Suck It Up And Screw The Poor
If they didn't deserve it we wouldn't do it
Links are at the end, bristling.
On May 8, former Obaman Daniel Pfeiffer published an op-ed in the NYT arguing against negotiating with Republicans about the debt ceiling legislation. “[F]rom the perspective of someone who had a front-row seat inside the White House to the last two debt-limit standoffs between a Democratic president and a Republican House,” Pfeiffer wrote, “Mr. Biden’s refusal to negotiate on the debt ceiling is the best strategy.”1
On May 9, the Bidennaires tweeted an approving link to Pfeiffer’s piece, citing Obama’s latter days example as an imperative: never give a inch.2
Yesterday, May 15, Politico writes that “the White House argues it is not actually negotiating over the debt ceiling, but merely having budget negotiations with a debt ceiling component attached.”3
But that appears to be a distinction without an actual difference. Concessions are being made. Over the past several days, White House aides have signaled openness to imposing caps on government spending through the end of Biden’s term. They’ve floated clawing back billions of dollars in pandemic aid once seen as critical to the agenda. And ahead of a third meeting with McCarthy, Biden suggested he’d consider restrictions on certain safety net programs for the poor.
Nobody in the White House will be hurt by whatever concessions Biden makes.
Nobody in Congress will be hurt by whatever concessions Biden makes.
Military spending won’t suffer from whatever concessions Biden makes. Corporations and their CEOs won’t suffer. Rich people won’t suffer. Banks won’t suffer.
Who the fuck do we think will suffer?
(Rhetorical question.)
It seems like only yesterday we were talking about how the poor represent an extractive resource in this country. It wasn’t yesterday—yesterday we were talking about how presidents should earn an automatic five-year prison sentence in exchange for being permitted the luxury of, say, fucking the poor, or blowing them up, or torturing them or whatever—but rather the day before yesterday.4
We have a class of people in this country, many politicians among them, who think themselves courageous when they advocate fucking the poor, as if daring to do so distinguishes them from those weak-willed do-gooding fools who want only to help the lower classes.
Making the hard choices, they call it.
Being responsible, they say.
Biden is one of those motherfuckers. When he argued for freezing Social Security, freezing VA money, freezing Medicare and freezing whatever else his eyes happened to fall upon, he did it as a brag.
This will cost me votes, he said, it'll hurt me politically, but it has to be done. The poor people, the veterans, the disabled people, the old folk—all of them, absolutely one hundred percent of them, have to get fucked, and I'm the only Democrat brave enough to do it.5
That’s the motherfucker who negotiated a catastrophic debt ceiling deal with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner in 2011.6
That’s the motherfucker we’re all relying on to abandon an opportunity to screw the poors and blame it on Republicans.
Republican intransigence could still force the Bidennaires to refuse a deal, but what the latter are leaking indicates an eagerness to offer human sacrifices in exchange for preserving Biden’s signature achievements, principally the wholly inadequate “climate bill.”
Fuck. These. People.
Fetterman and Ro Khanna say they won’t vote for anything which functions as a social welfare program cut,7 and likely will be joined by Sanders and a few others. Who knows, maybe Feinstein's staff will jump in.8
All the Bidennaires need, though, are most Republicans and a few Democrats.
Have we mentioned recently that our democracy isn’t a democracy?
Why yes: yes we have, for the umpteenth time, little more than a week ago.9
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Ah well.
MUSIC
The Clash, “London Calling.”10
That, Comrades, is all there is
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Take care, be well, stay mad.