What more could the Tea Party possibly want?

[girl gone mad]

From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EconomicPerspectivesFromKansasCity/~3/8yL0ixJYuwg/barack-obama-nations-first-tea-party.html">Marshall Auerback:

For all its talk of the importance of averting a debt default, Barack Obama.is increasingly signaling that major deficit reduction has become more than just a bargaining chip to bring Republicans aboard a debt deal. He actually believes that cutting entitlements and reducing the deficit are laudable goals, which would mark “transformational” moments in his President. Let’s face it: the man is not a progressive in any sense of the word; he’s a Tea Party President through and through.

(snip)

This President.. has apparently fallen in love with the idea of being the biggest deficit hawk in Washington, DC. In fact, last Sunday, the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, said on “This Week” on ABC that Mr. Obama would continue to push for a major deal to reduce the deficit. “Everyone agrees that a number around $4 trillion is the number that will make a serious dent in our deficit,” Mr. Daley said. “He didn’t come to this town to do little things. He came to do big things.”

“Big things” – like destroying the New Deal and what’s left of The Great Society. Who knew this is what Obama meant when he said he wanted to be a “transformational President” like Ronald Reagan? He actually believes this poisonous nonsense about the US on the verge of becoming “the next Greece”. He fails to understand that if private spending is lagging then public spending has to fill the gap. Otherwise output and employment growth will be sluggish if not negative. To cut into the huge pool of unemployed and underemployed labor, employment growth has to be faster than labor force growth, which means that real GDP growth has to be faster than the sum of labor force and labor productivity growth.

These facts are very simple and indisputable. Cutting public spending “at this time” is the last thing the US government should be doing. Yet this President is pushing for the largest possible cuts that he can on the Federal government debt. He is moving ahead of the GOP on this issue. He is providing “leadership” of the sort which is infuriating his base, but should endear him to the Tea Party. This is “the big thing” for Barack Obama, as opposed to maximizing the potential of his fellow Americans by seeking to eliminate the scourge of unemployment. Instead, his big idea is to become the president who did what George Bush could not: cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. What more could the Tea Party possibly want?

[Drale]

1. They want you to be dead so that you stop taking money that could be theirs. /nt

[amborin]

2. The Black Agenda Report's take on this:

http://blackagendareport.com/

Obama’s “Big Deal”: Wallowing with Pigs in Search of a Grand Center-Right Coalition

Wed, 07/13/2011 - 11:23 — Glen Ford

"Barack Obama is salivating at the prospect of concluding his Big Deal with the Republicans, the one that will move the center robustly – even transformatively – to the Right, where this president really lives. The debt-limit deadline is Obama’s big chance to panic a significant part of the Democratic Party into joining in the rape of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “When the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion.”"

Obama has been savoring the big moment since last November, when the Republicans seized control of the House and sidelined the president’s main opposition: the left wing of his own party. Delusional Obamites, especially Blacks, are fond of saying their guy really wants Democrats and activists to force him to take a more progressive path – to “make him do it.” It’s actually the other way around. Obama depends strategically on Republicans to “make him do it” – to push him inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock. It is an intricate and intimate dance, with Obama and the GOP moving and grooving to the same music. Obama often gets so caught up, he mouths the Republicans’ lyrics.

“The reason to do Social Security” – by “do,” Obama means “cut” – “is to strengthen Social Security to make sure that those benefits are there for seniors in the out-years,” says Obama, an exact echo of the apocalypse-soon Social Security scare propaganda perfected over the years by the GOP. Obama has been promising to “do” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since just before he was sworn into office in January, 2009, when he announced that these entitlements would be “on the table” in his administration. His deficit reduction commission last year did indeed put the programs on the operating table, with Obama’s corporate surgeons tracing dotted lines around the organs to be excised under the irresistible imperatives of austerity – the Republicans’ copyrighted anthem

snip

[babylonsister]

3. Nice.

:eyes:

Go look up Glen Ford if you care.

[amborin]

5. what

am i supposedly missing?

this:

http://www.leftforum.org/category/speakers-affiliations/%5Bcatpath-raw%5D-989


or this:

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=10826

[amborin]

11. i'm waiting

to hear what I'm missing;

[checks-n-balances]

4. He underestimates how this will be his demise if he does this.

Maybe he aspires to be a true rethug. If he makes those cuts, he may as well be one.

[TheKentuckian]

6. That is all I see.

[girl gone mad]

7. His supporters, also.

They can't seem to grok how devastating the deal Obama wants would be for the economy, thus to Obama's re-election chances.

[Petrushka]

8. Maybe he'll run as the Republican candidate for President.

:wow:

http://infauxtainment.com/?p=8216


:spank:

[jaxx]

9. Unrec

Why wasn't the title of the piece used?
Was it because it called PBO the first tea party president?

[girl gone mad]

10. There is no rule that the title must be used.

I didn't want the focus of the discussion to be over the title.

Would you care to comment on the content?

[jaxx]

12. No. The title was enough.