This morning I've noticed a barrage of mainstream media reporting and ads which appear to me to be another well orchestrated campaign to prepare Americans to go along with severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other social safety nets so that the we can continue paying off the gambling debts of the banksters and thereby solve the debt crisis. Yes, that's right, they want us to forgo the retirement funds that we've paid into throughout our entire lives so that this money can be used to pay off their debts!
Shortly after being awakened by my clock radio, I heard this NPR report:
As the federal debt balloons, reducing it would seem more and more pressing. Yet policymakers remain far apart. Debt, deficit and budget rhetoric is often accompanied by numbers cherry-picked to support a particular political view.Then on TV I saw this ad repeated several times:
But a new book by Wall Street Journal economics writer David Wessel lays out the numbers that both political parties face.
"In the early 1980s, about 10 percent of the federal budget went to Medicare and Medicaid," Wessel tells NPR's Renee Montagne. "Now, it's about a quarter of all spending, and it's on the way to 33 percent of all spending unless something happens to change the trend."
The book is called Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget, and it breaks down the budget in stark terms: how the government spends its money, who pays what in taxes, and why politicians can't reduce a potentially catastrophic debt load.
Then I came across this editorial in The New York Times entitled, "The Entitled Generation" which smears the baby-boomer generation for being so spoiled and selfish while attacking Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
After reading that editorial I nearly lost my breakfast. But, thanks to Michael Hudson, I managed to hold it down. In this 23:31m video he provides a good explanation for what is happening:
Johan Galtung in an article from Transcend Media Service has a quite a rant on the bankster engineered debt crisis. Although he frames his remarks as a grieving capitalist cursing the financial crooks for wrecking the economy and losing Western capitalist dominance to the "non-West", his piece provides a good summary of bankster crimes. What struck me most about all these media pieces was an ominous tone of desperation regarding the crisis. It may be that, contrary to what most Americans think, the ruling class has run out of remedies to forestall a really profound collapse of the economy.
As I see it, capitalists realized that there were diminishing returns that were possible from investments in the real economy as their growth addicted system came up against the limits of a finite planet and as they realized that industrial growth threatened destruction of the ecosystem. Thus, bankers and financiers overturned laws which restricted their ability to gamble in the market, and then engaged in all kinds of financial shenanigans (created obscure derivative investments and used accounting tricks) to bet in the market. They lost their bets, and now they demand that we sacrifice our retirement pensions and medical care to cover their losses.
Ain't capitalism grand?! Stay tuned, better yet, stay active.