A socialist view of the stimulus bill and the two political parties who serve the corporate elite

[Karmadillo]

We could have had a visionary bill to rebuild America's energy, health, agricultural, transportation, and educational infrastructure and created millions of jobs and we could have added in enough money to meet the immediate needs of those Americans who have suffered most under the unending assault of the rich and their two politcal parties. Instead, we get lots of post-partisan sausage making, tax cuts, and a bill stripped of billions in education spending because, as CNN said last night, its critics said the money would have been a "slush fund" and "it's not the business of the federal government to build schools." Of course, the critics are right. It's the business of the federal government to finance criminal wars, pump taxpayer money into big banks, and assault the civil liberties of US citizens. Vision stuff? Sounds like socialism. Until the ones we've been waiting for show up (surely, despite Obama's words, the one's we've been waiting for can't be us passive bootlickers), here's a view of the stimulus package unlikely to make it on to the Sunday corporate media roundup:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/sena-f07.shtml

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The nature of the "compromise" agreement is best illustrated by considering the political physiognomy of the five senators who negotiated it. They include three Republicans—Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus, and independent Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, an all-out supporter of the war in Iraq who was one of the most vitriolic supporters of defeated Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the 2008 elections.

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In the face of this intransigence, the approach of the Obama White House and the congressional Democratic leadership was to conciliate. Obama met repeatedly with the handful of right-wing Republican and Democratic senators who engineered the eventual compromise. While making occasional verbal sallies at his Republican opponents, citing his election victory only three months ago, he never dropped the posture of pleading for bipartisan support.

The five days of floor debate and backroom negotiations on the stimulus bill thus highlighted a basic difference between the two parties. Both are political instruments of the financial aristocracy, but the Republicans are the open advocates of big business. The Democrats pretend to defend the interests of the working people, while in practice serving the same corporate elite. This double-dealing role of the Democrats is expressed in their habitual spinelessness and insincerity.

In an opposition role, the Republicans conduct themselves intransigently, while the Democrats bow and scrape, beg for "bipartisanship," and end up looking like the weaker party even when possessed, as now, of a sizeable majority.

With a Democrat in the White House, the Republican minority in Congress today attacks and blocks administration legislation, using every available parliamentary device, like the filibuster. When they were a majority in Congress, the Republicans even impeached a twice-elected president, Democrat Bill Clinton, on trumped-up charges.

The Democrats, by contrast, never availed themselves of the full powers of the legislature when, against their own expectations, they won a congressional majority in 2006. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ruled out impeachment hearings over Bush's illegal wars, spying on Americans, and countless violations of the Constitution. The Democrats would neither vote down nor filibuster the stream of "emergency" bills to continue the funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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[TheBigotBasher]

1. I doubt that there will never be an opportunity like this again

for many many more years.

The bill for this will have to be repaid and it will be repaid by those whose lives could have been made better. The poor of America.

[On the Road]

2. I Wouldn't Want a Bunch of Trotskyists Running the Country

but those guys have some of the best political analysis on the internet.

[blindpig]

3. Trots will never run anything but their mouths.

Armchair revolutionaries.

[Karmadillo]

4. This article suggests the armchair revolutionaries are not as deluded as the armchair progressives.

nt