By Patrick Devlin
In an apparent effort to highlight one of the reasons why Americans do not have universal health care, the federal minimum wage has not been raised in ten years and a vast majority of Americans live “paycheck to paycheck”, the fabulously spendy former president Barack Obama told a group(ie) meeting of recently elected Democrats that they should dream big, but watch the pennies, as they pursue fairness and equity for all Americans and robust environmental protection as legislators.
With no obvious sense of irony, the former president, who presided over gifting private banking companies that are owned by private citizens trillions in government handouts to save their incompetent and criminal asses in the wake of the mortgage investing crisis (which is often referred to as the ‘foreclosure crisis’ by history revisionists – yes homes were foreclosed upon, but the cause was the banks’ criminal malinvestment in and sale of securities backed by flawed mortgages) while not requiring these same banks to forgive bad loans marketed to poor people (as happened in other effected western courtiers, such as in Ireland and Iceland for example), was reported by CNN to have advised the assemblage of acolytes;
“Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of big, bold ideas — and that it’s good to re-imagine some of our social institutions and to update them for the new economy. But Obama also said the party needs to think practically and in the nitty-gritty about how those big, bold ideas will work and how you pay for them.”
From reporting, Obama spent some of his speech in a reverie about his ‘signature legislative effort’ The Affordable Care Act, a law that was written by insurance industry lobbyists without input from advocates of health care for everyone, rich and poor. Not mentioned was his spending in seven military invasions or the cost (in $s and human lives) of killing several thousand foreign non-combatants with million dollar drones, his bailout of both the bankers and the entire US auto industry and his attempts to ‘work across the aisle’ to reduce Social Security payments to our seniors and our disabled workers.
From Obama’s quote, the former president displayed the same type of timid, penny-pinching and designed-to-not-piss-off-American-oligarchs ‘policy savvy’ that defined his time in the presidency. Obama’s ‘big and bold’ presidency did assist in creating our America: happy bankers and financiers who rule with a brutal and uncaring hand as they receive bipartisan payouts and a 99 percent of lower class expendables living from pay check to pay check hoping that they don’t fall over dead while working off their debt to our country’s conniving and corrupt oligarchs as the earth burns.
There was no reportage in the media if the newly elected public servants, who promised voters health care as a human right, fair taxation, the end of imperial wars and to try and save our dying planet, decided to abandon these altruistic and compassionate goals to instead try to find new ways to tell the rabble that ‘the bankers broke no laws’, as Obama, ‘Mr. practicality’, and his Justice Department determined during their reign.
In other news, the minimum wage stagnates at the same poverty level that it did during the entire Obama presidency ($7.25), President Donald Trump has determined to cease reporting on the number of deaths rained upon poor dark complexioned people in foreign lands by America’s drones and nearly 80 percent of Americans report “living paycheck to paycheck.”
Debs was right:
“The Republican and Democratic parties- or to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.”
