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Good Monday to ya everybody I’m John Henry your gluten free emotional support host, welcome to another Morning Message!
Debt Ceilings
I want to take a quick look at this debt ceiling “compromise” that was reached over the last week, with President Biden signing on Saturday in what was described as a “private” ceremony.
I’m not a fan of this deal on the basic level that it’s completely unnecessary.
I’ve already written two parts of a series on the national debt which goes deeper in to what that debt is and how it functions and how it’s used as a weapon of disinformation against you. I should have that wrapped up in the next couple of days, and it’s well worth reading and understanding.
The great harm this whole pointless argument causes isn’t the “repercussions” or the lowering of investor confidence in US credit, but rather in the way it’s used as an artificial threat to justify fumbling compromises when no compromise is necessary.
This allows the folks who hold status quo power on both “sides” to both preserve their interests and act as though they’re trying really hard not to. “Sorry, it’s those darned other guys.”
Given that on the right this means they have to step back from just flat-out ending democracy and enslaving anyone who can’t buy their freedom, I don’t have a problem with that.
My problem is half the ostensible “left,” i.e. the Democratic Party, caves as well to the simple threat of not signing a budget which isn’t a threat at all. There are constitutional mechanisms in place to go around precisely that sort of bone-headed power play. Rather than do that, the Dems chose to cave – on student loans, on work requirements for food stamps, on the Mountain Valley gas pipeline – and make zero cuts to the outrageously bloated defense budget. Moreover, increases in non-defense spending are capped, but defense isn’t.
This is the same old crap, sorry. It’ll be interesting to see if and how Biden chooses to paint himself out of the corner on the student loan problem. It’ll be more interesting to see if the rising voices in the electorate can manage to get more folks like Sanders and Fetterman into office and start standing up to this game, because the simple truth is that it is a game, and it has to stop.
Poverty is a political choice. It is not an economic necessity. We could quite literally top everyone off to $50K right now if we wanted to. There are good reasons we don’t, but those reasons are never part of these conversations. Realistically if we made the political choice we could implement a universal basic income and federal job guarantee program in a year or less. Problem is that would free a lot of people from being required to work for someone else’s profit in order to survive, and the people whose profit is at stake don’t like that.
So they fight against it and we continue with half a million homeless, millions more on the brink of financial disaster – a brink the GOP insists on pushing them over after stomping on their fingers to make them let go, via that student loan problem I mentioned – and we continue playing these ridiculous games.
Game Over
The picture isn’t entirely bleak. Whether we progressives like to admit or not, Joe Biden is canny as hell, and he’s pulled a swerve more than once to end up far ahead of where we thought he was, even going back to his coming out in support of LGBTQ rights. I’m not betting you’ll see some workaround that extends the student loan repayment pause, but it won’t surprise me if you do either. The edge of what the GOP wanted in terms of cuts and Malthusian demands that humans with a right to exist earn that right by contributing to some billionaire’s monopology game was significantly blunted.
Unfortunately, what we’re still not doing is saying loudly and clearly that we know that edge has no reason to exist at all, and the only it reason it does is so that ugly-minded, mendacious, slavering lapdogs of fascism and oligarchy can keep pleasing their masters at everyone else’s expense.
What we’re also not saying is that we see the games the Democratic leadership is playing with trying to let things “cool down” enough that they can make their move in favor of preserving that status quo power I talked about, without causing too much uproar about it. They’re doing this by peeling off smaller groups of student loan debtors for special consideration separately from the main group, using that issue as an example. Eventually the group of people they’re sacrificing isn’t as loud anymore, and the group of people for whom it’s “not my problem” gets larger, and the problem slides into the background again until things get bad enough for people to start getting loud again.
Lather, rinse, repeat, and the whole time the left gets to pretend they’re fighting hard and winning these big concessions. Mick Foley said it best: the real world is faker than pro wrestling.
Until we have those conversations, out loud and without flinching, we’re not winning anything – we’re only holding the line or succeeding in not giving up completely, and frankly that’s ridiculous. It’s time to evolve, and if we’re gonna do it kicking and screaming then so be it.
Because the other option is we choose not to evolve…which means we’re choosing to become extinct.
