Debt Wars in Washington: The First Crucible of Choosing Lambs for Sacrifice

By: Michael_T_Bucci

After my wife passed, I moved from my home and applied for an apartment. The stern manager looked at my application with approval but couldn't accept me because I had two ferrets, my only remaining family. He turned and asked: "Can you get rid of one of them?" I quickly replied, "Which one?" He was neutralized. When the Tea-Party/GOP presented President Obama its demands to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and entitlements, the President didn't reply "no", and didn't ask "which one". He answered: "We'll negotiate. We'll compromise. We'll make it bipartisan." It was a done deal.

Where does one begin to explain to a person still stricken with Obamania that their President has betrayed all he stood for and for what his party represented since FDR? One doesn't begin easily. One sees it or doesn't see it. The rose-tinted glasses that President Obama has placed over the eyes of his constituents have served to obfuscate his role in moving this nation into the open fist of right-wing extremists who seek to destroy 100 years of social reform in one quick legislative session if only they had the power to do so. As it stands, the President, Democrats and Republicans have argued over choosing lambs for sacrifice, but the amount is unacceptable to the Tea Party, and but a paltry offering to the gods of finance, free markets and the ruling class.

Since our sinking Titanic is lacking lifeboats to prove its invincibility, which lambs will you select to be thrown overboard and sacrificed first, Congress and Mr. Obama? Those needing food stamps? Those needing housing subsidies? Those needing supplemental health benefits? Those needing an education? Those crippled and disabled who will never work again? The poor who are too powerless to object? The entire elderly population who are the heaviest weight? Washington, which lambs go first, then second, then third? Which one?

And who gets the lifeboats? Who gets saved?

From only an economic viewpoint, Mr. Obama's 2008 campaign was bankrolled by the Street, but also by Messrs. Warren Buffett and George Soros. He began his administration announcing his alliance with Wall Street by selecting Tim Geithner and Larry Summers among others. He honored Ben Bernanke's tenure at the Fed bringing forward neoliberal right-wing policies that ultimately failed the nation but enriched the investment class. Mr. Obama extended a welfare system for the rich and investment bankers that Hank Paulson began through blackmail in 2008. QE1 and QE2 were welfare payments to banks here and offshore with little left for Main Street and nothing for the growing ranks of the unemployed. Lately, Mr. Obama has been shamelessly collecting campaign pledges from the "movers" on Wall Street: the investment banks and hedge funds - his not-too-secreted underwriters. His alliance with Wall Street is becoming evident to all but the naive. He is Wall Street's man who has easily dwarfed the double-standards revealed in Bill Clinton's NAFTA, Rubinomics and the demolition of the Glass-Steagall Act that opened floodgates of profit for investors, of boom-and-bust cycles and bubbles. Additionally, he is the point man for the military/security state, the other welfare system immune from oversight and budget cuts.

Let us recount his broken promises, his postures that have proven to be deceptive, recount the President's myriad supplications to Republicans and to a Tea Party that has hijacked the Republicans, Democrats, White House and now the nation. I say he is the best President the Republicans and Pentagon ever found; someone called him "The Tea Party President" while the Tea Party calls him a socialist (that he is, for the rich, Wall Street and Corporations). Since no Republican could escape electoral defeat by dismantling Social Security, Mr. Obama moved to dismantle it. His constituency chooses to remain blind (with the help of media) or purposely mum to what he is doing. Obamania people still suffer from a chronic intellectual weakness called "believing is seeing". They are either foolishly devoted or in denial.

He was Wall Street's man in 2008, and still is. He has extended the wars, impoverished the Treasury not only through blood-of-the-people infusions to Wall Street, but through continuing Bush/Cheney's maniacal and obsession-induced "war on terrorism", now in its 10th year, costing trillions upon trillions and deaths upon deaths. He has openly endorsed assassination of sovereign leaders as well as Americans seen aiding an "enemy", brought about heinous domestic surveillance, extended the Patriot Act, weakened civil liberties, ignited the mid-east into a potential holocaust from NATO militarism and occupations, exacerbated ongoing military build-ups in Russia and China, and has contributed in making the world a much more dangerous place than when George W. Bush left the Oval Office.

This world, once hopeful that Mr. Obama's Presidency would shift Washington significantly away from Mr. Bush's pious new world order hegemony and arrogance, has recoiled from the awful reality that Obama is no different than his predecessor, and in most respects just another face of the same empire, an empire that brought the financial world to its knees in 2008 and is threatening to do it again and again. After George W, Bush, followed by Mr. Obama's performance in the White House - directly violating and voiding his own election promises - some of the world has clearly determined that no President of the United States can be believed or trusted ever again.

President Obama was never a liberal or progressive President, and historians will show he served to move this country from center to right, and currently is enabling its move to the far-right. The mirage he creates is difficult to decode for many, especially when so-called liberal and progressive sources only serve to interpret, explain, defend and excuse him. It is no surprise why the FOX Nation and Tea Party are trained to see Mr. Obama as a socialist - which he clearly is not - when given the same ploys and ruses once used by the founders of the John Birch Society in their attempt to defame and undermine President Dwight Eisenhower by calling him a communist during the McCarthy purges. The strategy is to force the victim's position closer to the accuser's position. In Obama's case, he moved to the Right.

