The “shutdown issue,” presently mired in the political-ideological battle between the Far Right and the Less-Far Right (House Republicans and Administration Democrats), has little to do with the social welfare of the American people, and instead reveals discernible differences only on the degrees of sophistication informing the programs of each in their determined assistance to corporate capitalism. Republicans in this tableau (a staged presentation going back decades in the roles assumed by each side) are the visceral fascists, striking out at government without realizing how much it helps, assists, and protects business and banking, while Democrats actively, yet with becoming liberal rhetoric to hide from themselves their delusions and treachery, take help, assistance, and protection to a higher level of systemic interpenetration between business and government by means of a regulatory framework written by the affected interests.

Let’s put the situation in historical perspective. FDR announced when coming into office that America was a nation one-third ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-fed; today one might say, one-fourth, possibly one-fifth, in a vastly larger population, so that, at minimum, sixty million Americans, in what is reputed to be the richest country in the world, are living, or should I say, existing, at or below the poverty line, and at least a third more barely breaking the surface. When, here, I explicitly call for the government shutdown, it is not to bring on more suffering to the already afflicted, which would follow from a subsequent default, but to clear the air, blow off the fog of false consciousness, and force the issue, especially percolating from below, as to why the distortion of social priorities (x billions to dictators, past, present, future, around the world; y billions to US megabanks and AIG; and z for an all-devouring military machine eating up the nation’s resources which might—dare we speak democratically?—otherwise create a vital social safety net) has been allowed and in various guises pursued for more than half a century.

Shutdown, ideally, equals wake-up, an exposure of widespread impoverishment on one hand, widespread waste, corruption of democratic institutions, and military aggression pure-and-simple on the other. If nothing more, scaring the folks at Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs until the legislative conflict is papered over, is worth the candle, considering that nothing will be done for the poor in any case.

Sequestration will ensure the lifeblood of the current American polity and economy, militarism attached to the continuing program of global hegemony, so that neither Republicans nor Democrats find urgency in resolving the present stalemate—and in fact, holding the bottom one-fourth of the people hostage to the utter good will of the political system and the consolidated wealth standing behind it, as the source for a solution, is a good lesson in proper obedience, deportment, citizenship. Dangle just enough social- welfare anticipated goodies before the people to ensure quiescence while simultaneously magnifying ideological differences that hardly exist, and one has the perfect formula keeping the masses distracted from the main show—not shutdowns or debt ceilings, but a foreign policy of global capitalist expansion geared to US-defined financial, monetary, and trade advantages, coupled with necessary regime change for their realization, all wrapped in a framework of massive surveillance at home and the quickening paces for demanding patriotism and conformity.

[pullquote]Face-saving measures from either side may avoid a shutdown. So what? Either way, the governing classes are against the people.[/pullquote]

This is not Tea Party fare (and the Republicans as the Partiers’ enablers and breeding ground)—akin to geostrategic dumbness abroad, hoped-for Red Scare forays at home, but rather the self-styled liberals and progressives in their ongoing financialization and militarization of the American economy, monopoly capitalism with a smiley face, comfortably lodged in Democratic ranks. Here government shutdown is welcome, because by giving the political-ideological spectrum a still further Rightward push (Republican intransigence as pretext and excuse for Obama’s failed presidency, except to those privileged by it), the Democrats somehow appear Left-leaning or centrist. Nonsense. Obama has demonstrated on every count subservience not merely to Wealth, but to its most atavistic form: from policies which sanction a rawness of capital accumulation via deregulation, regressive principles of taxation, and subsidies to such favored industries as defense and nuclear power, to social policies which keep working people in a state of suspended animation, their collective bargaining rights weakened, and through lack of job creation, a reservoir of hard-core unemployment resulting in deteriorating standards of living.

On the civil-liberties front, an equal rawness, actuated by the abuses of a saturated counterterrorism atmosphere in which NSA surveillance is a unifying thread for the nuts-and-bolts of a National Security State, from the lack of transparency in government and an over-classification of its documents to the abridgement of freedom of the press in exposing illegal activity and punishment of whistleblowers in Espionage Act prosecutions to the same end. But it is the rawness of military growth and activity under his watch which takes the cake. I have in mind particularly Obama’s pivot to the Pacific, and the encirclement of China, and more immediate, the obvious attention to the Middle East, as part of carving out a future still wider sphere of influence in the region.

