After US sequester, Wall Street demands cuts in Medicare and Social Security

By Andre Damon, wsws.org

Needs repeating: Obama initiated the "sequester".

Needs repeating: Obama initiated the “sequester”.

Following last week’s imposition of $1.2 trillion in government spending cuts, which will slash social services for millions of people, Wall Street is demanding more cuts. Major credit rating agencies, which in 2011 downgraded the rating of the United States’ sovereign debt, say more spending cuts—particularly to “entitlements” like Medicare and Medicaid—are needed to keep the country’s debt rating from being cut further.

These demands come as congressional Democrats have dropped all pretenses to blocking the sequester cuts, while Republicans are drafting a bill that would sharply curtail the sequester’s impact on military spending in preparation for making the cuts to social services permanent.

David Riley, Fitch Rating’s global managing director for sovereign ratings, told CNBC Europe that the sequester cuts are “not the most ideal outcome,” stressing that he would have preferred to see more “long-term” cuts. Saying: “You’d rather have intelligent cuts and some revenue measures as well … but we don’t live in an ideal world, and it’s better to have some deficit reduction than none at all.”

Translated from the political doublespeak adopted by the Obama administration, by “intelligent cuts,” Riley means cutbacks to programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. This remark followed similar comments by Merrill Lynch executive Savita Subramanian, who told the New York Times over the weekend that “the market wants more austerity.”

With the passage of the sequester, the next major budgetary milestone is the upcoming March 27 deadline for Congress to approve government appropriations. If the Democrats and Republicans fail to vote on an appropriations bill before then, it would trigger a shutdown of the federal government.

In recent days both parties have made clear that they have no intention of turning the deadline into a political battle. The Democrats, in particular, have stressed that they do not intend to use the March 27 deadline to force the Republicans to overturn the social spending cuts imposed by the sequester. “Certainly we don’t want to have a shutdown of government,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Friday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed the Democrats’ sentiments that the funding authorization bill would pass without a hitch, saying Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program that “I believe we’re going to be able to work out passing the continuing resolution later in March on a bipartisan basis.”

House Republicans have proposed a bill to extend funding for the federal government through September 30, while eliminating much of the sequester’s impact on military spending. “The legislation will avoid a government shutdown on March 27th, prioritize [defense] and veterans programs, and allow the Pentagon some leeway to do its best with the funding it has,” said House Rules Committee Chairman Hal Rogers in a statement.

The bill gives the Defense Department the leeway to shift money between different accounts, significantly blunting the sequester’s impact. Washington newspaper The Hill noted that “In total, the bill includes $518 billion for defense, $2 billion more than President Obama requested this year but the same as in 2012.”

The bill likewise includes provisions for extra funding allocations for border security, as well as staffing provisions for the FBI and the federal prison system.

Democrats have voiced little opposition to this bill, which is set to be voted on by the House Thursday, and it is likely to clear the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Meanwhile, after spending much of the last week demagogically denouncing the sequester spending cuts, the White House has abruptly switched its public tone, seeking to move on to other issues in the general admission that the administration will do nothing to reverse the cuts.

“We are going to manage as best we can … but this is not the right way to go about deficit reduction,” Obama said in a cabinet meeting Monday, adding later that “Now, my agenda is obviously broader than the sequester.”

In an article titled “With sequester in swing, Obama switches his focus to other priorities,” The Hill quoted a senior White House official, saying, “Until they’re willing to compromise [on the sequester], there’s not much more we can do.”

The newspaper concluded that “President Obama will shift his focus to immigration, gun control, increasing the minimum wage and other second-term priorities now that the sequester cuts have begun.”

These developments underscore the fact that, from the beginning, the sequester cuts were a stage-managed affair, with Obama’s nominal opposition to the cuts being entirely for show. In fact, the White House was instrumental in orchestrating the sequester, and the cuts to discretionary spending it imposes are thoroughly in line with the Obama administration’s own proposals for spending cuts.

