US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

What are the chances that Obama figures the country will go apeshit if the choice can be posited between reducing SS benefits and repealing the Bush tax cuts?

No chance at all because he's never believed in repealing those tax cuts (and didn't).

1) repeal of DADT is a major achievement, though it is one that heteros may not appreciate as such.
2) AHCA's acceptance by lotsa Dems/liberals was on the premise that its dubious features could be made better at some future point. SS/Medicare reductions will make this belief seem naive at best in retrospect.
3) again, devil will be in the details ... but the weight of SS/Medicare benefit cuts will probably fall on future beneficiaries (so unless something else is in the works, the "angry geezers" won't get pissed.) as well as being substantively bad, it will demoralize many of Obama's former supporters (including all of the fresh young things that voted for him in 2008, to the extent that they're paying attention). we'll probably hear some shit about "we can restore these benefits at some future point" from certain Dem lackeys, but see 2) above re AHCA.

xps, well, what is the world we're in now?

1. finance capital, after decades of being let off its leash, had a huge failure, and economies capsized overnight

2. the world's democratic political systems decided to try to put humpty dumpty back together again

3. it's really expensive to do that, but not doing so was a huge unknown too. alternatives were not considered and international cooperation was nonexistent. there was no plan beyond "stop it!"

4. the beneficiaries of that extraordinary emergency protection are heavily engaged in a) controlling the story of their mistakes, b) misdirecting public anger, and c) preventing/reducing further government expense that is directed toward anyone else.

b) and c) are basically ongoing parts of "normal" politics at all times anyway. what's remarkable about this to me is how normal it all is, really? you don't need hardt/negri or anybody to figure this out at all. i don't think it's "late" anything.

I mean what if Obama's narrative is "I had to because the Republicans were so intransigent and irrational even in the face of the debt ceiling crisis. Now re-elect me and give me a Dem majority and we'll undo the damage."

thx hoos for the clarification.

still... am i a monster for thinking "the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy” sounds... really delicious??

"I had to because the Republicans were so intransigent and irrational even in the face of the debt ceiling crisis. Now re-elect me and give me a Dem majority and we'll undo the damage."

^^^bad sales pitch

also, the soundest fiscal policy would've been to let ALL of the Bush tax cuts (INCLUDING those that benefited the middle class) expire. this has NEVER been Obama's position (he campaigned ONLY for the repeal on taxpayers earning more than $250K/year) and even on the campaign trail he was willing to raise the estate tax exemption amount to at least $2.5M or so.

bad sale pitch

Isn't his entire gamble that the semi-rational part of the American electorate will see him as more mature than the raving Right?

1) repeal of DADT is a major achievement, though it is one that heteros may not appreciate as such.

This homo's not all too impressed that this is the best he could do in one term.

you don't have to be Morbz to look cockeyed at such a sales pitch, Michael. plus, even if Obama is more mature than the raving Right what good does it do if he still gives them what they want?!?

imho Obama should say fuck you to the GOP, invoke the 14th Amendment and raise the debt limit himself, and then hammer the GOP on the obstructionist/ideologues/taxes thing. would basically mean no legislation gets passed over the next year, but whatever.

a repeal of all those Bush tax cuts would have solved three-quarters of the deficit problem.

It feels to me that this is some sort of Major Crisis of Capitalism but I'm aware that people have thought that before, so I'm not going to start shouting from a church tower that the end is nigh.

As long as people can watch Dancing With The Stars and drink a beer on their own private property, I don't really think anything is ever going to change for America.

Isn't his entire gamble that the semi-rational part of the American electorate will see him as more mature than the raving Right?

wait who's the semi-rational here?

This homo's not all too impressed that this is the best he could do in one term.

rmde at "best" - he's done more than just that, the DADT repeal was just the biggest deal

ONLY for the repeal on taxpayers earning more than $250K/year) and even on the campaign trail he was willing to raise the estate tax exemption amount to at least $2.5M or so.

I still basically support both those positions.

am i a monster for thinking "the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy” sounds... really delicious??

― jackie tretorn (elmo argonaut), Friday, July 8, 2011 4:34 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

haha srsly creepy evangelical paternalism is soooooooooooooo creepy

imho Obama should say fuck you to the GOP, invoke the 14th Amendment and raise the debt limit himself,, etc...

I would too but then I'm far more combative that he appears to be.

I'm no constitutional scholar, but after reading last week's bleatings about invoking the Fourteenth Amendment I'm not sure the executive has this authority without Congress; but if he tries it I can guarantee you that while the GOP will try to impeach him he will have the public on his side. We like strong chief executives.

again, it's the Dem leadership's fault for allowing this conflation of the raising of the debt ceiling and the deficit in the first place.