Is this off-topic? No, precisely because the threat of a shutdown, whether or not it actually materializes, is like a laser beam into Leviathan’s brain and/or stomach, revealing contents which normal operations of government successfully cover up. Military, yes; public welfare, no. Yet I hope it comes about, in the hope that it energizes the community of the poor to in fact become so, a community discovering itself, now, as the fulfillment of Dr. King’s long-delayed fulfillment of the Poor People’s Campaign, to DEMAND an end to militarism, inequality, inadequate educational opportunities, poor housing—after so many years, a turn-around from FDR’s description of American poverty, and yes, his defiant call to throw the money-changers out of the temple, so ordinarily people can live lives of social decency. The shutdown per se of course would hurt an already hurt to all-intents-and-purposes underclass, but if a permanent change is ever to be effected, a class awakening is of absolute importance.

In that regard, Obama and the Democrats, with their liberalization of corporate class-rule, and what I’ve termed several times the gradual slide into full-scale fascism (surveillance is already a good start, with or without the domestic force-feeding of monopolism and, abroad, aggressive CIA-JSOC paramilitary operations, drone warfare, and main forces still in place, along with the elaborate network of military bases), are a greater obstacle to such class awakening than the heavy-handed, Neanderthalish Republicans who are so easy to spot.

Face-saving measures from either side may avoid a shutdown. So what? Either way, the governing classes are against the people.

My Comment on NYT editorial, “Dawn of a New Era in Health Care,” Sept. 29, relevant here because Republicans have made Obama’s health care plan the issue/pretext for the Shutdown, a plan deeply flawed as herein noted:

The final words of the editorial undercut its overall tone and content: “…that has long been universal in other advanced countries.” NYT praises what deserves opprobrium: private insurers riding the government gravy train, rather than the single payer system which ensures a wider safety net and doesn’t shove money–our money as taxpayers–into the maw of the gorging Private System. Indeed,those final words are incorrect in one important respect: “other advanced nations.” For the US plan places America in the political-structural context of being a DECLINING not an advanced nation. We have sacrificed the people’s health on the altar of ideology: market fundamentalism, the natural-rights status of private property, profit before moral decency. Obama = the liberalization of a militarized capitalism, rhetoric glossing over reality.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch in the fall of 2013.

After five years of Obama’s economic recovery, the American people are as gloomy as ever.  According to a Bloomberg National Poll that was released this week, fewer people “are optimistic about the job market” or “the housing market” or “anticipate improvement in the economy’s strength over the next year.” Also, only 38 percent think that President Obama is doing enough “to make people feel more economically secure.”  Worst of all,  Bloomberg pollsters found that 68 percent of interviewees thought the country was  “headed in the wrong direction”.

So why is everyone so miserable?  Are things really that bad or have we turned into a nation of crybabies?

The reason people are so pessimistic is because the economy is still in the doldrums and no one’s doing anything about it. That’s it in a nutshell. Survey after survey have shown that what people really care about is jobs, but no one in Washington is listening. In fact, jobs aren’t even on Obama’s radar.  Just look at his record. He’s worse than any president in modern times. Take a look at this graph.

More than 600,000 good-paying public sector jobs have been slashed during Obama’s tenure as president. That’s worse than Bush, worse than Clinton, worse than Reagan, worse than anyone, except maybe Hoover. Is that Obama’s goal, to one-up Herbert Hoover?

Obama has done everything he could to make the lives of working people as wretched as possible.  Do you remember the Card Check sellout or the Wisconsin “flyover” when Governor Scott Walker was eviscerating collective bargaining rights for public sector unions and Obama blew kisses from Airforce One on his way to a campaign speech in Minnesota?  Nice touch, Barry. Or what about the “Job’s Czar” fiasco, when Obama appointed GE’s outsourcing mandarin Jeffrey Immelt to the new position just in time for GE to lay off another 950 workers at their locomotive plant in Pennsylvania.  That’s tells you what Obama really thinks about labor.

What Obama cares about is trimming the deficits and keeping Wall Street happy. That’s it.  But the people who elected him don’t want him to cut the deficits, because cutting the deficits prolongs the slump and costs jobs. What they want is more stimulus, so people can find work, feed their families, and have some basic security. That’s what they want, but they’re not going to get it from Obama because he doesn’t work for them. He works for the stuffed shirts who flank him on the golf course at Martha’s Vineyard or the big shots who chow down with him at  his $100,000-per-plate campaign jamborees. That’s his real constituency.  Everyone else can take a flying fu** for all he cares.

Then there’s the Fed. Most people don’t think the Fed’s goofy programs work at all. They think it’s all a big ruse. They think Bernanke is just printing money and giving it to his criminal friends on Wall Street (which he is, of course.) Have you seen this in the New York Times:

“Only one in three Americans has confidence in the Federal Reserve’s ability to promote economic growth, while little more than a third think the Fed is spinning its wheels, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll….

The Fed has been trying for five years to speed the nation’s recovery from the Great Recession by reducing borrowing costs to the lowest levels on record….

Most Americans, it would appear, remain either unaware or unpersuaded.” (“Majority of Americans Doubt Benefits of Fed Stimulus“, New York Times)

“Unpersuaded”? Are you kidding me? Most Americans think they’re getting fleeced; unpersuaded has nothing to do with it.  They’re not taken in by the QE-mumbo jumbo. They may not grasp the finer-points, but they get the gist of it, which is that the Fed has run up a big $3 trillion bill every penny of which has gone to chiseling shysters on Wall Street. They get that! Everyone gets that! Sure, if you want to get into the weeds about POMO or the byzantine aspects of the asset-purchase program, you might detect a bit of confusion, but –I assure you–the average Joe knows what’s going on. He knows all this quantitative jabberwocky is pure bunkum and that he’s getting schtooped bigtime. You don’t need a sheepskin from Princeton to know when you’ve been had.

And that’s why everyone is so pessimistic, because they know that the Fed, the administration and the media are all lying to them 24-7. That’s why–as Bloomberg discovered–”Americans are losing faith in the nation’s economic recovery.” Because they don’t see any recovery. As far as they’re concerned, the economy is still in recession. After all, they’re still underwater on their mortgages, Grandpa Jack just took a job at a fast-food joint to pay for his wife’s heart medication, and junior is camped out in the basement until he can get a handle on his $45,000 heap of college loans. So where’s the recovery?

Nobody needs Bloomberg to point out how grim things are for the ordinary people. They see it firsthand every damn day.

Did you catch the news on Wal-Mart this week? It’s another story that helps explain why everyone’s so down-in-the-mouth. Here’s what happened:  Wal-Mart’s stock tanked shortly after they announced that their “inventory growth …had outstripped sales gains in the second quarter…. Merchandise has been piling up because consumers have been spending less freely than Wal-Mart projected….” (Bloomberg)

Okay, so the video games and Barbie dolls are piling up to the rafters because part-time wage slaves who typically shop at Wal-Mart  are too broke to buy anything but the basic necessities. Is that what we’re hearing?

Indeed. “We are managing our inventory appropriately,” David Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said today in a telephone interview. “We feel good about our inventory position.”

Sure, you do, Dave. Here’s more from Bloomberg:

“US. chains are already bracing for a tough holiday season, when sales are projected to rise 2.4 percent, the smallest gain since 2009, according to ShopperTrak, a Chicago-based firm. Wal-Mart cut its annual profit forecast after same-store sales fell 0.3 percent in the second quarter. …

Wal-Mart’s order pullback is affecting suppliers in various categories, including general merchandise and apparel, said the supplier, who has worked with Wal-Mart for almost two decades and asked not to be named to protect his relationship with the company. He said he couldn’t recall the retailer ever planning ordering reductions two quarters in advance.” (“Wal-Mart Cutting Orders as Unsold Merchandise Piles Up”, Bloomberg

So we’re back to 2009?

Looks like it. When the nation’s biggest retailer starts trimming its sails, it ripples through the whole industry. It means softer demand, shorter hours, and more layoffs. Get ready for a lean Christmas.

The Walmart story just shows that people are at the end of their rope. For the most part, these are the working poor, the people the Democratic Party threw overboard a couple decades ago when they decided to hop in bed with Wall Street. Now their hardscrabble existence is becoming unbearable; they can’t even scrape together enough cash to shop the discount stores. That means we’re about one step from becoming a nation of dumpster divers.   Don’t believe it? Then check out this clip from CNN Money:

“Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings, according to a survey released by Bankrate.com Monday.  Fewer than one in four Americans have enough money in their savings account to cover at least six months of expenses, enough to help cushion the blow of a job loss, medical emergency or some other unexpected event, according to the survey of 1,000 adults. Meanwhile, 50% of those surveyed have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all..

Last week, online lender CashNetUSA said 22% of the 1,000 people it recently surveyed had less than $100 in savings to cover an emergency, while 46% had less than $800. After paying debts and taking care of housing, car and child care-related expenses, the respondents said there just isn’t enough money left over for saving more.” (“76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck“, CNN Money)

Savings? What’s that? Do you really think people can save money on $30,000 or $40,000 a year feeding a family of four?

Dream on. Even an unexpected trip to the vet with pet Fido is enough to push the family budget into the red for months to come. Savings? Don’t make me laugh.

The truth is, most people are hanging on by the skin of their teeth.  They can’t make ends meet on their crappy wages and they’re too broke to quit. There’s no way out. It’s obvious in all the data. And it’s hurting the economy, too, because spending drives growth, but  you can’t spend when you’re busted. Economist Stephen Roach made a good point in a recent article at Project Syndicate. He said, “In the 22 quarters since early 2008, real personal-consumption expenditure, which accounts for about 70% of US GDP, has grown at an average annual rate of just 1.1%, easily the weakest period of consumer demand in the post-World War II era.” (It’s also a) “massive slowdown from the pre-crisis pace of 3.6% annual real consumption growth from 1996 to 2007.” (“Occupy QE“, Stephen S. Roach, Project Syndicate)

So the economy is getting hammered because consumption is down. And working people are getting hammered because jobs are scarce and wages are flat. But we live in the richest country in the world, right?

Right. So what’s wrong with this picture?

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. Whitney’s story on declining wages for working class Americans appears in the June issue of CounterPunch magazine. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

On August 16^th I wrote an article for my blog titled “A Dossier on Bill de Blasio”  that mentioned in passing his occasional appearance at NY Nicaragua Solidarity steering committee meetings nearly 25 years ago, something I likened to Obama’s overtures to antiwar activists on Chicago’s South Side—an investment that could pay future dividends. As de Blasio escalated up the electoral ramps in New York, he was careful to retain his liberal coloration even though he became an ally of Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn pol who once belonged to Meir Kahane’s terrorist Jewish Defense League.

When Hikind spearheaded a drive to force Brooklyn College to add a speaker reflecting Zionist policies to a meeting on BDS, de Blasio issued the following statement: “The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is inflammatory, dangerous and utterly out of step with the values of New Yorkers. An economic boycott represents a direct threat to the State of Israel–that’s something we need to oppose in all its forms. No one seriously interested in bringing peace, security and tolerance to the Middle East should be taken in by this event.”

Despite his anti-landlord rhetoric, he also endorsed Bruce Ratner’s downtown Brooklyn megaproject that ran roughshod over the local community’s needs. Originally based on a design by superstar architect Frank Gehry, the project so appalled novelist and Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem that he was inspired to write an open letter to Gehry calling the project “a nightmare for Brooklyn, one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our lives.”

There’s lots of excitement among liberals about the prospects of a de Blasio mayoralty. As might have been expected, the Nation Magazine endorsed him in the primary election as “reimagining the city in boldly progressive, egalitarian terms.” Peter Beinart, a New Republic editor who has gained some attention lately for veering slightly from the Zionist consensus, wrote an article for The Daily Beast titled “The Rise of the New New Left” that was even more breathless than the Nation editorial. Alluding to German sociologist Karl Mannheim’s theory of “political generations”, Beinart sees the de Blasio campaign as “an Occupy-inspired challenge to Clintonism.”

Most of Beinart’s article takes up the question of whether de Blasio’s momentum could unleash broader forces that would derail Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016. Perhaps that analysis can only be supported if you ignore the fact that de Blasio was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager when she ran for senator from New York in 2000. The NY Times reported on October 7, 2000: “At the White House, the president, Mrs. Clinton and her campaign team can often be found in the Map Room or the Family Theater, drilling for her debates, or fine-tuning lines in some speech.” One surmises that Bill de Blasio was there.

Reporting for CounterPunch on July 26, 2005, Joshua Frank referred to Hillary Clinton as the Margaret Thatcher of the Democratic Party, a reference to her acceptance of a top position with the Democratic Leadership Council, a body that sought to expunge all traces of George McGovern style liberalism from the party.

With respect to de Blasio’s campaign being “Occupy-inspired”, it is important to note that in an interview with Bhaskar Sunkara in the Nation, he tried to dance around the sticky problem of Bloomberg’s eviction of the protestors from Zuccotti Park: “The location that they were using did become a problem. I think it was appropriate to say that that had to change.” Of course, it had become a problem. It was a constant reminder that people were unhappy about the rich lording it over the rest of society.

Despite de Blasio’s liberal image and even more radical connections a quarter-century ago, he would have probably followed the same path as Oakland’s Mayor Jean Quan who sicced 600 cops on Occupy activists on October 25, 2011 just two weeks before Bloomberg’s sweep of Zuccotti Park. If anything, Quan had an even more radical past than de Blasio. In the 1960s she was a member of the Third World Liberation Front when she was an undergrad at Berkeley. But when you begin to run City Hall in a major American city, you have to leave all that behind you. Law and order comes first.

On September 4^th I was contacted by Javier Hernandez, a NY Times reporter who was working on an article about de Blasio. He had seen my article and wanted more information about his role at the NY Nicaragua Network. I told him (and an NPR reporter who contacted me later on) that it was difficult to remember what someone said or did that long ago. I referred him to people who had remained active with the network long after I had dropped out. Hernandez dug up material from younger people whose memories have remained sharper than my own. They helped him recreate the Bill de Blasio of the good old days:

Mr. de Blasio’s answering machine greetings in those days seemed to reflect a search for meaning. Every few weeks, he recorded a new message, incorporating a quote to reflect his mood — a passage from classic literature, lyrics from a song or stanzas of a poem.

Over time, he became more focused on his city job, and using the tools of government to effect change. The answering machine messages stopped changing. He no longer attended meetings about Nicaragua.

His friends in the solidarity movement were puzzled. At a meeting early in 1992, Mr. de Blasio was marked absent. A member scribbled a note next to his name: “Must be running for office.”

If he told his comrades that he was running for office, he would have likely reassured them that it would be to challenge corporatist values after the fashion of Beinart’s new new left. Hernandez writes:

Increasingly, he was distressed by what he saw as “timidity” in the Democratic Party, as it moved to the political center in the dawning of the Clinton era, and he thought the government should be doing more to help low-income workers and maintain higher tax rates.

Nowadays de Blasio would probably confess to this being a youthful indiscretion, at least to those who were not eager—like me—to debunk the notion that he is an “Occupy-inspired” candidate. I for one am anxious to see Bill de Blasio become the next mayor of New York as part of the long, difficult but necessary task of waking Americans up from the deep slumber that allows them to trust capitalist politicians to turn back the ever-increasingly cruel attack on their standard of living. If you pay careful attention to what is happening behind the scenes, you will see that de Blasio will likely be known as the Big Apple’s version of Barack Obama. The NY Times reported on September 11:

But as Mr. Lhota [the Republican nominee] seeks to secure support, Mr. de Blasio, aware that his rhetoric has unsettled powerful people, has quietly been in touch with several establishment figures recently, including Rob Speyer, the chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York, and the financier Steven Rattner. Both men have close ties to Mr. Bloomberg, and supported the campaign of Christine C. Quinn in the Democratic primary.

In some of these conversations, Mr. de Blasio has played down his unabashedly liberal positions, pointing out that no public-sector union has endorsed him, and saying that he would represent the wealthy as well as the 99 percent if elected mayor, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The marketing of Bill de Blasio, like that of Barack Obama, has been most skillful. Most experts in the field regard the ad that featured his son Dante, sporting a 60s style Afro (de Blasio is married to an African-American), as key to his success. It played to both liberal and African-American constituencies. Two of Obama’s top campaign advisers are now working for de Blasio. His campaign manager is Bill Hyers and John Del Cecato has been producing his commercials.

Although I had no trouble telling the NY Times or NPR what I remembered about de Blasio, I sent the NY Post packing. To my surprise, some of my email correspondents charged me with abetting a redbaiting campaign against de Blasio as if NY Times readers or NPR listeners would be scandalized about the candidate’s youthful fling with the left. They make it sound as if going to Nicaragua was something to keep secret, like a New Yorker magazine cartoon of bearded anarchists assembling a bomb in the Paris sewers.

The Times article accurately noted that “Tens of thousands of Americans — medical workers, religious volunteers, antiwar activists — flocked to Nicaragua hoping to offset the effects of an economic embargo imposed by the United States.” Like Bill Clinton’s antiwar activities at Oxford, Kerry’s testimony to Congress as an embittered Vietnam veteran, or Obama’s friendship with CP’er Franklin Marshall Davis in Hawaii, these are the sorts of things you expect young people to do. It is only hard-core radicals who continue challenging the system well into their sixties and seventies such as the unrepentant author of this article.

The irony is that no matter the intent of the NY Times reportage, it will only make de Blasio more attractive to people sick and tired of business as usual. Today very few people have any idea of what Nicaragua stands for, many knowing it only as a spot featured from time to time on the House Hunters show on the HGTV cable network with a couple of gringos looking for a place on the beach at an affordable price. In fact Daniel Ortega would fit right in at some of those meetings de Blasio is going to right now. He learned long ago that the only way to get ahead in Nicaraguan politics is not to offend Uncle Sam. But at least Daniel Ortega came to this point only after putting up a valiant if doomed resistance that tested his own mettle and those of the people he risked his life to liberate. Bill de Blasio came a lot cheaper.

Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.wordpress.com and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch