Image: Davidd / Flickr
There is a U.S. unemployment crisis that no one is doing anything about that. There is no fiscal crisis …
… but the Republicans and Democrats are using that lie, that fantasy, to continue high and higher unemployment, to pillage Social Security and Medicare, and to pursue their main goal, the prime directive of the upper class: redistribute the economy’s wealth to the 1%.
Read Dean Baker and once again weep. How can the Washington Post write the following, in its lead editorial:
“THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE for the next president will be putting the nation’s long-term finances on sounder footing. The failure to do so is the biggest shortcoming of President Obama’s first term.” [capitalization in original]
All-caps, yeah right. This is a class warfare editorial of the most obvious and aggressive sort. Baker responds with faux naivete:
people who had access to data on the labor market would have to believe that the fact that tens of millions of people are still unemployed or underemployed in the biggest failure of President Obama’s first term. These people and their families are seeing their lives ruined.
The worst part is that the devastation they are suffering is not due to their own failings. Its due to the incompetence of people with names like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Robert Rubin and the people who have the opportunity to express themselves in major media outlets like the Washington Post. This disaster would have been 100 percent preventable, if anyone in a position of authority had been able to recognize an $8 trillion housing bubble and understand that its collapse would have a devastating impact on the economy.
Which gets us back to the layers of tragedy. Not only is the real economic crisis ignored and class warfare fantasy put in its place, but no one is allowed to point that out in a major news source. A further layer is that both major political parties are selling the fantasy and ignoring the real economic crisis. As Serge Halimi writes,
Once again, with a political system operating for the benefit of two parties falling over each other to grant favours to the business community, millions of Americans disenchanted with Obama’s weakness will still be forced to vote for him. So they will resign themselves and make the usual choice offered in the US, that between bad and worse.