[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
We are not referring here to yet another rancid market bubble that so putridly pops with dismaying regularity upon the populace with wet Republican deregulation flatulence, but another well-known and equally dismaying closed-cultural phenomena of Washington DC, the Village. The boiling bubble of closed feedback loops between fierce lobbying armies, slippery politicians who wouldn’t know a principle if it bit them in the ass and a fawning, gossipy journalism corps inevitably produces values, mindsets and initiatives that are laughable and embarrassing to the rest of the country, that isn’t America counting the days until Clinton resigns, it’s classic DC bubble bullshit.
This is such a well-known and distinctly awkward American political element the Obama Administration precisely made a public objective of combating it, a very nice man spends all of his days in DC sifting letters written to the President from the little people and every week he gets a short inviolate slot to show a selected few to the President. The rationale was that when President Obama sees little people turning tiny stimulus bonuses into victory gardens the rabid lobbyist army, blue dogs and scurrilous journalists would somehow be kept at bay in leading the Administration on a ludicrous DC bubble path to nowhere. It didn’t come remotely close to working.
The latest most glaringly ludicrous bubble mentality and rhetoric set to bloom under the wayward gaze of the Obama reign is the laughable sudden infatuation with budget deficits. There are many more, a few tied into this blimp of a bubble over DC everyone else can see but our august public servants are allegedly oblivious to, but for today this fevered budget deficit DC psychosis will be examined, it’s easily the most glaring and by far the most dangerous.
Before we begin a fact of absolute importance must be established with the utmost clarity and inviolate implacability: my head is not a fucking television set. Verily it is so, I swear to you, Lawrence Welk DC bubble masters all the way, I posses a memory, an excellent knowledge of easily available political history and a good public education, for Christ’s sake you can’t flap any old DC bubble bull with some squirrelly journalist in some ludicrous 30 second clip on TV and expect it to fly, it will not.
I’m not remotely special. Every single running household of any type has a little people cranium equally capable, it takes a lot more brains and savvy to keep a household afloat in these times than it does to comprehend you’re been spoon-fed crap from some twisted DC politician lost in space on some bubble ride. The maddening contempt for the little people’s comprehension in formulating these blimps of bubbles is the bedrock to the whole phenomena, if my tone is arrogantly contemptuous it’s because I—and every other American family—is sick of being taken for stupid clueless rubes, get a clue.
In 1992 the little people were pleased at the prospect of cashing in the peace dividend so we could invest in us, but that babbling little ogre Alan Geenspan convinced Clinton the roaring deficit of monstrous Reagan/Bush hypocrisy had to be abated. No spending for the little people.
Then in 2000, lo and behold, a budget surplus was deemed to be very dangerous to America, tax cuts for the rich must take place immediately. Another 8 year hurricane evolution of Republican lying and hypocrisy cranked up the deficit yet again to alarming levels.
Yet the election of Obama did not immediately click in this deficit bipolarity, he implemented revenue-gobbling tax cuts in the stimulus. But with a crushing Great Recession and no options left but spending on the little people, why, all of a sudden amazingly arrogant charlatans who never gave a shit about deficits under Bush II suddenly yet again cranked up the massive DC bubble machine and, just amazingly and with real economic insanity deficit reduction is all the DC rage.
The acid burn of comprehension of an administration so classically ensnared in a viciously sticky DC bubble was the Obama declaration of a spending freeze that exempted the military. Just from a pure fiduciary duty of prudence mindset this is outrageously ludicrous, never mind the gross ethical and economic black holes of traps this can lead a people into.
Economists of the highest stature and credibility are almost screaming for massive public spending for the little people right now, today, but all we get out of DC is this tragically ludicrous latest obsession with budget reduction. We’ve so seen this movie, DC, your bubble is showing, please do whatever it takes to snap out of it before Great Depression II knifes us all.