the Bush appointees calling for 'self-policing' in the oil industry, which culminated in British Petroleum's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, then went on to promote an expansion of nuclear power during a triple meltdown in Japan!" A bullet-riddled copy of "The Audacity of Hope" was found at her side.

Experts say that "vote or die" extremism is fueling the wave of suicides. "When people are told, over and over, that 'this is the most important election of our lifetimes,' they naturally begin to feel that the casting of their vote has a cosmic significance," says John Croteau of the National Institute For Mental Health. When reality then cruelly disabuses them of this illusion, it's often too much to bear."

False Savior: Barack Obama (7)

"Forward."

-----Barack Obama, re-election campaign theme.

"How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?"

-----John Lennon

"You argue that the son of a single-working mom can't be an elitist. But it's not where you start in life; it's where you end up. After a prestigious prep school, Colombia, and Harvard, you've ended up with the values of Cambridge, San Francisco, and Hyde Park. So you're doing badly in Scranton, Youngstown, and Erie, where ordinary Americans live."

-----Karl Rove, letter to Obama, May 2008

Among Obama's myriad false claims are that the killing of Osama bin Laden took place during a "fire fight," when in fact he had ordered the shooting of an unarmed man, a cowardly feat of which he is greatly proud. The killing and sodomization of Libyan leader Moamar Qaddafi is also an Obama "triumph," one that has predictably left Libya at the mercy of brutal Islamic factions, as well as U.S. diplomatic personnel, recently murdered in Benghazi. For the record, Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted in advance that a "no-fly zone over Libya would be an 'act of war.'" So the war was yet another act of U.S. aggression, not the "humanitarian intervention" it was sold to the U.S. public as being.

Meanwhile, Obama did not condemn the repression and government killings of protesters in Bahrain using U.S.-made tanks and weapons, because that is where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed. Nor did he issue a critical word about Yemen, a close U.S. ally that kills and wounds protesters while the U.S. president looks on impotently.

When the "Arab Spring" emerged, offering hope of a sliver of democracy for long-suffering peoples in North Africa and the Middle East, the Obama administration moved to strangle it. President Obama never criticized the 30 years of U.S. support for Hosni Mubarak, nor Mubarak's collaboration with Israel, which was strongly opposed by the majority of Egyptians. This collaboration was sustained by dictatorship and attendant state terror, including torture, both given economic support courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. Somehow, this did not qualify as an occasion for delivering "change you can believe in."

Economist Edward S. Herman aptly summarizes Obama's continuation of George W. Bush's "war on terror": "Obama has extended and deepened the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, greatly enlarged the use of drones for use in war and to fight terror (i.e., terrorize) across the globe, and he has fought, and continues to fight, de facto wars in Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. . . . Obama has enlarged AFRICOM and advanced the U.S. military penetration into Africa. He regularly assails and threatens Iran and he continues the encircling and threatening of Russia and China . . ."

Perhaps Obama looks better on domestic policy? Not really. Obama's deficit commission was what initially established the suicidal dogma that a minimum of $4 trillion must be cut from the U.S. federal debt, (but not by eliminating empire-building and the grotesquely wasteful private medical system, the twin drivers of deficit spending). This was the number proposed by Obama last February 2011 in his annual budget. Huge cuts from Medicare-Medicaid were later agreed to in the August 2011 budget deal, and more cuts are on the way. Obama and Biden have consistently offered hundred of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, without asking for a single Republican concession in return. This severe austerity can't help but wreak havoc on ordinary Americans, and Obama well knows it. But he has made a career of sticking it to ordinary people in order to help wealthy people who already have more money than they are willing to productively invest. Meanwhile, U.S. annual spending on war is between $900 billion and one trillion dollars, every penny allegedly helping to "keep the American people safe." Sure.

For the record, the causes of U.S. deficits and cumulative debt are (1) wars and runaway military spending; (2) the Bush tax cuts, extended by Obama (80 percent of which benefited wealthy investors at a cost to the federal government of $200 to $270 billion a year); (3) the bailouts of banks and corporations; (4) the fiscal stimulus packages of both Bush and Obama - neither of which produced economic recovery; (4) the four years of keeping 25 million American workers unemployed; (5) price gouging by health insurance and service providers.

Meanwhile, profit margins are at an 80-year high, while real earnings continue to fall for 90 million workers and middle class households.

Obama's January 2011 State of the Union address promised a five year freeze in domestic spending (federal), which is flatly incompatible with his promises to improve education and help rebuild a decaying infrastructure. His support for massive military spending and permanent war prevents resources from being delivered to a crisis-ridden civil society, even as he talks hypocritically of "solidarity." He has repeatedly failed to address the massive unemployment, housing, and insecurity problems of millions of Americans, the growth of inequality, and the further consolidation of the "too big to fail" banks. He expressed great pride in keeping the U.S. "competitive," which means cheap labor, no benefits, and increasing privatization of education. He has praised his accomplishments in extending "free trade" agreements to Latin America and South Korea, with their attendant exploitation of the poor.

Meanwhile the big business critique of Obama is that he has gone "too far," straying from the proven principles of free enterprise with major tax increases, massive deficits, and "job-destroying regulation." The solution for them is capital flight to force down workers' wages still further and eliminate all social democratic protections. Obama is their stealth agent, not the lesser evil, but the more effective evil than Mitt Romney, who will have liberals on guard against budget austerity if he wins the elections, whereas Obama gets a free pass on the issue.

But surely Obama is good for the environment? Not hardly. Six months before the BP oil disaster in the Gulf, Obama and his secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar colluded with the oil behemoths to permit exactly the kind of drilling that produced the catastrophe. And when Japan's triple-meltdown occurred at Fukushima, Obama went off to Chile to promote an expansion of nuclear power.

Chile is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world and had recently suffered a massive earthquake, 8.8 on the Richter scale.

Forget Obama. Vote for the Green Party.

Sources: (Note: these sources have been drawn on to complete all the "False Savior" blog posts related to President Obama).

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Chomsky, Noam, "Hopes and Prospects," (Haymarket, 2010)

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Parenti, Michael, "The Face of Imperialism," (Paradigm, 2011)

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