Heads I win, tails you lose
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
Whatever may be said of the GOP members of Congress
trying to kill Obamacare, one thing is certain. Someone is backing their play.
Whether it’s the promise of campaign contributions,
the threat of well funded election opposition or the lure of post Congressional
riches, there is a lot of money in play.
What does the money want?
Probably not what the tea partier next door wants,
which is a dramatically smaller federal presence in their lives; a goal with which
I suspect a lot of Americans are increasingly in sympathy.
But that is not precisely what the money wants.
The one thing you know for sure about modern
American government is that it is a government of, by and for established
corporate interests. In Washington, corporate profit trumps all.
Obamacare is a windfall for the insurance and
pharmaceutical industries. “Big pharma” is big, and the finance industry (of
which insurance is a part) is the now the biggest of all, by some reports
accounting for 60 percent of U.S. domestic profits. They are not going to let
Obamcare go down. And neither will the president. It is his “legacy.”
Without it, what will remain for the history ebooks
will be eight years of crushing unemployment and more than five million homes
foreclosed, an assault on constitutional rights, massive student debt, an
Orwellian surveillance and police state and mindlessly expensive foreign
military involvement.
And the health care legislation has the president’s
name on it. It is not negotiable and everybody knows it.
So Obamacare is a stalking horse. What do the
global corporate elite really want?
More.
Where will they get it?
Entitlements.
Not of course from the corporate entitlements: tax
breaks and billions in subsidies to banks, energy, defense, agribusiness, IT
and the gods of modern American business. But rather, from Social Security,
Medicare, food stamps, unemployment and any spending that does not go directly
to the corporate bottom line and ever more fantastic salaries for corporate
CEOs and dividends for shareholders (the less than 1 percent of the American
people).
President Obama put these programs on the chopping
block two years ago; the idea got no traction. But corporate America has not
given up, because the big prize is big. Get rid of Social Security, and the
employer contribution goes away.
Well, not away, exactly. More like diverted — into
CEO salaries and shareholder dividends.
And Wall Street gets to play with the $1 trillion a
year which Social Security collects, every year, while they load up private
retirement plans with fees and commissions, as they have already done with
401ks.
So the puppet masters who pull the strings in both
parties have got the president and Congress doing this little dance of crisis —
the corporate media providing the sound track — being maneuvered into position
to do their deal, bow nicely and end it in a great show of democratic civility.
The American people are being set up for what
passes for compromise these days: heads, the 1 percent win, tails the 99
percent lose.
There is of course another possible outcome.
The people still will not accept more austerity for
the 99 percent, and the predatory puppet masters will decide they are tired of
waiting and collapse the economy entirely; in which case Social Security and
about everything else that supports the people and American prosperity may
disappear quite suddenly and quite completely.
In either case, it is time for the American people
to get ready to shuffle the deck for a Second New Deal.
