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What follows here is a synopsis of, and a link to, Keith Olbermann's recent tirade.
- In exchange for selling out a principle campaign pledge, and the people to whom and for whom it was made,
- in exchange for betraying the truth that the idle and corporate rich of this country have gotten unprecedented and wholly indefensible tax cuts for a decade,
- in exchange for giving the idle and corporate rich of this country two more years to accumulate still more and more vast piles of personal wealth with which they can buy and sell everybody else
- in exchange for extending what he spent the weeks before the midterms calling tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires to people who have proven, without a scintilla of doubt, without even a fig leaf of phony effort to make it look like they would do otherwise, that they will keep the money for themselves
- in exchange for injecting new vigor into the infantile, moronic, disproved-for-a-decade three-card Monte game of an economic theory purveyed by these treacherous and ultimately traitorous Republicans, that tax cuts for the rich will somehow lead to job creation, even though if that had ever been true in the slightest, the economy would not be where it is today
- in exchange for giving tax cuts for the rich which the nation cannot afford, and extending their vintage through the next election and thus promising, at best, a reenactment of this whole sorry, amoral, degrading spectacle during the 2012 presidential campaign, when the sides will be climbing over each other to again extend these cuts -"
- In exchange for this searing and transcendent capitulation, . .
. . the President got just thirteen months of extended benefits for those unemployed less than 100 weeks. And he got nothing, absolutely nothing for those unemployed for longer, the "99ers."
This the Administration is celebrating, taking the victims of Republican economic policy, taking the living breathing proof that the Bush tax cuts for the rich do not create jobs, and putting economic bulls eyes on their backs as of next December.
On the one hand, unaffordable tax breaks for the beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts, made ever more permanent as they threaten to suck $4 trillion out of government revenues in the next decade.
On the other hand, an insufficient dead-end unemployment solution for Americans who would actually work for a living, a solution made ever more temporary.
And we are hearing nothing about those 99ers, even though the numbers of them will balloon from two million to four million or more by next December even with this deal, even though just last Thursday, the President's own Council of Economic Advisers reiterated the reality that the easiest way to create jobs and keep jobs is to make sure that the unemployed continue to have money to spend.
The unemployed, unlike the rich whom this president has just bowed to, are, in fact, the job creators
Why so? Because they do not have investment portfolios to expand. They do not have vast savings into which to stuff their government checks. Instead, they have to spend the money, all of the money, which is exactly what would help create the jobs that this country needs, as employers scramble to produce the products called for by this increased demand.
The economy is surprisingly simple. If business and the rich won't spend, and the middle class can't spend, the only factor left, to keep pushing money into the insatiable maw of capitalism, is the government. So, for the sake of the US economy, should the government give the money to the rich who either sit on it (or invest it in another part of the world, like China), or give the money to the not rich, who spend it? Apparently this President does not know the answer to that simple question, even though he has his own Council of Economic Advisers.
Mr. President, for these meager and short-lived crumbs you've gotten, for some of the unemployed, you have given up huge, costly, insulting, divisive, destructive tax cuts for the rich; and you have given in to Republican blackmail -- which will of course be followed by still more Republican blackmail.
And of course it's not just tax cuts for the rich that you've given up. There is also your new temporary payroll tax holiday, establishing a precedent that the way money is pumped into Social Security should be negotiated and traded off, thereby making it just that much easier to gut Social Security later.
And, oh by the way, in the middle of a crisis over making temporary Republican tax cuts permanent, you gave the Republicans another temporary Republican tax cut that they can come back later to blackmail you into making permanent. Well, sir, at least that's the end of it. Except, of course, for the estate tax -- what Republicans so happily call "the death tax," which will be reduced from its 2009 levels.
Huh?
The money given by one dead rich person to some living rich persons will not be taxed up to five million dollars. More than five million and it will be taxed at the 35 percent rate, which is less than it was under the tax laws of President Bush's last fiscal year! Sir, you have given undeserved tax breaks to rich people, living and dead, and you have carved them a little more deeply into the stone of law. And you want me to tell them which Democrat proposed this estate tax giveaway part?
Blanche Lincoln! Blanche Lincoln, repudiated by nearly half the Arkansans in her own party, and then repudiated by 63 percent of the voters in Arkansas. Mr. President, you're listening to Blanche Lincoln?! What?!
This president negotiates down from a position of strength better than any politician in our recent history. It is too late now to go back and ask why the President, and why the wobbly Democratic leadership, whiffed on their chance to force John Boehner to put his money where his mouth was. In September, Boehner said if he had no other option, and that of course he would vote to extend tax breaks only for the middle class.
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