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What Is Obama's Political End-Game? Did He Enter Politics as a Democrat Only Because Republicans Are Bigots?

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Eric Zuesse

 

On January 12th, Ezra Klein blogged at the Washington Post, "Treasury: We won't mint a platinum coin to sidestep the debt ceiling," and he reported that Treasury had told him directly that, as Klein put it: "The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it." Klein also interviewed the Republican congressman, Mike Castle, who had written the law that was the basis for the coin proposal. Castle explained why "That was never the intent of anything that I drafted or that anyone working with me drafted." So: the coin-trick would almost certainly fail in the Supreme Court, if it were to be tried.

 

Thus, by renouncing the 14th-Amendment weapon, Obama has clearly indicated, by his behavior, that he wants to complete the gutting of Democratic social-insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) that previous Democratic Presidents had mightily struggled to produce and then protect. He is using the current debt-limit "negotiations" (subsequently non-negotiations) with the Republicans, so as to enable them to "force" him to allow these cutbacks, as being the supposed way for the nation to restore, to the federal government, the assets that the government had spent in order to bail out the bondholders and the stockholders in AIG and the mega-banks, which bailouts to the elite (in addition to the inevitable shortfalls in federal tax-receipts that had resulted from the economic crash that had resulted from Wall Street's frauds), have created the soaring federal debt since the 2008 crash, and the soaring economic inequality during Obama's Presidency. Obama's protection of the banksters who had caused the 2008 crash is by now obvious to anyone who has eyes to see and a brain to understand.

 

At a press briefing on February 11th, the White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, was asked, "What about reducing the annual cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients?" This would gradually reduce retirees' incomes, and would therefore not be noticed by the public; and so it's the sneaky conservatives' preferred way to do the job. Carney said: "As part of a big deal, part of a comprehensive package that reduces our deficit and achieves that $4-trillion goal that was set out by so many people in and outside of government a number of years ago, he [Obama] would consider that ... but not in a cherry-picked or piecemeal way. That's got to be part of a comprehensive package that asks that the burden be shared; that we don't, as some in Congress want, ask seniors to bear the burden of further deficit reduction alone." In other words: "the burden" of paying for the bailout of Wall Street must "be shared," not borne by seniors "alone."

 

A few weeks earlier, on January 3rd, business commentator Nate Wooley had already headlined  "Chained-CPI: How the Government Plans to Hammer Consumer Stocks," and he clearly explained there what chained CPI would mean, not just for seniors, but for consumer spending: "At the beginning of 2012 the average social security recipient received $1230. With a 3% current CPI in 10 years that person receives a monthly check for $1653.02. If chain[ed] CPI is used then that person only sees an annual adjustment of 1% less each year. So at the end of 10 years that ... monthly check is now only $1499.36. That's $150/month less for each recipient to spend. Multiply that by the growing number of social security recipients and suddenly we're looking at a massive reduction in disposable income for consumers." He said: "That's the plan: balance the books on the backs of the people who can afford it least." He said that it would thus gradually lower U.S. GDP.

 

The only difference between Obama and the other Republicans is that Obama wanted this burden of bailing out the aristocracy to be "shared." He didn't want the victims of the Wall Street crash to suffer its losses "alone." Other Republicans did; he did not.

 

Obama apparently considers liberals to be merely fools. For example, in order to convince the liberal Paul Krugman that Obama was really trying to avoid caving to the Republicans (as was reported by the disappointed coin-trick proponent Krugman on his blog on January 13th), "The White House insists that it is absolutely, positively not going to cave or indeed even negotiate over the debt ceiling -- that it rejected the coin option as a gesture of strength, as a way to put the onus for avoiding default entirely on the GOP." So: first, Obama threw away his powerful weapon of the 14th Amendment, and then his powerful threat of the fiscal cliff; and, then, he discarded his weak (if not non-existent) weapon of the coin-trick; and, now, he was telling liberals that this discarding of his weaponry constituted "a gesture of strength." Meanwhile, he indicated that he wanted seniors to pay for the bailouts, but not "alone." And meanwhile, he continued negotiating with other Republicans, stripped of all his weapons. The only thing that Democrats had to rely upon now was hope that he would suddenly use the bully pulpit in order to expose to the public the evilness of what Republicans were trying to do, and thereby pressure congressional Republicans enough so as to avoid all of the burden being borne by the middle class and the poor. Obama would go on the hustings and be the hero condemning a Republican thrust that he could have stopped dead in its tracks, if only he had wanted to.

 

Obama was consistently acting as if he wanted liberals to view him in historical hindsight as having been merely stupid, not evil -- not a Manchurian Candidate, a Trojan-Horse secret Republican in Democratic garb, all along. Not a traitor to the Democratic Party, and to the entire bottom 99.9% of the American people. However, only a fool would think that Barack Obama was a fool. Obama was, instead, brilliant, whatever else one might be able intelligently to say of him. His plan here was, indeed, brilliant -- first the give-away on December 6th of the 14th Amendment; then the give-away of the fiscal cliff on January 1st, which freed the Republicans to hold hostage now the nation's credit-rating -- and, like Obama's entire life since he had first decided as a conservative Black to enter politics with his secret ultimate aim being to become the nation's first black President, his political skills dwarfed any competitor's: that's why he had become President, in the first place, and it's how he had stayed President now.

 

Obama was signaling to Krugman that the Republicans were merely bluffing. Obama hasn't even been doing that (bluff). His standard negotiation-tactic has instead been to start out by discarding the progressives' weapons -- never by threatening to use them. Not only he doesn't bluff; he doesn't threaten at all. Without even the availability of threats, there can be no negotiation; there's nothing to negotiate about. Things just get dragged out, after Obama has already handed away his big weapons, even before the January 1st fiscal cliff -- the time when he should have held firm, but chose instead to "buckle" and give the Republicans a needless top-end-tax-cut (and bottom-end-tax-hike) gift.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that (more...)
 
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