While the REAL problem is with Wall Street, nobody in our Senate wants to deal with the 800-ton gorilla in the 5x5 outhouse. After all, both parties are on the take from these "banksters."
Scheer:
He is right to point out that enormous sums always seem to exist to aid Wall Street but that assistance to average Americans has consistently been only an afterthought. And he does have a point in noting that if the latest spending extension was felt to be so important, why wasn’t it funded in a timely manner or in an orderly procedure by his congressional colleagues from both parties who are now trouncing him?
The money is always there when they want it, as we have witnessed throughout the banking bailout when enormous sums have suddenly been made available to those who least need it. The Treasury Department managed to find $200 billion last week to deposit with the Fed to increase the purchase of toxic mortgages to $1.25 trillion to make the bankers whole.
But the level of vituperation unleashed against this senator is so disproportionate to his role in the economic catastrophe as to raise questions of motive. The overreaction to Bunning’s protest was never anything more than a ploy for Democratic and Republican leaders to profess great sorrow for the folks on Main Street while they continue to coddle Wall Street.
I really can't disagree. Both parties play a stinking parliamentary and rhetorical game while people continue to hurt.
I like this comment following the piece:
By Thomas Dooley, March 3 at 3:45 pm #
“Don’t blame Bunning?”
I understand that Bunning is making a symbolic gesture, but surprise, surprise, he’s making it at the expense of the unemployed. Why did he choose them rather than the wealthy and powerful? Gee, I wonder why.
Besides, there is a special tax already levied to pay for unemployment benefits. Employers figure this tax into the total compensation package for each employee. Company accountants treat it as wages as though the employee had received the funds. The assumption is that if the unemployment tax did not exist the employee’s take home pay would increase by that amount. This is money that has been earned by the employee and has been set aside as a form of forced savings on the Social Security model.
Like Social Security the unemployment fund has been running in surplus taking in more than it paid out. If brave boy Bunning wanted to go after someone’s store of wealth to make a point why not go after the wealthy’s store of wealth rather than the unemployment surplus? Isn’t he a brave maverick? I guess not that brave or mavericky.
The only way to not blame Bunning is to blame the Senate and here we can make a good case.
The Senate is anti-democratic. In a democracy no one, not Bunning nor anyone else should be able to invalidated public policy after candidates have been selected, elections held, legislative battles fought and won, and the policy passed into law. Doing so is a disgrace to anyone’s notion of democratic ideals. This insult is due to our tolerating the existence of the profoundly anti-democratic Senate. It should be abolished and Bunning gives a crystal clear, unmistakable example why it should.
Bunning isn’t the only example. Look at how our health care policy is being handled, mangled and strangled in the Senate. There plenty of other examples. The House of Representatives has passed many good bills in the past few years only to see them buried in the Senate at times on the whim of a single Senator.
So sure, don’t blame Bunning, but if you don’t want this sort of thing to happen then we must advance a constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate.
That would require the Senate to have a 2/3rds vote for abolishing itself. Fat chance it would happen. Not that it shouldn't. The Senate is as much use as tits on a boar.
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