From the start, the cuts were intended to be made permanent, and to set a new baseline for the imposition of even further cutbacks to basic social programs.

With the sequester cuts in place, amid a crisis atmosphere whipped up by the threat of another debt downgrade by Wall Street, the crosshairs will now shift to “entitlement spending,” most notably Medicare and Social Security.



Remember: Sequestration was Obama’s Idea

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

BAR-sequester-satan_sandwich_chef_barack

President Obama is a full partner with the Republicans in the latest episode of the manufactured disaster saga: sequestration. “The idea was to make every popular constituency in the country scream – and accept the inevitability of massive entitlement cuts.” It’s a goal shared by corporatists in both parties.
“Disaster capitalism is manifesting itself as disaster governance.”

The Obama administration has been very skillful in framing itself as the good guy in the latest looming fiscal disaster, this time under the heading of “sequestration.” On Friday, across-the-board cuts of $85 billion are set to go into effect, wreaking havoc on most government operations. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and what’s left of welfare are not directly affected, but these so-called “entitlement” programs have, in fact, always been the primary targets of this cascade of manufactured crises. Disaster capitalism is manifesting itself as disaster governance, and President Obama is fully complicit in the corporate-imposed charade. Indeed, Obama is most culpable for infecting the nation with austerity fever.

It was Obama who swallowed whole the corporate argument, previously championed by Republicans, that the national debt was Crisis Number One and that entitlement programs were the root cause. From the moment in January of 2009 when Obama served notice that Social Security and all other entitlements would be put on the chopping block, he became the chief mover and shaker for so-called entitlement reform. He created the model for austerity, through his Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission. It was Simpson-Bowles that provided the basis for the massive cuts offered by President Obama in 2011. When the Republicans balked at even a modest tax increase for the rich, it was the White House National Economic Council Director, the corporate deal-maker Gene Sperling, who came up with the sequestration scheme, which was timed to explode right after the 2012 elections. The idea was to make every popular constituency in the country scream – and accept the inevitability of massive entitlement cuts.

“The Republicans are his partners, not his opponents.”

Let me repeat: Sequestration was Obama’s idea. So-called entitlement reform is Obama doctrine. Austerity was embedded in the Democratic Party’s agenda under President Obama. More than any other individual, it was Barack Obama who engineered the current disaster scenario. These waves of austerity crises were not inevitable, but they are the inevitable result of President Obama’s calculated statements and actions since Election Day 2008. The Republicans are his partners, not his opponents. The closest thing he has to an opposition – at least on paper – is the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose two co-chairs introduced a bill that would turn the austerity juggernaut on its head. It’s called the Balancing Act of 2013, and would replace all of the sequestration cuts with new revenues, and then add a $276 billion stimulus to the economy. Needless to say, the progressive bill will get nowhere, not just because of Republican opposition, but because the top Democrat, Barack Obama, wants to go down in history as the smart austerity president. Just as he said he wasn’t opposed to wars, but only to dumb wars – which is why he has built tens of thousands of the smartest drones and smartest bombs ever devised by man. He’s outsmarting what passes for a Left in the United States at every turn. They cheer him as he effectively consummates his grand bargain with the GOP, in a cacophony of manufactured crises, exhausting what little opposition remains.

That’s why we at BAR call him the more effective evil.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.



Farewell Jesse Jr., We Hardly Knew Ye: A Lesson on the Limits of our Black Political Class

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon

juniorJackson

 

With longtime Jackson strategist Frank Watkins, Junior co-authored a valuable and insightful book, Toward a More Perfect Union, in which he proposed constitutional amendments for the rights to vote, to a decent job at a living wage, a clean environment, and more. The other two books which he co-authored with his father were forgettable at best.

If Junior had shown imaginative leadership in Congress, he might have been mayor of Chicago by now. But imagination and leadership seem to have eluded the young prince. Junior mostly kept his head down in Congress, voted with the crowd on Iraq and other mattters, and by 2003 he was shilling for a south side casino and a new airport in his district supposedly as “job creation” measures.

in the Democratic half of which our black political class have made their careers.

