Nerobama Defies the Mass Strike
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Jan. 25—The voters of Massachusetts delivered a devastating vote of no confidence to President Barack Obama and his Nazi-styled health-care and austerity policies on Jan. 19, by overwhelmingly electing a Republican State Senator, Scott Brown, to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Edward Kennedy. Both Brown and his Democratic rival, State Attorney General Martha Coakley, were, by conventional standards, qualified to fill the Senate seat. Under "normal" circumstances, even an uninspired campaign by Coakley would have likely been enough to win the seat in the state, which is traditionally strongly Democratic.
But nothing is normal about the situation in the United States today. Politics in America, for the past two and a half years, has been increasingly dominated by a dynamic political explosion, of the sort which Polish revolutionary intellectual Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) called "the mass strike."
This is not a partisan or class matter. The lower 80% of American households by family-income bracket are in a state of revolt against the politics of Washington. Brown's election was not a victory for the Republican Party per se, because voters have repudiated both political parties, for presiding over the disintegration of life as they knew it.
They hate the fact that millions of productive jobs have been lost in the last year, on top of more than a decade of erosion. They hate the fact that at least $12 trillion in taxpayers money went to bailing out Wall Street; and that the "too-big-to-fail" financial institutions that have profiteered, with taxpayers' cash, have shut off credit to business, cancelled credit lines, imposed usurious interest rate hikes, and foreclosed millions of mortgages, leaving more and more once-middle-class families out on the street.
They hate the Afghan War and the troop buildup; and they hate Obamacare, which, they correctly conclude, is going to make the health-care and health insurance system worse, not better. In many cases, they know that, behind the so-called health-care reform drive by the White House, is a commitment to impose Nazi-style euthanasia on especially the poor, the elderly, and the chronically infirm.
This is why the LaRouche Political Action Committee's famous "Hitler mustache" poster of President Obama has become the de facto banner of the mass strike.
LaRouche's HBPA
The mass strike revolt began in Autumn 2007, soon after the collapse of the housing bubble, the first sign (to many people) of the general financial and monetary breakdown. Its first political manifestation was the substantial grassroots political support for Lyndon LaRouche's Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007 (HBPA), which was endorsed by scores of city councils and state legislatures, and hundreds of local elected officials, all over the country. LaRouche's HBPA would have frozen all home foreclosures for the duration of the crisis, reinstated the Glass-Steagall Act's separation of commercial banks from investment banks, and forced the restructuring in bankruptcy of the Federal Reserve System, in effect reconstituting a National Bank and a return to Constitutional sovereign credit.
Through the intervention of Wall Street- and London-backed corporatist fascists like George Soros and Felix Rohatyn, working through their Congressional flunkies such as Rep. Barney "Bailout" Frank (D-Mass.), LaRouche's HBPA was killed, and now, tens of trillions of dollars in bailout money later, the system is more bankrupt than ever. A hyperinflationary spiral has doomed the global financial and monetary system to an early death. The question on the minds of the vast majority of Americans is: Will the nation go down with the bankrupt banks?
Obama's Narcissistic Delusions
The mass strike process broke out in a qualitatively different form in August 2009, when hundreds of thousands of citizens turned out for town hall meetings to confront their Congressmen and Congresswomen over their capitulation. Every time an opportunity presented itself, the American people displayed their fury over Congress's and the Obama Administration's refusal to act on behalf of the general welfare. In November 2009, Democrats were cast out of the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey.
Then came the shock heard 'round the world, in Massachusetts on Jan. 19, 2010.
President Obama responded to Scott Brown's victory with a display of narcissistic self-delusion, that shocked the top echelons of the Democratic Party, and further fueled the anger of the American people.
The day after the Massachusetts vote, the President gave a TV interview to ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, in which he displayed total oblivion to what had just happened. Not only did the President attempt to claim that the Brown victory was a reaffirmation of his own November 2008 electoral victory ("The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office"); he made it clear that, in his own judgment, he had made no significant mistakes during his first year in office. His only sin? He failed to anticipate how ignorant and ungrateful the American people would be.
This clinical display of Nero-like narcissism was not well received by leading Congressional Democrats, who saw their own political survival rapidly slipping away.
With the election of Brown to the U.S. Senate, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority. And Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) shut off any chance of a White House wing-ding to ram the health-care bill through the Senate before Brown could be sworn in, by declaring that the health-care vote should not take place before the new Senator was seated. It was an obvious institutional move from a leading Democratic Senator, who had held a Cabinet post in the Republican Reagan Administration. Not everyone in Washington was as delusional about the meaning of Massachusetts as President Obama and his Chicago flunkies.
Obama's health-care bill, which took up most of the first year of his Presidency, was now dead—unless he could get House Democrats to simply pass the Senate version without any changes. When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) tried to whip House Democrats, at their weekly caucus meeting, to cave in to the President, she faced an overwhelming revolt. According to one House Democrat who attended the caucus meeting, Pelosi could not muster a single vote for the Senate bill, which was, in reality, drafted at the White House by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and budget director Peter Orszag.
Pelosi came out of the caucus meeting, according to senior Democratic Party sources, badly shaken, and aware that the health-care bill was dead-on-arrival.
