The government shutdown battle is more like a Civil War reenactment
than the real thing. A face-saving bargain will soon be struck,
returning 825,000 furloughed federal employees to their jobs at wages
that have been frozen for the past two years – not by the Republicans,
but on President Obama’s orders.
The clock has been stuck with both hands on “austerity” since Obama
came fully out of the closet as a GOP fellow-traveler following the 2010
midterm elections. From that moment on, Republican-imposed gridlock
has been the only barrier to Obama’s long-sought Grand Bargain to
eviscerate entitlement programs. When the current theatrics are over,
Obamacare will remain intact and the president will be back on his
ever-rightward stride. The GOP will take Obama up on his offer, earlier
this year, to cut Social Security
and will probably be offered other bits and pieces of the social safety
net in the interest of “shared sacrifice” and domestic peace.
In the interim, while the reenactors haul their cannons around the cow pasture, waiting for the rich people who call themselves “markets” to signal an end to the charade, rest assured that national security is sacrosanct.
In the interim, while the reenactors haul their cannons around the cow pasture, waiting for the rich people who call themselves “markets” to signal an end to the charade, rest assured that national security is sacrosanct.
-- Glen Ford, "The Shutdown Game" (Black Agenda Report).
