Ramming It Up Our Behinds

In a great article today, Glenn Greenwald talks about how President Obama -- not the "nasty" Republicans -- is setting the stage to remove the last obstacles to turn America into a playground for the corporate class and a vast wasteland for the rest of us.

It's been bleedingly obvious for some time that the bipartisan D.C. political class and the economic factions that own it have been intent on massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare...but the combination of deficit hysteria (repeatedly bolstered by Obama) and the manufactured debt ceiling deadline has, by design, created the perfect pretext to enable this now. As one "Democratic official" told the Post: "These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by." Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine is not a GOP-exclusive dynamic.

Reports are coming out of Washington that Obama is pushing a budget that slashes $4 trillion over the next 10 years -- TWICE AS MUCH as the Tea Party-backed Republicans are seeking -- as a supposed "compromise" to raise the debt ceiling. That's right, the man vilified by the Radical Right as a Muslim-loving socialist is working hard to strong arm the members of his own party to acquiesce to a plan that throws 90% of the country under the proverbial bus!!

NOTHING IS OFF THE TABLE, except for ending war and windfalls for the wealthy and Corporate America. If Obama has his way -- and there is no indication he won't -- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will be chewed up and spit out without a second thought. And there's not a damn thing you or I can do about it!

Even worse,

Obama knows full well that he can slash Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security -- just like he could sign an extension of Bush tax cuts, escalate multiple wars, and embrace the Bush/Cheney Terrorism template recently known in Democratic circles as "shredding the Constitution" -- and have most Democrats and progressives continue to support him anyway. Unconditional support ensures political impotence, and rightly so. He's attending to the constituencies that matter: mostly, Wall Street tycoons who funded his 2008 campaign and whom he hopes will fund his re-election bid, and independents whose support is in question. And he's doing that both because it's in his perceived interest and because, to the extent he believes in anything, those are the constituencies with which he feels most comfortable.

If this goes down like it looks like it will and you vote for Obama in 2012, then you must at least admit you are not a progressive...or even a liberal. No, you are a disaster capitalist and Milton Friedman is your god. You will have voted for a man who supports economic policies to the right of those ON the right!

Greenwald concluded his essay with a George Carlin video that I have featured on this blog before. I am featuring it again for those of you who still don't understand what is transpiring before our very eyes.