Amazing that we can see repeated so often “the findings of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” “the commission’s recommendations” and similar variations.
That’s the Simpson-Bowles commission of course — the one that failed to actually issue any consensus recommendation…

Posted by: Mang | Aug 1 2011 11:17 utc | 3

Remy: Raise The Debt Ceiling Rap

We may not be able to address our current debt ceiling woes, but we can at least put them to a good beat.

I liked this comment, “Last time I checked, both parties are fucking the country.”

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 1 2011 13:55 utc | 5

You are right but though the crisis was as phoney as the proverbial three dollar bill, the reality was that the decision to transfer a massive amount of wealth from poor to rich-taxpayers and service consumers to capitalist coupon clippers- meant that something had to be done.
There either has to be a redistribution of wealth or the bill, for covering the bets of all the losers in 2008, has to be paid.
And it is being paid by the weakest party: 95% of the population, strong in numbers but devoid of ideas and shattered into a thousand shards of mutual jealousy, race hatred, religious bigotry and the cowardice of the petit bourgeois who has thrown in his lot with his enemies.
There has never been a silence like this one: an absolute absence of resistance as jobs are trucked off to Asia and homes repossessed and left to crumble back into the ground (because there is no market for them).
The problem is perfectly exemplified by the man most responsible, the President and the titular head of US Liberalism. A liberalism which was shaped in the Cold War, which it manufactured in large part to out manouevre the isolationist right- there is nothing new about triangulation.
Sinclair Lewis said that if fascism comes to America it will be wearing a cross. He might have added, preaching zionism and brown skinned too. After all fascism is what capitalists resort to when they get angry and throw off the mask, when the only way left to impose their way is brute force, when liberalism has run out of ideas and the choice is between saving the starving and hopeless, on one hand, and emptying the poor box in the church for another weekend of roulette.
They just emptied the Poor Box and they are about to lose it all on the next spin of the wheel. That will make them angry and they are running out of enemies that can’t fight back so the working class is next in line.

Posted by: bevin | Aug 1 2011 14:15 utc | 7

Tweets from Eric Boehlert of Media Matters:

“Imagine if POTUS tonight tried to sell deal as way to defeat GOP in 2012; Cantor’s already rallying troops w/ explicit get-Obama ref’s”

“GOP knew it could take econ to the brink because the press would never (never!) call out their radical ways”

Posted by: Watson | Aug 1 2011 14:36 utc | 9

@Eureka Spring – all valid question.
The idea Yves puts out with this is that EW should run in the primary against Obama if only to move the overtone window back further to the left.
As long as no one is running that expresses a even mildly leftist view the overtone window, what’s bubbling in the media and “correct”, will only further move to the right.
I believe that is a valid strategy.
—
U.S. Manufacturing Index Falls to Two-Year Low

The Institute for Supply Management’s factory index fell to 50.9 last month from 55.3 in June, the Tempe, Arizona-based group said today. Economists projected the index would drop to 54.5, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey. Figures greater than 50 signal expansion.

Posted by: b | Aug 1 2011 15:17 utc | 11

Also, I have no idea how Warren would govern, and there’s little to help us with that.
I’m leery of newbies with no track record…. No matter how good they are in one area, and she is stellar in working for fairness for the general consumer.

Posted by: jawbone | Aug 1 2011 15:28 utc | 13

Colm @ 4 — There were economists here in the US pointing out that the austerity measures being implemented in Europe would lead to exactly what has happened there.
It’s kind of elementary: When businesses who make money by selling goods or services have no buyers of their goods and services they seldom add new employees. Starting with a recession verging on depression, as is the case here in the US, where there is limited demand due to people not having jobs, more people not having jobs will lead to more not having jobs and then more, etc. A vicious spiral downward.
These same economists have been pointing out for years now to Obama that, given the type of downturn the banksters put us into, without true stimulus there will not be job growth. Krugman mentioned recently that Obama did not want to hear about that. Period.
We will be joining Greece, Spain, Ireland, Great Britain in the dumps of low job growth, only we here have limited social safety nets available to us. Among other things, some people without health insurance will definitely die because they cannot afford health care. It’s already happened in states with steep cuts to Medicaid. It’s a predictable outcome of Obama’s policies (which are the ConservaDems and Republicans’ policies as well).

Posted by: jawbone | Aug 1 2011 16:05 utc | 15

@ Jawbone
Indeed there were many warnings. To think alot of people thought Obama would be the next FDR when he was elected in 08. Now he has shown that he is not only No FDR but his policies are not even on the left of the political spectrum. Hell even David Cameron implemented spending cuts and tax increases as part of austerity and he is center right.
Of course Obama shouldn’t get all the blame for this mess. The tea party faction did push him. His economic team is all Wall St interests (which maybe Obama can be blamed for since he picked them). But Obama has clearly shown that he is no fighter like FDR and that he is a man who has no principle that he is not willing to negotiate away (I think that is the shown in his foreign policy as well)
Whether it is on Social Security cuts, health care reform, Israel, pulling troops out of the Middle East. Obama has a pattern now of making decent statements at the beginning before negotiating it all away, until it is nothing but the status quo.

