[Peace-discuss] Only the rich are entitled in Obama's America

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Calling Monica Lewinsky! Your country needs you!
	Alexander Cockburn: The Monica scandal stopped Bill
	screwing with Social Security. What can stop Obama?

The American political system is nicely balanced so that certain foul deeds - 
like throwing poor women off the welfare rolls, or cutting old people's pensions 
– are handed off to Democrats who put on a better act, tears streaming down 
their faces as they protest that they must kill in order to be kind.

So when, in January 2009, Obama gave an interview to the Washington Post shortly 
before he took over the White House, saying that it was high time to take an 
unsparing look at "entitlements", the warning shot rang clear loud. Once again, 
a Democratic president was signaling an intent to sell his most loyal supporters 
– working people of modest means – down the river, to hack away at basic social 
protections like Social Security and Medicare.

But in those opening months of 2009 general economic meltdown required rescue of 
the bankers, passage of the stimulus bill and other urgent matters. Now, amid 
specious talk of a recovery, we're back to deficit bashing and the wolves are 
circling the campfire where the seniors are warming their hands.

The sensible way to deal with the hefty budget deficit would be to socialise the 
banks, and put their vast pools of capital – underwritten by the US government – 
to productive use instead of hacking chunks of flesh out of the Greek and 
Portuguese economies. This is anathema to Obama and the bankers at his elbow, 
and so the air is now thick with sermons about the need for all Americans to 
heed the plight of generations as yet unborn and help pay off the deficit.

It's unclear why lower pensions and even worse health care for the children of 
baby boomers will help anyone, born or unborn, but responsibility to Our 
Nation's Future is a big preoccupation of a right-wing New York Times columnist, 
David Brooks, invited more than once to the White House for tete a tetes with 
the President.

The so-called "crisis" in Social Security is rhetorical fakery. There's no 
structural problem with a system set up in the 1930s as a centerpiece of the New 
Deal, but "reform" of entitlements is a core axiom of neo-liberalism, urged on 
Clinton and now Obama by Wall Street's men, like Larry Summers. Wall Street 
wants to get its mitts on retirement funds as an investment pool, to drain to 
its advantage. More generally, any public "entitlement" to enjoy a life free 
from the threat of immediate starvation and debilitating disease offends the 
bankers' sense of moral propriety...

...it's fair to say that Social Security was saved [in the Clinton 
administration] by the flirtatious smile cast by the zaftig Monica, then a White 
House intern, at her Commander in Chief. An enlarged plaster cast of her 
subsequent intimate osculations in the Oval Office should adorn the Social 
Security Administration's HQ in Woodlawn, just west of Baltimore, Maryland...

What does [President Obama] really think about cutting the social safety net? To 
ask which is the "real" Obama is to drift towards the illusion of thinking there 
is one – as opposed to an infinitely mutable organism, endlessly adapting to 
political circumstance, with an eye eternally cocked to the main chance. 
Nonetheless, everything Obama has done so far suggests that by philosophical 
disposition and political instinct he's a neo-liberal eager to please the elites 
and can thus be counted on, when the chips are down, to do the wrong thing...

Entire article at
<http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/59872,news-comment,news-politics,
alexander-cockburn-calling-monica-lewinsky-your-country-needs-you>

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