Obama fails to plead the 14th – we move closer to doomsday

The hype over the Us debt ceiling in our media has been witless.  There is now a deal and it’s one that makes no economic sense.  What it demonstrates, like our own Condemlibbers, is that the rich are running the show and none of the rest of us matter. Austerity is a mug’s game, other than in household budgeting or corporate housekeeping.  Obama could have shown some balls and used the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling and forced the barking Republicans into war with the Tea Party clowns.  The great black hope is now laid as waste as all the under-sized heavyweights until Klitscho.

Much as we have come to hate welfare dependency and the evil poor, this is not the reason for economic decline.  The bottom 10% in our country hardly make a blip on the wealth of our country (see the ONS figures) and they (have to) spend whatever they get and thus help keep businesses afloat.  The problem everywhere is the rich, a bunch of thieving swine who are playing crooked games made legal.

I’d be all for austerity if it was coupled with structural changes like a genuine greening of the economy, the way we relate with each other and the production of social capital and new forms of entertainment and leisure.  Instead, we have a clown form that cuts the number of cops, slashes services, charities and hardly produces a decent job.

This is all happening at a time when we have truly amazing technologies to produce energy, food, housing, communities and a genuinely educated society.  I’d put it in terms of this thought experiment.

“Would we be better off losing the bottom 10% of our people or the top 10%”?

The sad truth now, I suspect, is that we would easily survive either, but be much better off if we could redistribute the wealth of the top 10% into radical social and work change.  Of course, if the wealth of the top 10% just went to government we’d see very little change.  The wealth needs to be in circulation paying people to do stuff and re-invest wages in change.

We won’t get any sense from the goon-class of politicians that serves the rich.  This is the Doomsday road to serfdom, led by the country we once thought the beacon of democracy and capitalism – now become the military fiefdom of robber barons.  Even America can’t produce jobs and has one in seven on food stamps and half its population poor.

The infamous double-dip is more or less with us, and as cops line up for decimation, we’ll find many other jobs disappear, inflation making families unable to pay bills and even food shortages in some homes.  The IMF is predicting £1500 a year lost per family over the next five years.  That’s about the same as we’ve spent in Iraq and Afghanistan in money, before we count the lives taken and those of our own lost.

It won’t be long before one set of clowns or another start venting spleen against the newly thinned blue line.  The brick flying in Toxteth is linked to Obama’s failure to plead the 14th.  Nothing in the politics in polemic here justifies any violent action against police officers.  I personally abhor the juvenile crap.  It’s all a long way from a couple of us in uniform facing 10,000 pickets and being offered butties and tea.  NI looks likely to kick off again too.

One might think, by now, our democratic leaders would do more to head off street demonstrations with alternatives the other voices in our society could deem fair and worthwhile.  I know none.

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