Posted by: Colm O’ Toole | Aug 1 2011 17:38 utc | 17

Unbelievable numbers of informed Democrats still plan to vote for Obama in 2012. Rationale? Lesser of two evils, of course (what BS!)
I’m planning to counter their argument with the following: If you think Obama was bad in his first term, just wait until the second term. If Clinton’s presidency was any indication, his first term was mixed while his second was dreadful–repeal of Glass-Stegall, China PNTR, with the final “gift” being Commodities Futures Trading Act, which enabled secret oil speculation, including Enron. So now you have Obama, who gave us NOTHING to vote for in his first term (oh yeah, mandating unaffordable health insurance. That’s a real positive!)
So just wait until you see the turds he lays on the American people in his second term. He there to do want the Republicans can’t get away with. Still think he’s the LESSER of two evils? They might even make W blush…

Posted by: JohnH | Aug 1 2011 22:59 utc | 19

There is such a brutal disconnect now between the smooth Obama rhetoric and the Obama government. And our country lies prostrate under austerity, a condition brought about by a thoroughly polluted, venal government.
Wall Street has what it wants. Obama has broken with the Franklin Roosevelt legacy; he is the first Democratic president to offer up the sacrifice, a chipping away at Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The country’s owners are smiling now, as its lackeys in Congress cobble together a consolidated committee, composed of 6 Republicans and 6 Democrats drawn from the House, with a matching set from the Senate, to be a kind of political ramrod that will authorize draconian budget cuts, one way or another. The rigged process of this dwarf committee representing Senate and House, will present Congress with decisions which cannot be debated or amended in the normal way before becoming law. The process put in place by the so-called “Super Committee” also contains a novelty called “triggers”. These essentially are penalties, the sacrifice of certain budget items, which hold a sword over the special interests of each party; theoretically these would be armaments or defense funds for the Republicans, and social programs dear to the Democrats.
If the republicans and democrats don’t ultimately agree or can’t agree on the size of the austerity package; then a pre-configured set of even more severe cuts that harshly impact the respective parties (including, of course, the people) will go into effect. These dreaded “triggers” are supposed to be awful enough in the eyes of both parties to enforce compromise.
Obama’s political betrayal of those who elected him is, of course, a sore point; and the Democratic side faces nothing less than moral bankruptcy and capitulation if it does not raise a challenger to the president in the primaries. Of this recent sordid compromise, one congressman spoke for all Americans who refuse to capitulate.
Arizona’s Raul Grajalva said:
“This deal trades peoples’ livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it”.

Posted by: Copeland | Aug 2 2011 1:13 utc | 21

@ben
what do you mean by “fourth estate”? the media? the working class? (I looked it up on Wikipedia, it’s ambiguous)
I think the alliance between Corporations, State, Finance and Military (a ruthless, parasitical alliance at the constant search of “opportunities” for big/huge profits, that is, loot) could be a good definition of Capitalism
and yes, I also think the Us exported not a “model” but power relations between the rich and working class (and the ideology and the rhetorics that justify such paradigm) – the “global plantation” you often cite
at the base, the problem is that Us politics has become an auction where congress and the presidency goes to the highest bidder; this conditions the political landscape in Europe, which, for historical reasons, is understandably reluctant to “abandon” Us primacy; and so the global plutocracy won

Posted by: claudio | Aug 2 2011 7:01 utc | 23

claudio @ 23 — The Fourth Estate in US usage is almost always considered to be the media, but was orignally newspapers. Their reporting, supposedly, would help people understand what their government was doing, what politicians were about, etc. The Fourth Estate was supposed to keep the politicians honest.
Today? Not so much, as the Fourth Estate has become in many ways an arm of the Moneied Powers That Be, usually, but not in every instance, supporting Republicans and their policies. Most outlets are owned by those who support the extremely business friendly plolicies, and also own many of those businesses. The Dems, it seems, to get in on the big money from the Monied Powers That Be, are more and more espousing the same policies as the Repubs. The parties are two sides of the same coin.
The Dems tend to use the liberals still in elected office as beards for their corporate friendly policies. As in Obama gets “forced” to do the Corporatist things he does.
Yesterday,

Posted by: jawbone | Aug 2 2011 13:39 utc | 25

Jawbone@25-
The ‘Forth Estate’ is an illusion and always has been. Big business has always owned the press in America, since the earliest days of the nation. The difference is, that for many years, those owners were a politically fractured lot and many things crept into the mainstream press because of this. Now, thanks to deregulation, the news business is like any other corporate whore and does the bidding of just a few wealthy, politically connected owners who own about everything, and this makes their work easier.
America, and it’s freedoms, are just fantasies that have never, ever, ever, been truly realized by the population as a whole. Segments of the population have enjoyed bits and pieces of it for many years (white dudes), in many places, but those days are past. We’re back to the founding days of our fine country when the slave revolts were uprising that included as many poor whites as it did blacks because both were treated about the same (late 1600’s, 1700’s) and that’s where we are now. The rich have their concubines amongst the poor who will willingly sell out their neighbors for 40 acres and a mule, or less. Doesn’t take much to impress the typical Joe Sixpack these days, 9/11 showed them (the corporate whoremongers) that.
There was a time people could trust in themselves to make choices, but not anymore. So instead, the talking heads tell people what to think and the people willingly eat it up. It was on the television so it must be true, right?
I’m beginning to mumble, and that’s hard to do while typing… time to sign-off and let you smarter, less mumbly types, type 😉
Peace

Posted by: DaveS | Aug 2 2011 13:59 utc | 27

DaveS @ 27– The people here in the US are badly served by the press, the Mainstream Corporate Media (MCM), but I have been stunned at times at just how much people “get” about how we’re governed.
But, still, it’s hard to break through the wall on what is considered news here. Amazingly, stories about how other nations have handled and been affected by austerity programs are now breaking out in the MCM, right after or just before the stupid bill is passed or well on its way to passage.
It’s almost as if there is…complicity…between the MCM and the Monied Powers That Be….

Posted by: jawbone | Aug 2 2011 16:48 utc | 29

Claudio — I did not know that, and find it fascinating. Now I want to learn more about that. But, rain is coming, and I must do yard things before it arrives! And, today is not hot, hot, hot or very humid. Gorgeous, as of now. And the summer insects are filling the yard with sound.

Posted by: jawbone | Aug 3 2011 13:10 utc | 31