Twirling towards freedom
Barack Obama, appearing Monday at his latest Roman triumph (this one in Denver) delivered yet another chalky-sweet spoonful of his patented pink bismuth for America’s upset tummy.
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The cure for what ails us?
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“We need a president who will fight for the Middle Class every single day. From the time he wakes up to the time he goes to bed he’s going to be thinking about you. How to make your life better, how to live out your American Dream.”
Jesus Christ! This guy may specialize in fellating our sense of optimism, but even I know that I won’t be on his mind from the first sip of coffee until his head hits the pillow. I mean, does he think America won’t at least give him a fifteen minute break once a day to try and fuck that sourpuss off of Michelle?
Obama’s ceaseless repetition of his own Mary Tyler Moore theme, his hypnotic incantations of hope and a better tomorrow, are facing their first real test with the Wall Street financial collapse/meltdown/crater (choose the imagery that makes you shit your pants the least). Before, it was just Iraq, a softening economy, and a retard in the Oval Office. We’d gotten used to all that. Now, with a freshly minted catastrophe that will still be walloping us when the next president takes the reigns, it’s put up or shut up time for the candidates. Neither seems prepared to do either.
McCain’s response was to pretend to suspend his campaign for a couple of hours, to fly back to Washington and wander the corridors of power, maybe check and see if you can really hear people whispering from across the room if you stand at the right spot in the Capital rotunda, then declare that victory was in sight and dramatically attend the debate he never intended to skip. If the senator somehow managed to interject something valuable into the bailout deliberations, maybe a life lesson that he learned while he was a prisoner in Hanoi, he has thus far not reported it to us.
Obama has likewise said nothing we haven’t heard ad nauseum since he began running for president at the 2004 Democratic convention. Blood oozes from every cell of his heart for working families, for the man who has to catch a bus before dawn to go shovel coal into Mainstreet’s boilers, for that mother with the small child who turns tricks just so her son can afford the blazer for his Catholic school uniform (that woman deserves free pap smears!). But when it comes to particulars, the guy has the depth of a lolcat. “Change? I gots it.”
Stimulus packages? Yup. Drilling and windmills? Oh, yup. Fiscal regulation, too! Yup yup yup! If you’ve got a dream, Obama’s heard of it and is gonna hop right on it when he gets to the White House. But he’s in lockstep with the Republicans In not wanting to point fingers during the present catastrophe. “Now is the time for mucking in with the enemy and filling sandbags! Come on, Washington! Let’s build that levy together! Kumbayyah, my Lord, Kumbay…”
But waitaminit, someone’s taken bipartisanship into their own hands! Why…it’s CONGRESS! Democrats and Republicans joining together to deliver a collective “fuck you” to the White House and its future occupant!
With the killer asteroid only moments away and President Bruce Willis demanding that mission control let him set off the damn nuke, the House sent up a collective “meh” and chose to let planet earth sweat it out while they took Rosh Hashana off. Turns out Armageddon won’t be as easy to shove down their throats this time.
Was the notion that you can actually say “no” to a $700 billion Cleveland Steamer suggested at all by Barack Obama? The Chosen Son seemed willing to take whatever it was that Bush, Paulson and Bernanke were shoveling with little complaint, so long as he could appear presidential, which meant joining in on the panic and not asking a hell of a lot of questions.
Obama must be kicking himself right now, seeing how well disobeying the program plays with the public. “I had no idea that not agreeing with the most unpopular move yet by the most loathed man in America was an option!”
You can bet that at this moment the Obama campaign is engaged in a Human Genome-type project trying to crack the significance of both taking a stand and backing it with a career-threatening vote. I think they’ll find that it’s not the kind of thing their candidate can make up for with one of his generic pep rallies. But that’s Obama: If the moment doesn’t offer the opportunity for sap, he doesn’t bring the waffles.
Excuse me, but you really should buy me a drink before making love to my brain like that.
So, if a candidate keeps delivering the same message, he’s just mouthing a mantra, but if he adapts his message, he’s a waffler… what exactly is it that we’re looking for, again?
I would suggest he has not adapted his message at all, except to reiterate how tough times are but with a renewed sense of urgency. Has Obama said anything fresh recently that he wouldn’t have said one month ago before Wall Street turned on their shit-and-fan super collider? Of course not. It’s easy to pledge not to hand out $700 billion worth of golden parachutes–that’s a no brainer. But what happens when the bailout is recast as a “rescue”? Then it becomes almost unpatriotic not to offer, say, golden life jackets.
Here’s what Obama would be telling us if he had a pair. This is from presidential also-ran Dennis Kucinich:
Here is a very quick explanation of the $700 billion bailout within the context of the mechanics of our monetary and banking system:
The taxpayers loan money to the banks. But the taxpayers do not have the money. So we have to borrow it from the banks to give it back to the banks. But the banks do not have the money to loan to the government. So they create it into existence (through a mechanism called fractional reserve) and then loan it to us, at interest, so we can then give it back to them.
Confused?
This is the system. This is the standard mechanism used to expand the money supply on a daily basis not a special one designed only for the “$700 billion” transaction. People will explain this to you in many different ways, but this is what it comes down to.
The banks needed Congress’ approval. Of course in this topsy turvy world, it is the banks which set the terms of the money they are borrowing from the taxpayers. And what do we get for this transaction? Long term debt enslavement of our country. We get to pay back to the banks trillions of dollars ($700 billion with compounded interest) and the banks give us their bad debt which they cull from everywhere in the world.
Who could turn down a deal like this? I did.
The globalization of the debt puts the United States in the position that in order to repay the money that we borrow from the banks (for the banks) we could be forced to accept International Monetary Fund dictates which involve cutting health, social security benefits and all other social spending in addition to reducing wages and exploiting our natural resources. This inevitably leads to a loss of economic, social and political freedom.
Under the failed $700 billion bailout plan, Wall Street’s profits are Wall Street’s profits and Wall Street’s losses are the taxpayers’ losses. Profits are capitalized. Losses are socialized.
We are at a teachable moment on matters of money and finance. In the coming days and weeks, I will share with you thoughts about what can be done to take us not just in a new direction, but in a new direction which is just.
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I love the use of the term “teachable moment”. What is Obama teaching us at this moment? That when the going gets tough, turn up the hope–and hope no one is paying close attention to what you aren’t saying.