That’s what John Boehner told President Obama when Obama told him that there had to be a deal on the debt ceiling. But he wasn’t really talking to Obama – he was talking to the people of the United States who re-elected Obama to a second term and helped Dems pick up seats in the Senate and House. In essence he’s telling all of us the price for the Democrats winning the election is that the Republicans in the House are going to ruin the US economy if they don’t get what they want – no tax cuts for the rich and cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. For starters – repeal of Obamacare is also “on the table.”
This is how the Movie Mafia Gang Lords talk. It’s extortion. It’s a direct threat to tank the country’s economy. In fact, we’ve seen this real life political hostage taking before in 2010 and 2011 when Republicans played a crude, reckless and dangerous game with the lives of their fellow citizens as part of a naked grab for complete power over the budget and also to wreck Obama’s re-election by any means necessary. That a last minute deal to keep the Bush tax cuts in place resulted in a downgrading of America’s credit rating and damaged the economy was just “collateral damage” as far as Republicans were concerned.
The threat that the country might not pay all its bills caused a slump in financial markets and led in August 2011 to the first downgrade of the nation’s credit rating. It left broader economic scars, too. Many economists contend it hurt economic growth and jobs, and a July 2012 report by the Government Accountability Office found that it increased the country’s borrowing costs by about $1.3 billion in the 2011 fiscal year.
On short, Republicans didn’t give a damn about the millions of unemployed, improving the economy so people could find jobs and provide for their families, or protecting the social safety net for millions of people on Medicare and Social Security. All they cared about was preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans from rising 3.5%. They were willing to cut spending on everything for essential scientific research, funding for the National Weather Service, the safety of our food and medicine the FDA, money for disaster relief, etc. Only cuts for defense spending were off the table. In brief, it was their version of Austerity or nothing
You know Speaker Boehner, we’ve had the chance to watch how well austerity, during a deep recession, has worked out in real time in Europe this past few years. The result: A European Union on the brink of economic collapse. Why? Because austerity measures take money out of the hands of people who would spend it thus elimination demand for goods and services. You don’t have to bring up Greece or Spain or Portugal to make that case. Just look at the United Kingdom:
he UK economy is flatlining, unemployment is rising and around 13.2 million people live below the poverty line. The prospects of building a sustainable economy remain distant.
The common factor behind these grim statistics is that the purchasing power of ordinary people has been severely eroded and without adequate resources people cannot buy goods and services produced by businesses.
The UK gross domestic product (GDP) has increased from the 1976 figure of £621bn to around £1.5tn, but the share going to employees in the form of wages and salaries has declined. In 1976, the amount of wages and salaries paid to UK employees, expressed as a percentage of GDP, stood at 65.1%. By the end of 2011, it was around 54% …
That’s from the well known leftist publication the Business Insider. Austerity in Europe isn’t just an economic policy with economic consequences. It has led to an increase in suicides, the closure of health clinics and signs of a rise in infectious diseases. To be blunt, Austerity policies endanger the lives and health of real people, as well as affects the bottom line of many small businesses. Believe it or not, Goldman Sachs CEO is against austerity measures right now.
TORONTO (AP) — The chief executive of Goldman Sachs said Wednesday he is against austerity measures in the short term as the U.S. “fiscal cliff” looms.
Lloyd Blankfein, also chairman of the investment bank, said during a talk at the Canadian Club of Toronto that he’s all for budget cutbacks in the long term but not right now.
Blankfein said, “You can’t austere yourself into a higher GDP” and added, “It’s not going to be very good if the medicine kills the patient.” He said there can’t be another stimulus because of the consequences to the government’s balance sheet and said the U.S. has to convince the market it will deal with its problems in the long term.
Even Wall Street Banksters know that austerity in a time of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression is a “short-sighted” idea. Yet, a failure to raise the debt ceiling would impose immediate and long lasting austerity effects on the US economy. So why are the Republicans continuing to push for policies that will hurt our economy, but more importantly impact and in many cases devastate the lives of their fellow Americans, many of them already just barely getting by?
Because frankly they care more about their rich benefactors, the billionaires who spent all that money this last election cycle to defeat President Obama and reclaim the Senate. Well, that flood of money did not do what the financiers of the Republican election campaigns expected, and they are royally pissed at the GOP. Combine that with the still powerful bloc of Tea Party ideologues in Congress led by Paul Ryan, and you have the explanation for why Boehner is promising that he will not raise the debt ceiling to allow the government to function unless the Republican agenda, the one voters rejected at the polls, is passed.
To call the GOP a political party is an oxymoron. The republicans in office are merely the means by which right wing media outlets generate infotainment programming and revenues, large corporations preserve the ability to make obscene profits at a time of economic distress, and a fee hundred billionaires protect their monstrous hoards of wealth from a small rise in taxation. It’s not a political party,it’s simply the bought and paid for political machine of people like the Koch Brothers. It will not compromise or do the “people’s business” because it does not care about the people, nor is it able to compromise.
Less extreme Republicans, like Richard Lugar and Charlie Crist, have either left the party or been pushed out. Others have simply adopted the extremist views of the most rabid portion of their base, a base that has been brainwashed by conservative media outlets such as Fox, talk radio, etc. The famous Yeats poem “The Second Coming” has a verse that perfectly describes them: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
We learned in 2009, 2010, 2011 and this year that Republicans will say anything, repeat any lie, and worse, do anything, no matter how disastrous the consequences would be for our country in order to oppose the policies that would help ordinary Americans at the minor expense of a few uber rich individuals and corporations. We’ve witnessed hate speech, racism and even violence at levels not publicly seen since the Jim Crow era. We’ve watched Republicans pull every dirty trick in the book to keep people from voting, and pull every political stunt to delay and obstruct Democratic policies (e.g., the unprecedented abuse of the filibuster) while also grabbing every opportunity to pass laws promoted by ALEC that protect the profits of the wealthiest and most polluting industries on the planet.
Nothing they do should surprise us anymore. Republicans do not support America as a nation of diverse peoples and cultures with a common dream of creating a better life for themselves and their families. What they do support is whatever Fox News or their benefactors demand they support.
They will not compromise. They will not give in. On the contrary, they expect the Democrats to meekly surrender to their demands. Well, I didn’t vote for Democrats to cave in at the first sign of these egregious bullying tactics by the extreme right, and I suspect neither did you. There have been hopeful signs from Senator Reid, Senator Durbin and from the White House that the Democrats have learned the lesson of the past four years and will not abandon the principles and policies they espoused to win our votes in order to appease these extortionists.
I pray they are right. But in the meantime let your Democratic officials, your representatives know that you will not stand for a repeat of 2010 and 2011.
Get on the phone, send in your emails and tweets and tell them to fight, and as Harry Truman once said, “Give them hell.” Certainly Republicans deserve nothing after this election other than a resurgent, combative and united Democratic Party that won’t stand for these brazen attempts to essentially hold America hostage once again. Tell them to tell Boehner there is no price we are willing to pay to see the Republican agenda passed against the will of the people.
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