Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

Barack Obama finally got the grand, bipartisan consensus he’s been working towards for two and a half years. His implacable, deep-seated hostility to the left half of the Democratic Party (“retarded,” said his boy, Rahm Emanuel) – which includes most of the Congressional Black Caucus – transformed a 2008 popular mandate for progressive change into its opposite: a de facto center-right governing coalition of Republicans, rightwing Democrats and Obama’s Executive Branch arrayed against roughly half the Democrats (on a very good day) in the House of Representatives, plus a handful of liberal Senators.

Obama’s unrelenting hostility to “entitlements,” which he vowed to put “on the table” for cutting two weeks before taking the oath of office in January, 2009, came to fruition this week, setting in motion a rolling implosion of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. It is a monumental catastrophe, worthy of a Mt. Rushmore in reverse (say, deep in a guano-filled bat cave). History will, without doubt, lay this ruin of a nation at the doorstep of Obama, the corporate Democratic Trojan Horse whose complexional characteristics neutered, neutralized or outright made insane the bulk of Black America and most of those whites that pass as “progressives.”

Bruce Dixon: Barack Obama and the Debt Crisis: a Successful Con Game Explained

What just happened? Did Barack Obama just save the world, and us from a looming debt catastrophe? Or has he just played good cop to the Republican bad cop in an elaborate hoax staged to circumvent the will of the American people and deal mortal blows to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security?

The phony debt ceiling crisis was, from beginning to end, a con. It was an elaborate and successful hoax in which the nation’s first black president, the Democratic and Republican parties, Wall Street and corporate media all played indispensable parts. The object of the supposed “crisis” was to short circuit public opinion, existing law, democratic process and traditions of public oversight, in order to deal fatal blows to Medicaid, Medicare, social security, job growth and public expenditures for the common good. It worked. We’ve been conned.

David Dayen: Balanced Budget Amendments Don’t Work: Look at State and Local Gov’t Stats

Republicans are barnstorming across the country in support of a balanced budget amendment. This, they say, will force government to “live within its means” and lead to surging economic growth, though I’m not really sure how they get from A to B. But we don’t really have to guess about the impact of a balanced budget amendment, particularly during recessions. Because we’re seeing the effects right now.

Since the technical end of the recession in July 2009, the public sector has 430,000 less jobs (pdf).

   Government employment is now 1.9 percent lower than it was at the start of the recovery, a drop of 430,000 jobs. In contrast, government employment rose by 1.1 percent (or 232,000 jobs) during the equivalent part of the last recovery.

In a testament to how weak the last recovery was, private sector hiring is actually better in this recovery. But the government employment cutbacks counteract it.

As we know, state and local governments cannot print money and are limited by statute in their ability to run deficits. So instead of borrowing in a recession when faced with a budget shortfall, they raise taxes or cut spending. Increasingly during this recession, they opted for the latter. As a result, we are seeing a catastrophe in public sector jobs. These are teachers, nurses, sanitation engineers, cops, firefighters, all being put on the street because state and local governments have to balance their budgets. And while the federal government provided some aid in the stimulus package to help states and localities manage, that has mostly faded away. So more cuts are in the offing.

Michael Winship: The New Era of Hostage Politics

When I arrived in Washington this past Sunday, just as the debt ceiling crisis was approaching its climax, all the flags surrounding the capital’s Union Station stood at half-mast. I blackly joked with my brother and sister-in-law that maybe they’d been lowered to mark the death of the New Deal. (In fact, they honored the recent passing of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili.)

As for those throngs of sightseers, defying the malarial heat and clogging the DC streets and sidewalks? I imagined them engaged in that phenomenon known as “last chance tourism” — getting to a location before it disappears, like the melting glaciers of the Rockies.

But my bleakest fantasies aside, Washington and America still stand, although the shining city on a hill Ronald Reagan liked to extol has been graffitied with the intemperate sloganeering and mudslings of Tea Partiers and others of the right who believe the best government is none at all, and selfishly would have those in need huddle, jobless and hungry, in the dark. (What’s the old joke: how many laissez-faire economists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None — the market will take care of it.)

Like so many progressives, I tried, really tried to find a silver lining in the deal that finally was brokered, much as one occasionally hears news reports on the “upside” of global warming. (Wider shipping lanes in the Arctic — hooray!) Programs for the poor seem to be protected, for now. Medicare cuts allegedly don’t affect beneficiary payments. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy still expire in 2013! (I’ll believe it when I see it.)