As long as people can watch Dancing With The Stars and drink a beer on their own private property, I don't really think anything is ever going to change for America.

rmde

I take it the guilty fruit of conjugal intimacy is when you're kid gets caught selling drugs or something, right?

goole otm itt but its way more fun to think of ourselves as standing on the precipice of the total collapse of liberal democracy--gonna buy myself a gun and a generator this weekend i think

there are respectable reasons to support Obama's stated position re the Bush tax cuts, i suppose. all i'm saying, though, is that if we really DID care about deficit reduction then repeal of all of the tax cuts would've been on the table.

yeah it would definitely mean impeachment articles from the House, plus Supreme Court challenge, etc

xp

I continue to drift more and more into Morbs' mindset and it upsets me.

also, i don't think that things are so bad that liberal democracy is in grave peril or anything. we have more answers now about how to solve a serious economic downturn than we did during the 1930s (when folks really WERE fumbling in the dark). we just don't have the political will to actually DO the things to get the economy back to something like full employment.

goole it's "late" in the sense of the cycles of capital accumulation, i.e.

Wage repression produces a deficit of effective demand that is covered by increasing indebtedness that ultimately leads into a financial crisis which is resolved by state interventions which translates into a fiscal crisis of the state that can best be resolved, according to conventional economic wisdom, by further reductions in the social wage.

http://davidharvey.org/2010/08/the-enigma-of-capital-and-the-crisis-this-time/

that's one tangle of a sentence

so many xposts that this is probably irrelevant now but

you seem to be arguing that our politics/economics are going to shit because we're hitting some kind of malthusian limit or something. i don't think that's true.

yeah, i can see why people would be skeptical of that, particularly after the predictions of The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth were followed by three decades of relatively consistent growth (although it must be noted that the primary model in Limits to Growth didn't predict a huge economic collapse for the mid-1970s, but rather a huge economic collapse for...about now). people in the 60s and 70s predicted eminent global food shortages due to resource constraints, but those fears were allayed by the Green Revolution (although again it must be noted that the Green Revolution was powered almost entirely by dumping fertilizers onto everything to a degree that destroyed the resilience and sustainable productivity of a ton of cropland, and also that currently over a billion people are malnourished.)

i suppose i'm partial to the resource/energy constraints argument because peak oil writers have been saying for a long time (more than a decade now) that since oil is the foundation of the global economy, peak oil would come paired with large economic problems, including a big recession. and then, just as oil production peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s, and oil prices were hitting their peak in the 2008, along came the recession. for the ultimate tldr; see Richard Heinberg's thoughts on this: Temporary Recession or the End of Growth?

the question is whether you agree with this:

compound growth for ever is not possible: capital accumulation can no longer be the central force impelling social evolution

at the moment, this appears to be true. but it seems unthinkable that an alternative force could be found. so maybe it won't be.

we're not abt to thunderdome in this bitch

but a lot of people a lot smarter than me seem to think we're lookin down the barrel of a gun son of gun son a bitch that's scarier than we've ever seen.

we just don't have the political will to actually DO the things to get the economy back to something like full employment.

I think a lot of this stems from the Bachmann mindset. There are a lot of ppl whose attachment to Xtianity impels them to view economics from a moralistic viewpoint, either from a Calvinistic pov or from an intellectually dishonest pov which tries to factually 'prove' the superiority of good clean Xtian living. Their emphasis is always on family instead of larger collectives since that suits their prejudice and they're always scared that majority tyranny will impose man-made over divine morality even if that means driving over the cliff that's right before their very eyes.

1. finance capital, after decades of being let off its leash, had a huge failure, and economies capsized overnight

Don't worry, they found a way to blame it on black people.

Well, remember this: Matt Taibbi vs Byron York.

Wage repression produces a deficit of effective demand that is covered by increasing indebtedness that ultimately leads into a financial crisis which is resolved by state interventions which translates into a fiscal crisis of the state that can best be resolved, according to conventional economic wisdom, by further reductions in the social wage.

this is exactly what i said!

step 0. in my little schema up there would be "no real wage growth and a credit boom going hand in hand for a decade or so"

"the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy

Also note that the word conjugal implies "within marriage" = they only care about the babies of socially upright husbands and wives, properly conceived in the dark, in the missionary position, and keeping in mind that Jesus is always the third partner. Or something.

Actually you'd think by those standards they'd stop harassing single women about their own fertility...something doesn't make sense there....

Wish I could find a screencap of that scene from The Handmaid's Tale which illustrates perfectly what they mean by "conjugal intimacy."

state and local governments have cut about a half million jobs over the last two years from a NY Times blog

I guess this makes Norquist and other conservatives happy(although they would prefer to see those cuts at the federal level as well)

nothing makes them happy

not in public

well, being in power, for its own sake? notice how nobody gives a shit about 'deficits' until the economy is bad and/or a democrat is in the white house.

the strange variable in all this, which i don't really know what to make of, is that the unemployment crisis is really only at crisis levels within Dem demographics. what will this mean? i don't know. right now, though, it means republicans can talk about while comfortably opposing anything that will improve it.

xp

I can't believe TPM ran this story. Until we know if they're lobbyists, what's the point?

to foment rage

stories like that are only good in pairs:

http://consumerist.com/2011/07/chase-gets-man-thrown-in-jail-for-fraudulent-check-except-the-check-is-legit.html

"class warfare" etc

I've eaten in Bistro Bis twice btw. It's not that great (or so expensive).

C'mon, Michael: you don't view economics from a moralistic perspective? You think that people who "don't work hard" "deserve" financial security anyway? I don't think it's a specially "Christian" view to think that that's wrong.