By employing it, St. Barry is endeavoring to persuade us, the proles, serfs, plebes and vassals at the bottom, to nobly endure the forthcoming pillaging of valuable, social capital resources which we OWN as paid-up strands of the social safety net, but which he is planning to reduce significantly so as to avoid having to discommode his wealthy benefactors in any significant way, and endanger his legacy as a conciliator (for such is undoubtedly his sole and only aim, now). So, he proclaims, we must ALL suffer to avoid plunging over the "fiscal cliff": higher taxes for the wealthy, reduced entitlements for the rest.
What the CorpoRat-SCUM "Press" is labeling The Grand Bargain is a bargain only if you think a three-dollar reduction in social spending in exchange for MAYBE one dollar of revenue "enhancement" is a a "Bargain." I, for one, don't!
Yet the prime cause for the proclaimed necessity of the "bargain," the dreaded, precipitous, "fiscal cliff," is a totally fictional precipice. Commentators from right, left, and center agree. It's a chimera. It was invented for the sole and only purpose of creating a "crisis"--really, a pseudo-crisis, if you will, in the meaning of social historian Dan Boorstin, 50 years ago; an event (a "crisis" fits the bill) which only exists to be reported on and commented about.
Fear provoked by the specter of the "fiscal cliff" creates the rhetorical screen behind the camouflage of which are introduced "solutions" which are not germane to the issues at hand, but which do advance and consolidate the power of the people in charge of the crises, while disempowering the "peoples'" institutions.
Said another way, the "Fiscal Cliff" is an archetype of those "shocks" about which Naomi Klein was so clairvoyant and descriptive, in her book, "The Shock Doctrine" a decade ago. Remember the Patriot Act?
Obviously, for the claim of shared sacrifice to be persuasive, a proportional share of the benefit now being repaid must somewhere have been realized by those being called upon to having to repay it. That hasn't been the case since Raygun's gunsels took over in the '80s and implemented the Powell memorandum's 1971 recommendations as the covert, but nonetheless official, domestic policy of the political/ruling class ever since. The falsity of the premise of some kind of 'parity' is exaggerated and amplified because the primary, unstated, and un-proven assumption of the rhetoric of shared sacrifice is so manifestly untrue. If the prosperity were equitably shared, then the shared repayment should be.
But it wasn't.
GOD KNOWS it wasn't. That's what the whole scandal of the "one-tenth-of-One-Percent" is all the fuck about. The average wealth of all less-than-rich USers has declined in the past five years, while that of the uber-dollar wealthy has metastacised like an aggressive melanoma.
O'Barry and his boys in DC--on all sides of the aisle--all fucking KNOW that.
They're just blowing smoke up our asses and covering for their real constituency, the bankstahs/Owners/Oners...And what they're all doing is just performing the National Debt Crisis Kabuki for ya. Give 'em a big hand...
(Graphic, above, came from the estimable "Naked Capital" blog, from a story they released about the same time as I posted this one. They are very good.)
No comments:
Post a Comment