 LeAlan Jones has apparently survived a challenge to his status on the ballot as a Green Party candidate. www.blackagendareport.com.

contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.



Bob Woodward embodies US political culture in a single outburst

  • By 
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 February 2013

    Bob Woodward: Mythologized for a breakthrough piece of investigative journalism about a crime that in reality pales by comparison to the real crimes committed by both parties.

    Bob Woodward: Mythologized for a breakthrough piece of investigative journalism about a crime that in reality pales by comparison to the real crimes committed by both parties on just about any day.—Eds

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward Photograph: Brad Barket/AFP

Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced that it would deploy “only” one aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, rather than the customary two. This move, said the Pentagon, was in preparation for the so-called “sequestration”, scheduled to take effect this week, that mandates spending cuts for all agencies, including the Pentagon. This aircraft carrier announcement was all part of the White House’s campaign to scare the public into believing that sequestration, which Democrats blame on Republicans, will result in serious harm to national security. Shortly before this cut was announced, then-defense Secretary Leon Panetta said:

“With another trigger for sequestration approaching on March 1st, the Department of Defense is facing the most serious readiness crisis in over a decade . . . . Make no mistake, if these cuts happen there will be a serious disruption in defense programs and a sharp decline in military readiness.”

That the Obama administration might actually honor the budget cuts mandated by a law enacted by Congress and signed by Obama infuriates Bob Woodward, Washington’s most celebrated journalist. He appeared this week on the “Morning Joe” program to excoriate Obama for withholding a second aircraft carrier in the Gulf, saying:

“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’ Or George W Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need’ or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ as he did when Clinton was president, because of some budget document.

“Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country. That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.”

As Brian Beutler points out: “the obscure type of budget document Woodward’s referring to is called a duly enacted law — passed by Congress, signed by the President — and the only ways around it are for Congress to change it. . . . or for Obama to break it.” But that’s exactly what Woodward is demanding: that Obama trumpet his status as Commander-in-Chief in order to simply ignore – i.e. break – the law, just like those wonderful men before him would have done. Woodward derides the law as some petty, trivial annoyance (“this piece of paper”) and thus mocks Obama’s weakness for the crime of suggesting that the law is something he actually has to obey.

How ironic that this comes from the reporter endlessly heralded for having brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency on the ground that Nixon believed himself above the law. Nixon’s hallmark proclamation – “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal” – is also apparently Bob Woodward’s.

All of this, of course, is pure pretense. Is it even remotely plausible that Obama is refraining from engaging in military action he believes is necessary out of some sort of quaint deference to the law? Please. This is a president who continued to wage war, in Libya, not merely without Congressional authorization, but even after Congress expressly voted against its authorization. This is a president who has repeatedly argued that he has the right to kill anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, not only due to Congressional authorization but also his own Commander-in-Chief powers. If Obama really wanted to deploy that second aircraft carrier, he would do so, knowing that journalists like Bob Woodward and members of both parties would cheer him. This is just a flamboyant political stunt designed to dramatize how those Big, Bad Republicans are leaving us all exposed and vulnerable with sequestration cuts.

But whatever Obama’s motives might be, the fact is that what we call “law” really does require some cuts in military spending. To refuse to do so would be to assert powers not even most monarchs have: to break the law at will. Woodward is right about one point: not only would prior presidents have been willing to do this, this is exactly what they did. Indeed, George Bush’s entire presidency was explicitly predicated on the theory that the president has the power to break the law at will whenever he deems that doing so promotes national security. That America’s most celebrated journalist not only supports this, but demands that all presidents follow this model of lawlessness, is telling indeed.

