Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, July 09, 2011

A Suicidal Bet on a Suicidal Electorate

Jack Germond reminds me he is alive by publishing this bit of puffery:
President Obama is taking an extraordinary political risk with his sudden move to bring the entitlement programs into the negotiations over the national debt. Indeed, it is by no means hysterical to suggest his re-election is at stake. What the president is doing is betting that the American people will recognize both the necessity and wisdom of making changes in the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs that make up the safety net for most of them. He is betting on a maturity in the electorate that has rarely been evident in this age of instant and pervasive partisanship.
The first thing I want to say is that we don't really know that Obama is really making this "sudden move to bring… entitlement[s]… into the negotiations" and we won't know until we know what's in the bill, especially given all the shadow boxing going on right about now. I suspect Germond is indulging in wishful thinking a bit here, which is not only premature but exposes him as an asshole. This leads me to my second point.

Unless the "necessity and wisdom of making changes in the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs that make up the safety net" involves lowering the retirement age, raising the taxable cap paid into Social Security, and making Medicare available to all (possibly through a buy-in option for a transition into a full single payer system), then I must say I for one see no necessity or wisdom in anything I hear described as reform of the safety net by the millionaires and billionaires inside the beltway who, after all, have little need of it themselves and who seem all too eager in the main to prescribe pain and suffering for everybody but themselves so that they can continue to wallow even a little longer on what amount to mountains of gold-plated poop.

To describe as "maturity" a hoped-for willingness on the part of the majority cheerfully to submit to voluntary enslavement or to commit suicide all the better to enable the prolongation of dubious pleasures of a miniscule minority of plutocratic parasites is, to say the least, fairly grotesque.

Germond's cute little suggestion at the end of his pious prescription of austerity-for-thee-but-not-me, namely, that we little people probably cannot be counted on after all to embrace the miserable suicidal "maturity" he has prescribed for us because of an atmosphere of "pervasive partisanship" is just the usual commentariat insult added to injury in which we are all expected to pretend that it is equally the fault of Democrats and Republicans that Republicans have gone completely insane and are absolutely intent on wrecking the place.

No comments: