Jamie Galbraith on the lessons of the Bad Deal

Jamie Galbraith writes for Deutsche Welle about The Bad Deal 04.08.2011. And he is bluntly unsympathetic to President Obama:

The debt deal will make things clear. The President is not a progressive – he is not what Americans still call a "liberal." He is a willful [willing?] player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result.

What Barack Obama got from the debt deal was exactly what his sponsors have wanted: a long-term lock-in of domestic spending cuts, and a path toward severe cuts in the core New Deal and Great Society insurance programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And, of course, no tax increases at all. [my emphasis]

It's nice to see Galbraith using the Jacksonian phrase, the Money Power.

He expects the next move for the bipartisan austerity caucus to look something like this:

The deficit lobbies are shifting: their next step will be to raise doubts about the plan's credibility and about Congress's will to enforce it. They will then make the self-protective assertion that still stronger steps are needed. European observers of Greek/Irish/ Portuguese/ British/Spanish and Italian politics – not to mention Latvia or Hungary – will find all of this familiar.

Tags: jamie galbraith, debt ceiling, us economy

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