[PEN-L:6244] RE: Re: Happy Days Are Here Again

[sawicky@xxxxxxxxxx (Max Sawicky)]

DH:
> Lemme get this straight, Max. The Dems are now the
> party of the IMF and imperial war. >>

I don't buy the first premise, so that which follows from it is
irrelevant.

The principal problem with the IMF is the conditions it attaches
to loans.  Dems in Congress are not necessarily enthusiastic
about this dimension of the IMF.  Their main concern stems from
Rubin and Summers being able to scare the pants off them with
tales of global financial meltdown.  You could say they are soft
on the IMF, or suckers for it, but they are not crusaders for it
either.  The latter is an elite occupation.

The same goes for 'imperial war.'  There is no major
Congressional Democratic interest in imperialism.  They voted to
support the air war because it was Clinton's policy, because they
think there is some kind of human rights interest, and only to a
extent they buy into the 'America must lead' stuff.  In a more
overt 'imperial war,' namely the Gulf, most Dems voted nay.

> The Republicans are full of folks who, for the wrong reasons,
want to throw a monkey wrench into the imperial financial and
military machine. But finding any good in this is a symptom of
having smoked "loco weed." >>

R's hardly want to hamper the military machine.  Their menu of
appropriate interventions differs from Clinton's, and partly they
oppose this operation because it is Clinton's and not their's.

As for finance, there would still be an "imperial financial
machine" without an IMF, and there is little evidence of Repub
opposition to this machine.

> Further...Clinton's trying to revive the all-but-dead
> Social Security "reform";

I disagree.  He's flogging the R's because they are stuck in an
impossible budget position, and his aim is for them to merely
ratify the only part of his own plan that he really cares about,
the debt pay-down.

> he committed money for the deployment of
> Star Wars (something
> Reagan and Bush never did); he put an end to welfare
> as an entitlement;
> he's presided over the gutting of the Endangered
> Species Act and the
> clear-cutting of national forests (something again
> that Reagan and Bush
> never dared); he signed the hideous crime bill and the
> Defense of Marriage
> Act and bragged about it; and he's probably killed
> more people (figuring in
> the Iraqi sanctions) than Reagan or Bush did. And,
> miraculously, he's
> managed to silence liberal opposition to any of this,

All of this could have been worse under a Republican president.
Some of it was opposed by Dems in Congress.  As a depiction of
Democratic interests, as opposed to Clinton's machinations, the
preceding is just a distortion.  Not without elements of truth,
but on the whole a distortion.

> whether we're talking about the enviro establishment or, I'm
sorry to say,
> the Economic Policy Institute.

I just work here.  If you don't like our policy, go complain to
Jeff Faux.  Just don't tell him I sent you.

> Try some loco weed, Max - it might be revealing!

Mushrooms are my hallucinogen of choice.  That and mailing lists.

mbs