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Sunday, August 7, 2011
AMERICA AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WERE NOT THE ONLY LOSERS IN THIS DEBT LIMIT DEBACLE
Posted by st at 3:38 AM
Amazingly enough it is not hard to link the dots with a direct line…the TEABAGGERS are also the big losers.
While it may appear that they won a big political victory based on an askew ideology and a perverse sense of hostage taking of our future…those very people who are the same ones who protested during the 2009 Health Care Reform Town Hall Meetings, they yelled and screamed to disrupt public discourse, they did their deed in sabotaging any efforts for elected officials to hear from their constituents; will end up being hurt by their outrageous demands and insistence on cutting the budget.
Those very Teabagging Teahadists who worship Sara and would name Michelle Bachmann their patron saint…are people of limited means, limited education and limited resources. The fact remains and it will be proven that the great majority of them will be negatively impacted by this Debt Limit Blackmail as their livelihoods and reliance on social programs will be pulled right out from under them.
The other issue that is seldom mentioned is that the very wealthy have had tax breaks for quite a few years now since Bush regaled them with this break…one would think that it has had plenty of time to work in favor of creating jobs and bring prosperity to America…and what have we seen instead so far? We have seen a big mother fucking financial meltdown and the loss of millions of jobs. The future of job creation doesn’t look any brighter and neither does the Stock Market as we watched the day this crazy ass Debt Ceiling Legislation passed…it went down two hundred and some odd points. Now, you would also think that if the debt limit legislation was so good for business we would have seen a tremendous surge on the Wall Street Stock Market.
Joshua Holland wrote a very good piece on this very thing:
NEWS & POLITICS
AlterNet / By Joshua Holland
4 Reasons the Tea Partiers Were Big Losers in the Debt Ceiling Deal
“The professional political operatives behind the Tea Party movement were huge winners, but what about the rank-and-file Tea Partiers themselves?
August 2, 2011 |
The conventional wisdom holds that the Tea Partiers were among the “winners” of the debt ceiling fight. We know this because the Washington Post, that font of Beltway conventional wisdom, told us as much:
There were major questions coming into the 112th Congress about who would blink first — the largely establishment-aligned leaders of the new Republican House majority or the tea-party-aligned freshman members. We got our answer to that question late Thursday as House Speaker John Boehner was forced not only to postpone his compromise bill but ultimately to add conservative sweeteners to get the 217 votes he needed. (He got 218.) The tea party — inside and outside Congress — will almost certainly be emboldened by the result of this fight.
That narrative conflates Tea Party-endorsed politicians and the professional conservative operatives working behind the scenes to advance their agenda with the rank-and-file Tea Partiers themselves. And it's important to understand what different creatures they really are.
In her book, Boiling Mad, veteran New York Times reporter Kate Zernike untangled some of the movement’s apparent contradictions. The Tea Party groups are touted by their fans as part of a “leaderless” movement, yet its various “leaders” are all over the media, weighing in on the issues of the day. Zernike squares that circle by describing the Tea Party brand as a franchise of sorts—a movement of small, local groups whose organizers are fiercely suspicious of “elites,” but which also enjoy training – and guidance on messaging -- PR and infrastructure provided to them by high-profile conservative groups like FreedomWorks, which are led by Washington insiders and backed by boatloads of corporate money.
Zernicke visited the Freedomworks offices, where she found that “the real work of spreading the Tea Party brushfires was done by a small knot of about twenty take-no-prisoners young conservatives” working with “the Red Bull-and-beer spirit of a fraternity.” But the far-larger majority of ordinary Tea Party supporters—those who forward the emails, sign the petitions, and occasionally attend the rallies—are a completely different story.
Zernike wrote that while they were attracted to abstract rhetoric about “freedom” from Big Government, “it wasn’t clear that [the rank-and-file Tea Partiers] understood” that if they had their druthers, the young Ayn Rand fans organizing the movement “would eliminate benefits for the elderly, subsidies for students who could not afford college on their own, [or] laws that made sure banks couldn’t disappear with people’s savings overnight.”
The movement, according to Zernicke, “depend[s] on the blurring of ideological differences,” which she likened to “an older man ignoring that he had no music or cultural references in common with his young trophy wife.”
The hard-right politicians and GOP operatives behind the scenes undoubtedly scored a big victory in the debt limit show-down, forcing deep spending cuts for years to come without any new revenues. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he got 98 percent of what he wanted in the agreement, and he's right. But for the actual rank-and-file Tea Partiers themselves – those angry white people holding up misspelled signs claiming that Obama's either a socialist or a Nazi -- it's a completely different story.
They lost big in this deal, even if they don't know exactly why or how. Here are four reasons why the conventional wisdom that says the Tea Partiers won is simply wrong.”
