Cassi Creek:
The clock is rapidly running out on the time left for Washington to resolve the impending debt ceiling crisis.
Yesterday’s efforts ended with President Obama walking out of the meeting after being repeatedly attacked and harassed by Rep. Eric Canton. Cantor has become increasingly power hungry and has grabbed a front row position in the teavangelist/GOP “no taxes” parade.
At the core of this problem is the GOP/teavangelist war on government. Harold Meyerson defines the problem in his WAPO column
Debt talks reveal the Republicans’ apocalyptic war on government
“For one thing, federal tax revenue as a percentage of the gross domestic product is at its lowest level since 1950. The correlation between low federal taxes and job creation looks more inverse than direct. The economy generated far more net new jobs during the ’90s (approximately 22 million during Clinton’s presidency alone), before the Bush tax cuts, than it has since(approximately zero). Yet in opposing any tax increases on the rich as part of a debt-reduction deal, House Speaker John Boehner vowed Monday that “the House cannot pass a bill that raises taxes on job creators.”
“Job creators? What job creators? Over the past two months, according to employment statistics, we seem to have completely run out of job creators, though American multinational corporations are having no trouble creating jobs in the cheap-labor nations of Asia. Small businesses, however, cannot expand until American consumers start buying more, and American consumers can’t start buying more until they work their way out of the debt they incurred during the recent decades of pervasive income stagnation.
“The Republicans, that is, have embraced market libertarianism at the very moment that America’s market capitalism is functioning worse than at any time since the Great Depression. Their timing is so perverse that we have to seek explanations for their radicalism that go beyond those of economic philosophy.
Republicans, to be sure, have long waged a war on government, but only now has it become an apocalyptic and total war. At its root, I suspect, is the fear and loathing that rank-and-file right-wingers feel toward what their government, and their nation, is inexorably becoming: multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities. That America is also downwardly mobile is a challenge for us all, but for the right, the anxiety our economy understandably evokes is augmented by the politics of racial resentment and the fury that the country is no longer only theirs. That’s not a country whose government they want to pay for — and if the apocalypse befalls us, they seem to have concluded, so much the better….”
Elsewhere in the mob, Michelle Bachman has decided to divorce herself even more from economic reality, going so far as to hope for economic default.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michele-bachmanns-defaulty-logic/2011/07/13/gIQAKtxADI_story.html
Michele Bachmann’s defaulty logic
By Dana Milbank,
“When Michele Bachmann was asked during a television interview last week whether she thought higher unemployment would increase her chances of winning the presidency, she gave an unexpectedly candid reply: “I hope so.”
“Now she’s putting that theory to the test. On Wednesday, she argued that failure to raise the debt limit — a prospect that even Republican congressional leaders say could lead to economic catastrophe — might not be such a bad thing.
“This is a misnomer that I believe that the president and the Treasury secretary have been trying to pass off on the American people, and it’s this: that if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion, that somehow the United States will go into default and we will lose the full faith and credit of the United States. That is simply not true.”
“To prove it, she and two Republican House colleagues — Steve King (Iowa) and Louie Gohmert (Tex.) — announced legislation that would require the federal government, in a debt-ceiling crisis, to prioritize payments to the troops and to U.S. creditors.
“With Bachmann sharing the stage, King explained that the government could pay creditors and the military and fund Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid without increasing the debt limit. “My response would echo that,” Bachmann added.
“Of course, this list omitted items such as veterans’ benefits, unemployment insurance, homeland and border security, the FBI, federal prisons, and air traffic control.
“No biggie, said King. He offered that he has heard no convincing argument that refusing to increase the debt ceiling would lead to financial ruin. “The answer I get back after I press that is no one knows,” he said, “and no one has the nerve to find out, because we’ll do anything to avoid such a scenario.”
“Until now, that is. The Bachmann-King-Gohmert plan, similar to those floated by other conservatives, is the economic equivalent of the old Cold War strategy in the event of a nuclear attack: If we just duck and cover, maybe it won’t be so bad…”
“As for Cantor, he has mastered the art of being a schmuck in his political job.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eric-cantors-slick-upper-lip/2011/07/12/gIQAYqURBI_story.html
Eric Cantor’s slick upper lip
By Dana Milbank,
“Eric Cantor has perfected the strategic sneer. (Or is that Eric Cartman?)
It comes, frequently, when he answers a reporter’s question about something President Obama has said: The House majority leader’s lip curls up on the left side and a look of disgust washes over his face. This week, he has been coupling the sneer with lines such as:
““How in the world can you even accept that notion?”
“And, “That is laughable on its face.”
“.” Asked about Obama’s belief that people like him should pay more in taxes, Cantor retorts: “You know what? He can write a check any time he wants.”
“He draws out the vowels in a style that is part southern, part smarty-pants. Had young Cantor spoken like this at his prep school in Richmond, the bigger boys may well have wiped that sneer off his face. Yet even then, Cantor was accustomed to having things his way. According to Cantor’s hometown Richmond Times-Dispatch, the quotation he chose to accompany his yearbook photo was “I want what I want when I want it.”
“What Cantor wants now is power — and he is prepared to risk the full faith and credit of the United States to get it. In a primacy struggle with House Speaker John Boehner, he has done a deft job of aligning himself with Tea Party House members in opposition to any meaningful deal to resolve the debt. If the U.S. government defaults, it will have much to do with Cantor.
“He pulled out of debt-limit talks with Vice President Biden. He shot down the outline of a compromise that Boehner attempted to negotiate. Now Cantor has essentially taken over talks with the White House, and he has tamped down any hint of conciliation.
“On Monday, Boehner hinted that he could accept a tax-reform deal that brought “additional revenues to the federal government” — and his spokesman confirmed that the proposal would be “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office as increasing tax revenue. But Cantor was having none of it: “We are not raising taxes, so it has to be net revenue neutral.”
“Cantor’s aides say he is merely reflecting his caucus. But Cantor, a veteran of a decade in the Capitol, surely knows that he is jettisoning the last chance in the next couple of years to make a serious dent in the national debt. The White House has so far offered up a tantalizing array of concessions — $4 trillion in budget cuts and overhauls of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – but Cantor has yet to offer anything but sneers.
Cassi Creek:
I knew boys like Cantor when I was in high school. They were outside the social elite, 2nd tier by virtue of the social order that existed in the time and place he grew up. Even at a pricey prep school, he must have been disliked by his fellow students. His up-bringing, scion of a real-estate broker with a nearly guaranteed lock on a huge share of the market, has led him to believe that he deserves power and fortune. His position as the only Jewish GOP Congressman singles him out as a target for many lobbyists with large purses.
Rep. Cantor seems to have adopted the practice of serving as the token hit man for his GOP partners in contempt. He seems only too willing to treat Obama as his own forebears must have been treated by the good ol’ WASPs of the old South only a generation earlier. As a Jew, he should know better than to trust the teavanagelists who currently use him as a designated hitter to weaken charges of anti-Semitism and racism directed toward them.
Obama apparently grew tired of being attacked and blocked at every turn because he is the first black President of America. He told Cantor that no other POTUS had been treated so poorly by the opposition. He’s right. He shouldn’t have to put up with open taunts and an opposing party that is willing to destroy the economy to defeat his bid for re-election.
Cantor must have pushed one button too many yesterday. Rather than leaving the meeting, Obama must wish he could have put Cantor in the corner or shut him into a locker in order to let the people who still retain contact with reality continue to try to solve a dangerously accelerating economic crisis. If I had been sitting in Obama’s seat yesterday, little Eric Cartman, err… Cantor; would still be standing in his locker crying to be let out.
Here’s something you should know, Eric. The teavanagelists will never accept you as their leader. You will always remain outside the Pale. Your willingness to do their wet work for them will someday make you as much of a target for termination as Obama is today. Put that on your Cheezy Poofs!
No comments:
Post a Comment