The Game Is Rigged

Matt Damon, the actor who once gave $2,000 to Dennis Kucinich, is giving up on politics. He told Playboy, “It’s easier now more than ever in my life to feel the fix is in, the game is rigged and no matter how hard you work to change things, it just doesn’t matter.”

Liberal Hollywood elites are not the only ones disappointed with failure of President Obama to deliver on his 2008 promise to change Washington. Heck, even left-leaning newspapers are blaming – albeit inadvertently – his Washington for the fiscal cliff fallout. When consumer confidence took a sharper than expected dive last week, the New York Times attributed it to the “looming fiscal impasse in Washington.”

Amazingly, the Times is on to something. This so-called fiscal cliff is nothing more than congressionally designed geography with a presidential signature.

Let’s review. In August 2011, President Obama signed a bill that arbitrarily cut defense spending. In December 2010, President Obama signed a bill to extend the current tax rates for two years. And in March 2010, President Obama signed $500 billion in tax hikes into law as part of Obamacare.

Blame for the forthcoming economic pain should be placed squarely on President Obama’s shoulders. Sure, he had bipartisan help for some of his cliff creation, but as President and the guy who promised to change Washington, he owns the outcome.

President Obama’s reckless approach to the cliff negotiations should make that much clearer. In the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel explained, “Mr. Obama won't willingly agree to any serious cuts, to any meaningful entitlement reform, ever. He will risk everything—the ‘middle class’ he claims to want to protect, his economic legacy—to continue growing government.”

The word risk is appropriate, because President Obama’s strategy is creating uncertainty over the future. RBS Securities economist Guy Berger told the New York Times, “So far consumers are worried about the future. Once they start worrying about the present, we’re in trouble.”

In August, the House – Republicans and some Democrats – attempted to head off the uncertainty by passing H.R.8, the Job Protection and Recession Prevention Act of 2012. It was straightforward – extend the current tax rates for everyone. It was a position many Democrats held in December 2010.

But, like Matt Damon said, the game is rigged. Harry Reid will not even bring H.R.8 up for a full debate. For five months, the leader of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” has stonewalled any effort to avert Barack’s Bluff.

Charles Krauthammer believes the explanation is as simple as it is cynical: “Obama was never interested in solving the fiscal issue. He wanted to break the Republicans…”

Rather than allow Harry Reid and President Obama to divide them, Republicans could put up a united front, which they are finally doing by refocusing on H.R.8. Again, as Strassel said:

In short, don’t play an away game. As Heritage Action’s CEO Michael A. Needham said, “It will never be enough for the political left.” He continued:

Funny thing about reality is that "more than one thing can be true" .... it is the mark of an ideologue that only certain things can be true, other things must be false, or if not obviously false, falsifiable by propaganda (which the MSM does constantly).

It's true that downs create the ups, and ups the downs: it's called "boom and bust".

It's true that Alan Greenspan busted the Reagan-era boom by slamming the brakes on in 1999-2000. It's true that the markets began to decline in 2000, before Mr. Bush was elected (not "selected"), because of Greenspan's backroom necromancy.

It's true that the stock market has been in a primary bear market since 2000 despite Greenspan's and Bernanke's efforts to b.s. their way out of it, by printing money and taking on bad debts of others to help "work out" the bad credit they helped create.

It's true that on tax policy, the Wall Street crowd achieved an intellectual, moral, political, and practical ascendancy over all other schools of thought during the 90's, and that their "highest good" was ..... "pay me, give me ALL the money." It's what they do. "All money in the universe is mine, always was, and what we need to negotiate is how fast you can get it to me, so I can ....do creative things with it. Or whatever." These propositions rest on the ancient "con man's inequation": "The constant I is always greater than the variable U."

It's also true that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd busted the housing market and, in Obama's case, got rich doing it .... while he wasn't running the Shirley Sherrod Ag Department scam.

It's also true that the major money-center banks and investment banks invented the Credit Default Swaps (CDS's) which now constitute 70 or 80% of the $100 trillion or so in public + private debt.

It's true there is plenty of blame to go 'round, but that Barack Obama is uniquely responsible for the fiscal mess of the last four years, and for trying to ruin the U.S. economy, break the middle class to poverty deliberately, and do every other thing he could think of, to work manifest injury to the People of the United States, because he is a black racist and hates them utterly.

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