Ike was no communist and Obama is no socialist.

A mass defection from the Democratic Party by the disaffected is highly improbable, but possible. If it mirrors the New Left of the late 1960s it might be no more effective today than in 1968 when the electorate reacted and turned rightward to Richard Nixon, and away from JFK, LBJ and The Great Society. It backfired.

Today, August 2012, is not August 1968, and tomorrow's electorate, ever facing the specter of depression, political instability and decline as a superpower, is likely to choose authoritarian control by a cartel or syndicate comprised of finance, the military/security alliance, the Religious Right, and wear a populist veneer of Libertarianism.

Regretfully, any who do leave the Party of Democrats to fashion an independent movement will confront a vacuum of leadership not dissimilar to Cairo's "headless revolution". Does it serve a cause or a country to be demonized by the Right and blamed by Democrats for any and all defeats suffered in 2012? Yet, doing otherwise is to submit to a lesser of two evils in 2012 - a submission that is never a virtue, but a vice. Yet the two-party system lacks two parties as it is two sides of the same coin - one that is corroded and weakened within from decades of systemic corruption. Also, the width of the political spectrum has dramatically narrowed since 2008 and now is colored only in shades of RED. There is no real political Center or real political Left in power, just the pretense of them.

With or without decisions crafted by President Obama, the nation is moving and will be moving far into the grip of financial controllers (IMF style). If the President's veneer is fading to his constituents today - who have inarguably been exploited and betrayed by him - the Right-wing (Tea Party) goal to "take over", as the Patriots and Militia crudely put it, comes ever closer to fruition in their eyes. If executed by an extreme act, it is called a "coup" in any language; and if the result of a coup is a government composed of oligarchs, corporations, finance, military and the religious Right, who together conspired to fashion it, its name is fascism. For public consumption, it would be labeled Conservative and Libertarian, and blessed by the Almighty whose hosts of "spiritual warfare" armies spawned in the Right's evangelical base will anticipate imposing the Puritan ethos of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ghost of Cotton Mather onto a multicultural and religiously diverse nation.

But with or without President Obama, with or without a Tea Party-GOP President and Congress next year, with or without a coup or Cotton Mather, the nation's creditors will be its controllers in the near-term, while the populace is distanced from that fact through distractions and political theatre.

Such an America, vacillating between moderate-right (Democrats) and far-right (Tea Party-GOP) ideology (sharing core hegemonic and imperial goals), with a citizenry bereft of understanding the root nature of their dilemma, with too many drugged into somnolence by media and the internet, others instigated by fear mongers and religious zealots, some just motivated by long-standing bigotry, anger, hatred and hostility, all becoming awash in unexpected but painful austerity cycles, most agreeing to be blindly led by either party into myopic political and social battles over self-interest; such a system enabling wealth concentration at the cost of economic decline and hardship for the many; such a system that will sacrifice tens of millions of lambs on the cross to save thirty pieces of silver ...

Such a system will not survive.

Such a system is doomed to self-inflicted self-destruction. There is found too few constructive or positive voices in American politics and society today; the vociferous voices of division, defiance, religious bigotry, nihilism and human destruction are blasted and headlined, while the voices of moderation and reason are stifled. Democracy, and its civilizing society, is being asphyxiated and deadened by its own hand. Can such a nation continue to claim it is superior to all others? Continue to claim that it is "the beacon of hope for the free world"?

Evident to a many Americans, their country is undergoing a break-down, a fall, a rapid decline, even a descent into an immoral morass with a potential for civil disintegration if not overt civil conflict.

It is a globe we occupy and nations are members of its international community possessing rich diversities. Finance, Business and Commerce have opened borders and markets that politicians wish remain closed to insure and perpetuate their own power and prestige. The nation-state framework has been yielding to globalism. Finance is international in scope and presents to other sectors reasons to embrace the international outlook. Quite the reverse outlook is now being propagated in the West in order to defend the old from the new: to defend the old Europe, defend the old Republic of the Founding Fathers, defend the old Fundamentalist religion, defend the old Gold standard, defend the old Cold War, defend the old monocultures, defend nationalistic ethnic purity, defend the old family structures, defend the old twin-garage American Dream, defend the old work ethic, defend the old Republican, defend the old Democrat, defend the old any thing and no thing...

Fear of change is self-defeating. Fear drives nationalism and fear drives religious sectarian intolerance. Yet a future world is moving toward us, not away from us no matter how vigorously we attempt to deny it or push it away.

Whether we resist it or accommodate to it, the future world WILL arrive. The upheavals of the present world are birth pangs into that next world, one which we ourselves have set in motion but are afraid to enter. We can minimize these pangs through foresight, reason and cooperation, or we can turn these pangs into agonies through violent social and national conflicts, or even world wars.

History, and its evolution, is not predetermined for us. History is the world we create for ourselves and is always fashioned by OUR choices. It is a collective decision to either tear asunder through violence and war, or to draw together in a mutually constructive unified globe. In the end, we and we alone are responsible for the world we create and our children inherit.

In the end, the future will arrive with or without us.

By Michael T Bucci

Michael T Bucci is a retired public relations executive from New Jersey presently residing in New England. His essays have appeared at The Market Oracle. He is the author of nine books on practical spirituality including White Book: Cerithous.

© 2011 Copyright Michael T Bucci - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

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