Equally telling is the radical militarism implicit in Woodward’s outburst. Contrary to the fear-mongering from the government and its media, the military cuts compelled by sequestration are extremely modest (as opposed to domestic spending cuts, which will actually produce genuine pain for many people). As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein documented: “even if we implement every single cut in the sequester, the fall in spending would be less than the military experienced after Korea, Vietnam, or the Cold War.” Given the massive explosion of military spending in the name of the War on Terror over the last decade (which Klein notes was “larger than the rise during Vietnam and during the Cold War”), the sequestration-mandated cuts would be but a very small step in returning to a sane level of military spending.

Then there’s the hysteria Woodward spreads about how we’ll all somehow be endangered if the US has only one rather than two aircraft carriers stalking Iran in the Gulf. What possible harm could come from that? None. This is all grounded in cartoon narrative that Iran is this frightening hegemon threatening the US at all times, and must be contained with massive assertions of military might. The reality, of course, is that even with these sequestration cuts, the US military budget is so much larger than Iran’s that they are not in the same universe. That would be true if we had multiple sequestrations. The very idea that two aircraft carriers are needed at all in the Gulf, let alone necessary to Keep America Safe, is just laughable.

Yet here is Bob Woodward, with one rant, expressing the core values of America’s media class. The president is not constrained by law (contemptuously referred to as “this piece of paper”). He not only has the right but the duty to do anything – even if the law prohibits it – to project military force whenever he wants (even though the Constitution mandates as his prime duty not to Keep Us Safe but rather that he “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed” and thus must swear as his oath “to the best of [his] ability [to] preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”). The US must act as empire, dominating the world with superior military force if it wants to stay safe. Any reduction in military spending and deployment will endanger us all.

It’s to be expected that these authoritarian and militaristic values shape political leaders and their followers. That these values also shape the “watchdog” media class, as embodied by one of their “legends”, explains much about US political culture generally.

Bob Woodward fulfills an important function. Just as Tim Russert was long held up as the scary bulldog questioner who proved the existence of an adversarial TV press while the reality was that, as Harper’s Lewis Lapham famously put it, he maintained “the on-air persona of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter”, the decades-old Woodward lore plays a critical role in maintaining the fiction of a watchdog press corps even though he is one of the most faithful servants of the war machine and the national security and surveillance states. Every once and awhile, the mask falls, and it’s a good thing when it does.

Glenn Greenwald needs no introduction. 



Democracy Canadian-style Part II: At home

Special—”French Canadians are generally pre-French-revolution immigrant stock. Similarly Anglo-Canadians were against the American revolution (a merchants’ revolt against the crown). The downside of this is Canada’s enduring colonial mentality, and the constant reassertion of conservative elites (Confederation, Borden, Mulroney, Harper) and kowtowing to the Britain/ US imperial center…”
Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг إيريك ولبر    Wednesday, 27 February 2013 16:51 PDF Print E-mail
Saul argues that Canada was ‘founded’ as a modern nation not in 1867 but in 1701 with the Great Peace of Montreal between New France and 40 First Nations of North America. This treaty, achieved through negotiations according to Native American diplomatic custom, was meant to end ethnic conflicts. From then on, negotiation would trump direct conflict and the French would agree to act as arbiters during conflicts between signatory tribes. The paradigm is a confederation of tribes, consensus, the Aboriginal circle, “eating from a common bowl”. The treaty is still valid and recognized as such by the Native American tribes involved. French Canadians are generally pre-French-revolution immigrant stock. Similarly Anglo-Canadians were against the American revolution (a merchants’ revolt against the crown). The downside of this is Canada’s enduring colonial mentality, and the constant reassertion of conservative elites (Confederation, Borden, Mulroney, Harper) and kowtowing to the Britain/ US imperial center. (Diefenbaker was the one exception, defying US empire over stationing nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, and he was shafted by US do-gooder JFK and our own do-good Nobel Peacenik Lester Pearson.) 

Sadly, this contradiction in Canada’s conservative colonial heritage has meant that the thread of continuity from the days when natives counted (it was their land which the whites wanted to expropriate, albeit peacefully) has now officially snapped, as Bill C-45, and the political and media campaign against the native resistance shows. 

