Would I have compromised? You bet your ass I would have, but not the compromise President Obama made. A worthwhile compromise would have been a large employment bill meaning over a trillion dollars for next year that would have included aid to the states, increased education spending K-post-graduate school, more direct government funding of research, green energy funding, infrastructure repair, and on and on. Unemployment funding is too little.
The compromise would have also meant an end to Don't Ask Don't Tell and the passage of the Dream Act. The compromise would have also included confirmation of the START treaty and more reimbursement for doctors taking medicare patients and more money for medicaid. The compromise also would have finally included taxing all earned income for social security. Now that is a compromise, I could live with.
So now we will all suffer. Without demand there will be no need to hire workers to produce goods. Without demand US markets will shrink and China will get pissed because even China will not have a market where goods can be sold. We are already seeing Europeans who are pissed with the cut backs in the benefits in their countries. Just wait until there are more larger demonstrations in Europe. As people in the US are laid off, even more will be fearful of being laid off. There will be more and larger demonstrations in the US as people realize the US and world economies are are the crapper. You think 9.8% unemployment is bad, before 2012 the levels will be in 20 to 30 percent range. With rethugs controlling the House of Representatives there will be cuts in social security and medicare. President Obama will absorb all the blame.
As Katrina vanden Heuvel said in Obama: On the way to a failed presidency?
This is political self-immolation. Blue-collar workers abandoned Democrats in large numbers in the fall; wait until they learn what the trade deal means for them. Seniors went south, probably because of Republican lies about cuts in Medicare; wait until anyone over 40 who's lost their savings hears about Alan Simpson's plan to take it to the "greedy geezers." The $60 billion each year in Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans could pay for universal preschool for America's children, or tuition and board for half of America's college students.
. . .
This isn't about conventional politics. This is simply about the fate and future of our country. This president has a clear and imperative historic mandate. If he shirks it, he risks more than failing to get reelected. He risks a failed presidency.
She speaks the truth. President Obama is in such a beltway bubble of his own making that he fails to see the truth. Even more will suffer.
Unfortunately President Obama believes his base will stick with him, because there is no place else to go. With the suffering to come no one, his base, independents, minorities, . . . will stick with him. A rethuglian victory in 2012 and the pain will only be amplified. Sadly that is coming unless we work hard to prevent it.
How? We must either convince President Obama to change his ways or nominate someone else in 2012. Right now the nomination of someone else looks more plausible.
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