But, on Jan. 24, Obama dispatched his three top spin-doctors—David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs—to the Sunday morning talk shows, to repeat, in slightly less delusional language, the President's claim that Massachusetts had never happened, and that nothing was wrong. The health-care bill? Still on track for passage. The prospects of heads rolling at the White House? Nobody's job is in jeopardy.
That was the President's message in the first five days after Massachusetts voters spoke for the vast majority of Americans, who are looking for every opportunity, within the bounds of the Constitutional system, to display their anger. That growing chorus of Americans is finding a President who remains tone deaf to their cries.
The End of National Sovereignty
Going into the Massachusetts vote, White House sources had reported that the President's first State of the Union Address would be devoted to one central theme: austerity. While those same White House sources are saying that the President will change the tone of his Jan. 27 address, to focus the rhetoric on the middle class plight and the need to create new jobs, nothing, so far, has changed from the policy standpoint.
Indeed, the President's coterie has been involved, since Massachusetts, in nearly non-stop negotiations with Congressional leaders, to establish an unconstitutional independent commission, to impose murderous austerity against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, and every other entitlement program.
In tough negotiations with Senate Republicans, the President has pressed for a legislative mandate for creation of a commission to devise a radical austerity plan to cut the Federal deficit. Congress would have no authority to modify the plan—just to cast a simple "yes" or "no" vote.
On Jan. 19—the day that voters in Massachusetts were delivering their verdict on the first year of the Obama Presidency—Obama reached a deal with Congressional Democratic leaders Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.), that if Congress fails to legislate an austerity commission, he will sign an Executive Order mandating it.
On Jan. 23, the President endorsed the legislative initiative, which is likely to be defeated, paving the way for his Executive action.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on Jan. 26, on an amendment introduced by Senators Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), creating the austerity board. In a Jan. 20 speech on the floor of the Senate, Gregg proposed a bill that would, in effect, place the United States under the same austerity dictatorship that was imposed on continental Europe—from London—in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Under Maastricht, every European state is mandated to limit the government deficit to 3% of its annual gross domestic product (GDP), which means a ban on any government capital investment, and a surrender of national sovereignty. In the aftermath of Maastricht, with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, the situation in Europe has gotten even worse.
This gets to the heart of what the Obama White House has in store for Americans. America is to be placed under a Wall Street/London bankers' dictatorship, overturning the U.S. Constitution, and stripping the nation of its sovereignty.
Evans-Pritchard Spills the Beans
It is ironic that British Tory propagandist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Sunday Telegraph newspaper has blown the whistle on the scheme to strip Europe of its last vestiges of sovereignty.
On Jan. 17, Evans-Pritchard penned an op-ed headlined "ECB [European Central Bank] Prepares Legal Grounds for Euro Rupture as Greece Festers." Incredibly, the story was soon air-brushed out of the paper's electronic archive, and would have been buried forever—except for the fact that several obscure financial blogs had snatched the text before it could be buried by the powers behind the Telegraph Plc.
In the extraordinary column, Evans-Pritchard revealed that the European Commission mandarins have eliminated the last vestiges of national sovereignty for the countries that signed on to the European Monetary Union (Britain and Denmark, although members of the European Union, did not join the EMU—otherwise known as the Eurozone).
Taking up the question of an imminent sovereign default by at least four European Union states—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Greece (the so-called "four little PIIGs")—Evans-Pritchard revealed:
Fears of a euro breakup have reached the point where the European Central Bank feels compelled to issue a legal analysis of what would happen if a country tried to leave monetary union. 'Recent developments have, perhaps, increased the risk of secession (however modestly), as well as the urgency of addressing it as a possible scenario,' said the document, entitled "Withdrawal and Expulsion from the EU and EMU: Some Reflections.
The author makes a string of vaulting, Jesuitical, and mischievous claims, as EU lawyers often do. Half a century of ever-closer union has created a 'new legal order' that transcends a 'largely obsolete concept of sovereignty' and imposes a 'permanent limitation' on the states' rights [emphasis added—EIR].
Those who suspect that the European Court has the power pretensions of the medieval papacy will find plenty to validate their fears in this astonishing text....
This is a warning shot for Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. If they fail to marshal public support for draconian austerity, they risk being cast into Icelandic oblivion. Or for Greece, back into the clammy embrace of Asia Minor.
The same City of London-centered apparatus that has declared the Maastricht Treaty a death knell for national sovereignty on the European continent, is moving to impose the same conditions on the United States.
Bad legislation can be repealed, but an overthrow of the sovereign Constitutional order is irreversible. It is this danger that lurks behind the Nero-like glare of President Barack Obama, as he stares into the mirror—and the teleprompter—and challenges the American people to be as disconnected from the reality of the hyperinflationary breakdown crisis as he is.
Power in America has shifted. It is once again the American people, the source of all legitimate authority in Washington, who are moving. The challenge to be answered in the immediate days and weeks ahead is that posed by Benjamin Franklin, to a woman who approached him on the streets of Philadelphia, during the closing days of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, to ask what sort of government the Conventionn had given us: "A Republic, if you can keep it."