{"id":35210,"date":"2011-03-05T01:12:32","date_gmt":"2011-03-05T06:12:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=35210"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:03:55","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:03:55","slug":"a-revelation-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/a-revelation-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"A Revelation Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The budget of the most prosperous nation on the planet is in a spin. The GOP House of Representatives threatens to use its power of the purse to shut down government services, strangling\u00a0the domestic programs most of us rely on. As politicians wrangle over the numbers, the current welfare\u00a0and future growth\u00a0of the\u00a0U.S. are in\u00a0jeopardy, along with the well-being of nations around the world. With billions going out in foreign aid, Uncle Sam is everybody’s rich relative.<\/p>\n

\"Vice<\/a>
Vice President Joe Biden arrives to meet with House and Senate leaders to discuss the federal budget, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday. Congress is considering two budgets - one from Republicans and one from Democrats, but budget-watchers say that a long-term agreement on spending is unlikely. Analysts point out that Republicans don't feel they need to compromise, and Democrats say they have already compromised enough. Photo by J. Scott Applewhite\/AP.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This particular political moment is as serious as a heart attack. Let me put that another way —\u00a0this is a serious attack on the heart. Consider who and what are at risk. The Republicans call for 100 billion in yearly funding cuts that dramatically\u00a0affect\u00a0community health centers, Pell grants, Head Start, children’s nutritional programs, Planned Parenthood, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity,\u00a0food aid for the poor, PBS, NPR, nuclear non-proliferation, wilderness and animal protection programs, national parks, and any hope of\u00a0an effective EPA. There are proposed cuts to public services\u00a0like Social Security and public safety programs such as Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.<\/p>\n

Imagine what our\u00a0country would be like without those things. That anyone would want to curtail them is mind-boggling.\u00a0Our social contract is under the gun. Republicans’ frenzied attacks are sold to the public as emergency measures, but are actually thinly disguised assaults on the last traces of FDR’s policy of government intervention to benefit citizens.\u00a0Anyone actually interested in balancing the budget would have\u00a0supported the public option\u00a0in health care reform and refused to extend tax breaks across the board. Now suddenly the Republicans are fiscally conservative, spreading their message of accountability and tough love? Really?<\/p>\n

Could it be possible that the American people have the attention span of a gnat? Have we lost all memory of the eight years prior to the last two? Can’t we remember how we got in this dreadful fix and who brought us to this moment? With the exception of Scooter Libby, nobody in Bush’s administration went to jail for willfully mugging our democratic principals, just as no Wall Street executive has been made to take legal responsibility for full-scale fraud. We can’t have forgotten that, can we?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You may have heard the joke going around that illustrates how — yet again — we’re being played, each against the other:<\/p>\n

A union member, a CEO and a Tea Party member are sitting at a table with a plate full of cookies. The CEO grabs all but one, turns to the Tea Partier and whispers, “The union wants to take your cookie!”\u0094<\/p>\n

Things have changed, just in the last few days. Have you noticed? We’re having what I call a revelation moment, when the truth of a given situation shines too brightly to ignore, most often due to the pain of it. The corporate signature is on everything we see these days. The union\u00a0fight to preserve bargaining rights in Wisconsin has leaked over into Ohio, where similar\u00a0rights have been stripped. Governors of strapped states across the nation blame their problems on the working class, decrying workers’ supposed greed\u00a0and unwillingness to sacrifice.\u00a0People like teachers and librarians and\u00a0sanitation workers\u00a0and firefighters are being asked\u00a0to give up mainstream middle-class benefits and services they have worked for all their lives, forced to sacrifice rights hard-earned by the generations of workers before them.<\/p>\n

By no stretch of the imagination is\u00a0our economic situation\u00a0the fault of the working class. We were spun into\u00a0mortgages by an eager Dubya who loved to brag about numbers of new home owners in his “ownership society.” Again and again we were told to spend-spend-spend instead of sacrifice after 9\/11.\u00a0The Bushies borrowed to finance the wars and risked the national treasure\u00a0as if it was their own. Yet even as\u00a0workers watched their jobs\u00a0sent overseas, we kept production high and even raised it despite our dwindling numbers; now there are fewer than\u00a012 million manufacturing jobs left in the United State\u00a0while production remains impressive.<\/p>\n

But even the most compliant citizen must eventually pay for absolute trust in a\u00a0broken system. The little guy is\u00a0thrown under the bus first; the truly poor and chronically unemployed\u00a0were mashed into the pavement long ago.\u00a0Now the middle class is having its ‘come to Jesus’ moment.<\/p>\n

The tiny portion of the budget proposal not allotted for military, Medicare and Social Security spending\u00a0— the last cookie — is now under attack by an increasingly radical\u00a0GOP. They\u00a0won’t mention the expensive ramifications of these cuts: the hundreds of thousands\u00a0of jobs\u00a0at risk, the crumbling health and education of the nation, the vanishing chance of a speedy fiscal recovery in the future. This is where the political gets personal.<\/p>\n

While none of this seems like good news, there is a flash of hope on the horizon, and I expect it will encourage you. It turns out that the majority of the American people — no matter WHAT the talking heads tell you — favor progressive measures to solve our budget issues. According to an NBC\/WSJ poll,<\/a> 81 percent of us favor putting a surtax on federal income of those making over a million bucks a year to begin solving our economic problems.\u00a0Not surprisingly, 76 percent of us want to ditch weapons systems no longer needed by the Department of Defense, and 74 percent want to axe tax credits for the oil and gas industries.<\/p>\n

Left to their own devices, the public supports the unions, is vehemently against cutting entitlements<\/a> and is more interested in pragmatic\u00a0cuts than ideological. People have no problem paring down the defense budget or imposing on the wealthy. When given a cyber-tool in which they themselves\u00a0made cuts to\u00a0the budget, they favored trade-offs\u00a0that preserved the humanitarian necessities\u00a0and even increased spending for some, while carving away at the top-heavy expenses. Of course the average citizen isn’t being lobbied by the Big Money guys or blackmailed by his or her own party. Give it a try yourself, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Doesn’t that make you feel better about your neighbor? Aren’t you a bit encouraged that you’re not alone in\u00a0your altruism and common sense? As the overreaching opposition party meets the anger of the American middle-class, we can anticipate a change of political mind and\u00a0a reprioritizing of what is worthwhile, of what is rational. If we believe the government has broken faith with us, then it’s time for us to take it back. That’s the kind of mind-change a revelation moment gives us, a clear mandate for looking after our own best interests and\u00a0taking care of the least among us.<\/p>\n

It gets exciting now, dearhearts. And for starters — we want our cookies back!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves The budget of the most prosperous nation on the planet is in a spin. The GOP House of Representatives threatens to use its power of the purse to shut down government services, strangling\u00a0the domestic programs most of us rely on. As politicians wrangle over the numbers, the current welfare\u00a0and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}