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Editors' Note:
Every so often we get stray transmissions from the planet Zontar
located hundreds of millions of light years away in the Remulac
galaxy. Sometimes these transmissions from this alien race
bear a possibly amusing resemblance
[Or possibly not – Ed.] to events here on our home planet,
although of course we can never really understand why these strange
creatures from deep space do the things that they do. [Enough setup
– Ed.] As Obama stands firm . . .
PRESSED
BY BANKS,
GOP CAVES ON DEBT
By David Bloviator
Washington Bureau Chief with
Financial Reporter
Maria Boroaroma in Brooklyn
WASHINGTON,
D.C. – After several days of chaos in world financial
markets caused by the refusal of Republican members of the House of
Representatives to authorize an increase in the nation's debt ceiling
to pay the debts that GOP politicians had previously rung up, the House
finally
passed a “clean” increase in the U.S. debt ceiling, stripped of the
budget-cutting riders that President Obama had firmly rejected.
Despite
the ravings of Tea Party diehards like lifelong
government employee Rep. Michele Bachmann (R – Happy heterosexual
marriage), the Republican leadership found they could no longer
withstand
the pressure from their corporate underwriters and outraged citizens.
The acceptance by the Republican Congressional leaders of a "clean"
debt ceiling increase took place
during a simple and dignified ceremony, according to White
House sources,
Dimon had led a delegation of the CEO's of all major
commercial and investment banks to Washington yesterday which summoned
House and Senate Republican leaders into closed-door sessions at JP
Morgan's Capital Hill branch office [Surely, the U.S. Capitol?
– Ed.]. The session had
dragged on for
nine hours without reaching any conclusion until Goldman Sachs honcho
Lloyd Blankfein finally decreed no more smoking breaks.
Twenty minutes later, House Speaker John Boehner agreed to a debt
ceiling increase without budget cuts.
The shock waves from the financial markets had reached the
commodities pits in Chicago, causing raw materials magnates like the
Koch Brothers to lay down the law to the Republican caucus. “It's OK to
f*** the poor,” explained public broadcasting benefactor
David Koch, “right up to the point when it threatens to cost me money.”
According to White House sources, the real breakthrough came
yesterday afternoon when Dimon and other creditors of the increasingly
rickety looking News International called up Wendi Deng Murdoch and
told her that unless NI subsidiary Schlox News stopped fomenting
irrational opposition to the debt ceiling increase, the banks might not
be able to roll over the short term indebtedness of the old man's
teetering media empire. The shocked current matriarch of the
Murdoch empire was sufficiently unsettled by the news that she decided
to wake her husband up from his afternoon nap 30 minutes early.
The sudden collapse of GOP opposition, which had seemed so
adamantine only days earlier, constituted a vindication of President
Obama's strategy, which the White House called “Cut the Bulls***.”
According to White House sources, President Obama had given
the GOP two choices: a “clean” debt limit increase that would
take the United States through the next election, or a balanced program
of tax increases on the wealthy and corporations combined with cuts to
Medicare and Medicaid financed by reducing payments to
for-profit hospitals and drug companies and managing care to avoid
spending billions on procedures and drugs of marginal utility.
In a tense late-night session over the weekend, he told
Republican House and Senate leaders: “I intend to fight on this line
all summer, whatever the cost." The threat to the
lobbyist-financed vacations of GOP Congressmen was missed by nobody,
White House sources said, with the possible exception of Tea Party
leaders who were described by those sources as "dumb as Perry." [Surely, paint? –
Ed.]
Although Republicans and their Schlox News mouthpieces
predicted for weeks that Obama would cave at the specter of a
default, it turned out that it was the GOP who wilted first.
The final straw was reported to have been Obama's threat to pay only 46
cents of every dollar of Social Security benefits in August and go on
national television to explain exactly who had prevented seniors from
receiving their full benefits.
In an orchestrated crescendo of faux outrage led by
drug-addled insult comic Rush “Oh my achin' back” Limbaugh and
Undefeated
direct to video star Sarah “Actually, I was defeated” Palin,
the usual right wing bloviators described Obama's threat to withhold
Social Security checks as “terrorism,” and threatened defeat to any
Republican who advocating a rational compromise. But the
millions of shocked seniors who
flooded Capitol Hill with outraged phone calls apparently carried more
weight than an obese junkie and a failed reality TV performer.
Democrats pointed to the result as confirmation of their
belief that Republican stonewalling had to be met with equal
firmness. “If we hadn't stood firm,” said Rep. Debbie
Wasserman Schultz (D – Alter Kockers), “we might have had to accept
some half-assed attack on Medicare and Medicaid dressed up as another
useless 'commission.' I mean, how stupid do the Republicans
think we are?” she asked, presumably rhetorically.
Other Democrats looked ahead to future battles on the 2012
budget and the extension of George Bush's tax cuts as further reasons
to stand firm now. “If we caved on the debt ceiling, the
Republicans would think they had a license to close down the government
if we didn't join them in shriveling Medicare and
borrowing another $4 trillion over ten years to pay for Bush's tax
cuts. Now they know better,” said an apparently pleased
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, although her Botox-frozen features made
it difficult to tell for sure.
Also in the mix was the decision by the unfailingly accurate
rating agency Standard & Poors to cut the implied
credit rating on U.S. Treasury debt to AA. “This means that
my
Government bonds are riskier than the toxic waste CDO's I used to
bundle. What a calamity,” exclaimed well-tanned
private investor Angelo Mozillo. Traders at Wall
Street bond desks were less worried about the downgrade, with one
saying “Those clowns couldn't rate a wet dream.”
The successful Democratic pushback against Republican efforts
to
gut social programs to pay for tax cuts for the rich caused no less a
media figure than Brandeis grad Tom Friedman to admit he was wrong
about the need for a third party (but not the gruesome
counterproductive Bush-Cheney war in Iraq). “I guess it shows
that I'm just a pompous empty suit with no more insight into U.S.
politics and government than into Middle --” [That's enough
News from Zontar – Ed.] |
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