Obama’s “Big Deal”: Wallowing with Pigs in Search of a Grand Center-Right Coalition

[Karmadillo]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/13-14

Published on Wednesday, July 13, 2011 by Black Agenda Report
Obama’s “Big Deal”: Wallowing with Pigs in Search of a Grand Center-Right Coalition
by Glen Ford

Barack Obama is salivating at the prospect of concluding his Big Deal with the Republicans, the one that will move the center robustly – even transformatively – to the Right, where this president really lives. The debt-limit deadline is Obama’s big chance to panic a significant part of the Democratic Party into joining in the rape of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “When the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion."

President Obama says he’s determined to make the “big deal” with the Republicans – not like the little, piddling deals he has been cutting all along to benefit the corporate classes, but the BIG deal, the grand consensus he believes he was born to forge with the GOP. Although it’s true that it will take a whopper of a deal to outclass the bipartisan joint venture that transferred $14 trillion to Wall Street, the vast bulk of it on Obama’s watch, the First Black President is nothing if not ambitious. Obama’s Big Deal is actually the coup de grace for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society – relics, like Black activism, standing in the way of a post-everything world.

Obama has been savoring the big moment since last November, when the Republicans seized control of the House and sidelined the president’s main opposition: the left wing of his own party. Delusional Obamites, especially Blacks, are fond of saying their guy really wants Democrats and activists to force him to take a more progressive path – to “make him do it.” It’s actually the other way around. Obama depends strategically on Republicans to “make him do it” – to push him inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock. It is an intricate and intimate dance, with Obama and the GOP moving and grooving to the same music. Obama often gets so caught up, he mouths the Republicans’ lyrics.

“The reason to do Social Security” – by “do,” Obama means “cut” – “is to strengthen Social Security to make sure that those benefits are there for seniors in the out-years,” says Obama, an exact echo of the apocalypse-soon Social Security scare propaganda perfected over the years by the GOP. Obama has been promising to “do” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since just before he was sworn into office in January, 2009, when he announced that these entitlements would be “on the table” in his administration. His deficit reduction commission last year did indeed put the programs on the operating table, with Obama’s corporate surgeons tracing dotted lines around the organs to be excised under the irresistible imperatives of austerity – the Republicans’ copyrighted anthem.

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[leftstreet]

1. K&R

[Starry Messenger]

2. k&r

[amborin]

3. K&R suggesting raising medicare eligibility age is just the start ....

"According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, raising the eligibility age to 67 would cause an estimated net increase of $5.6 billion in out-of-pocket health insurance costs for beneficiaries who would have been otherwise covered by Medicare. Seniors in Medicare Part B would also face a 3 percent premium increase, the study found, since younger and healthier enrollees would be routed out of Medicare and into private insurance. Beneficiaries in health care reform’s exchanges would see a similar spike in premiums with the addition of the older population. Employer retiree health costs would also increase by $4.5 billion. “Costs are shifted to older people who have been paying into the Medicare program their entire lives,” the Urban Institute’s Judy Feder said.

Worse still, some seniors between the ages of 65 and 67 could “end up uninsured,” the Center on Budget And Policy Priorities’ Edwin Park predicted. Individuals “with incomes too high for premium subsidies in the exchange and those who qualify for only modest subsidies” could be priced out of affordable coverage, he warned. "

thinkprogress.org

[sasha031]

4. K/R

[DJ13]

5. A big K&R

"The real Obama is a cold, cynical bastard. He is not a wimp, but rather, has plenty of spine to face down and brow-beat the remaining defenders of the social safety net in his own Democratic Party, who have always been the most immediate dangers to his grand center-right coalition. But it must be done quickly, quickly, quickly, to capture the debt-limit panic opportunity."

[Raksha]

6. K & R - I hope he's wrong.

But I'm very much afraid he's right.

[mzmolly]

7. More specuation by the third party rag?

:puke:

[deacon]

8. Yep. It's so weak and transparent. n/t

[cliffordu]

9. More horseshit from the purist asses that give Dems a bad name.

They wouldn't know a chess move if it bit them on the ass.

Fucking idiots.

[ddeclue]

10. Happy to push this to the greatest page K&R

[emilyg]

11. knr

[Karmadillo]

12. Kick

nt

[QC]

13. kick

[Zorra]

14. " transformatively – to the Right"

This phrase is frightening to me, in that transforming our country into a much more RW nation was one of Reagan's greatest, if not the greatest, achievement of his administration in the adoring eyes of conservative sycophants everywhere.

Obama constantly referencing Reagan makes my gut churn.