Natives face not only official pressure to give up their rights, but they face abuse, even by those who are supposed to protect them. The residential education programs, intended to forcibly assimilate native children by wiping out their languages and traditions and replacing them with modern (or rather ‘postmodern’) education, was exposed in recent years, even eliciting an official apology from Prime Minister Harper himself. Most recently Canada’s national police force stands accused of sexually abusing aboriginal women and girls in British Columbia, Human Rights Watch has revealed. 

The Idle No More protest movement, spearheaded by native activists, and joined by other Canadians who are opposed to the Conservatives’ agenda, is making alliances with similar groups in the US who are opposed to the neoliberal agenda. At the “Forward on Climate” march in February in Washington DC, Chief Jacqueline Thomas of the Saikuz First Nation warned that the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline will not only threaten indigenous communities living in its path, but the myriad of ecosystems that it will invade (the equivalent of the empire’s military invasions around the world). “When we take care of the land, the land [takes] care of us,” she pleaded.

Canadian pitbull

Harper is counting on Canada’s past do-good reputation to see it through in its new, hardnosed role as imperial pitbull. “Canada remains in a very special place in the world. We are the one major developed country that no one thinks has any responsibility for the [financial] crisis. We’re the one country in the room everybody would like to be,” he boasted at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009. The other G20 nations “would like to be an advanced developed economy with all the benefits that conveys to its citizens and at the same time not have been the source, or have any of the domestic problems, that created this crisis. We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them.”

Harper should read a less tendentious history book. Canada is the colonial success story par excellence, and continues to be. In most colonies (for example, India), a small number of Europeans ruled over much larger Indigenous populations. In order to make profits from a colony, Europeans needed the labor of the people they had conquered to amass profit.

Colonialism in Canada was different. Here it took the form of settler colonialism (other states with this type of colonialism include the USA, Australia and Israel). “Settler colonialism took place where European settlers settled permanently on Indigenous lands, aggressively seized those lands from Indigenous peoples and eventually greatly outnumbered Indigenous populations,” writes analyst David Camfield. It destroyed the organic cultures that grew out of relationships with those lands, and, ultimately, eliminating those Indigenous societies.

What’s left of the natives, with their very different way of life, ended up tangled up in the legal system, desperately them trying to keep their original treaties alive, though these treaties, with their many vague loop-holes, have in any case proved threadbare over time. And watch out for retribution. Native spokesperson Cindy Blackstock, who has spent more than five years trying to hold Ottawa accountable for a funding gap on the welfare of aboriginal children on reserves, found herself hounded by government surveillance intended to discredit her, as recently confirmed by a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal statement.

Similarly, (white) Canadians who run afoul of the neocolonial role Canada plays abroad have been burned. Gary Peters, an Australian national based in Canada, was found complicit in “crimes against humanity”, and Cyndy Vanier — of involvement in organized crime and falsification of documents, for helping deposed Libyan president Gaddafi’s son, Saadi Gaddafi, flee Libya in 2011.

Canada has graduated as the consummate colonial success story, and has now moved smoothly into its postmodern role as ‘supporter of human rights’ — not by promoting disinterested NGOs and providing lots of funding, but via invasion, exploitation and/or subterfuge at home and abroad. This should come as no surprise, where the indicator for success in economics and politics is not fairness and consensus, but profit and engineered majority-rule. 

Canada’s own democratic traditions have been trampled time and again by Harper, who prorogued Parliament twice, becoming the first prime minister ever to be found guilty of contempt of parliament, and flagrantly ignores freedom of speech by muzzling senior bureaucrats, withholding and altering documents, and launching personal attacks on whistleblowers. There is an ongoing investigation into voting fraud perpetrated by the Conservatives in the last election.

That this reality continues to be touted as Canada’s success story is a sorry commentary on our postmodern reality, where truth is in the eyes of the beholder, and public opinion is in any case shaped by ‘them that controls the words’.

This is the continuation of Democracy Canadian-style Part I: Abroad