#Obama, #Obamiacs, crickets and Social Security

"Crickets" is the most likely sound we'll hear from Obamiacs after Dear Leader just "sold out" Social Security. (April 30: Crickets is not the sound from Democratic House members, struggling to distance themselves from Obama before midterm elcctions.)

Those who do feel compelled to speak will offer one of the following options:
A. This is the "best possible deal" he could get to prevent sequester-like problems from recurring.
B. He's actually got some secret political jujitsu planned because he knows the House GOP won't accept it.
C. Social Security actually is in trouble.

Response:
A. Bullshit. Obama is again compromising for compromise's sake because he continued to be in love with the allegedly messianic powers of his mellifluous voice. Once again, Shrub Bush's favorite line about "the soft bigotry of low expectations" exemplifies his successor.
B. I actually heard this in the run-up to the sequester. That's a sequester that Obama helped cause, by the way, in part because he's too dumb to deal with the GOP in the first place.
C. Spoken like a true neoliberal, anybody who says this. Actually, not all neolibs like this, even. Brat Pack op-eder (not a journalist) Matt Yglesias worries that Obama has created a political box for himself.

And, as for longer-term relief from austerity in Europe and austerity lite in the US?

A debt jubilee, or anything close to it, won't happen, to riff on Voltaire, until the last neoliberal politician is strangled with the entrails of the last neoliberal technocrat.

I think again of a Catfood Commission whose members were all appointed by Obama.

Meanwhile, there's lots more fun with Obama and social issues.

The very insightful Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer notes that a lot of businesses will opt out of continuing to offer their employees insurance next year.

Why?

The $2,000 per employee penalty is less than half their annual per-employee cost for their share of health insurance, on average.

And, if you're lower middle class and without insurance right now? Obamacare sounds great on paper. But ... paper's going to be part of the problem for people unaccustomed to the paperwork that insurers will snow them with. CJR has the extensive details on what this will probably be like, as America's Health Insurance Plans is surely loving this part of the self-gifting of the Obamacare it helped create.