[lbo-talk] The latest Republican offer is that they will allow the government to reopen, if...

[Marv Gandall]

On a more serious note, what these clowns are doing - in some cases, quite consciously - is further conditioning the American public to accept cuts to Medicare and Social Security as a "compromise" alternative to the more extreme measures they're proposing. The more the politically somnolescent US working class is bombarded with propaganda about catastrophically "unsustainable" federal spending on social programs and the debt required to sustain them, the more likely it will roll over when its benefits are trimmed. 

The tea party true believers are only at the extreme end of the spectrum. The Republican and Democratic leaderships have been working on a "grand bargain" to cut "entitlements" for several years, the latter in the guise of trying to hold the line against Republican attempts to gut them more thoroughly.

The best defence of public spending, of course, is to expose the sham accounting which purports to show the state will run out of money to fund social programs, and to point to truly wasteful spending on the corporations and the military. But the governing parties in the US and Europe are all Austerians to greater or lesser degree, and, except perhaps in Greece, there are, alas, no parties of the left anywhere near to displacing them.

On 2013-10-06, at 11:50 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:


> Well, my bad, but the funny part is that this is well within the realm of
> what these clown have been doing so it is hard to tell sarcasm from a
> matter of fact statement.
> 
> Wojtek
> 
> 
> On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 2013-10-06, at 11:06 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Interesting.  Italian courts tend to be circuses, so it does not surprise
>>> me.
>> 
>> I was extending the spoof, Woj - obviously without much success. :)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ___________________________________
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Wojtek
> 
> "An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."
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