Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Jamie Galbraith on the lessons of the Bad Deal

Jamie Galbraith writes for Deutsche Welle about The Bad Deal 04.08.2011. And he is bluntly unsympathetic to President Obama:

The debt deal will make things clear. The President is not a progressive – he is not what Americans still call a "liberal." He is a willful [willing?] player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result.

What Barack Obama got from the debt deal was exactly what his sponsors have wanted: a long-term lock-in of domestic spending cuts, and a path toward severe cuts in the core New Deal and Great Society insurance programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And, of course, no tax increases at all. [my emphasis]
It's nice to see Galbraith using the Jacksonian phrase, the Money Power.

He expects the next move for the bipartisan austerity caucus to look something like this:

The deficit lobbies are shifting: their next step will be to raise doubts about the plan's credibility and about Congress's will to enforce it. They will then make the self-protective assertion that still stronger steps are needed. European observers of Greek/Irish/ Portuguese/ British/Spanish and Italian politics – not to mention Latvia or Hungary – will find all of this familiar.
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