If only alternatives were any better, we would send Obama packing!

Of course, my rantings here don't influence a damn thing (editor: have you forgotten the hate email, which is proof that there are people who read what you write?)

Therefore, it is all the more a consolation when I find that the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz and Sachs and ... write about these in ways that are far, far, far more influential. Here is Sachs (ht):

[At] every crucial opportunity, Obama has failed to stand up for the poor and middle class. ... Obama is on the verge of abandoning the poor and middle class, by agreeing with the plutocrats in Congress to cut spending on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and discretionary civilian spending, while protecting the military and the low tax rates on the rich (if not lowering those top tax rates further according to the secret machinations of the Gang of Six, now endorsed by the president!)

 If everything--including social security--is on the table, why then is military off the table?  On a special velvet-cushion chair all by itself?  Sipping a martini while expenditures over at the civil society are being shredded?

As Congressman Barney Frank said:

Scoffing at the suggestion that “everything is on the table’’ in budget negotiations between the Obama administration and congressional leaders, Frank said, “The military budget is not on the table. The military is at the table, and it is eating everybody else’s lunch.’’

A double-martini lunch, indeed!

How much do we spend on the military?

Brother, can you spare me a dime?

[The] idea of $25 billion for Africa suddenly doesn’t sound like so much after a $700 billion bailout in the United States or $2 trillion in bank guarantees in Europe. We’ve just been making choices to ignore the poor rather than calculations based on real resources available. We made a choice to let millions of people die and not honor our commitments. The crisis doesn’t change our quantitative ability to follow through. And now, I think everyone is more of a macroeconomist than they were before. They can evaluate for themselves that it’s just not a lot of money compared to the amounts mobilized in recent weeks.

In that argument, Jeffrey Sachs makes a fantastic point--we always offered excuses that we didn't have $25 billion to help out the poor in Africa. Anti-malarial medication, mosquito nets, TB medication, .... any of these was met with the same argument that we can't keep throwing money in Africa.

Well, hello, and we now have consensus that Uncle Sam is ready to spend 800 billion dollars to bail out banks and their bankers? The hypocrisy is too damn evident. But, as Ralph Nader likes to point out, as long we play a game of going back and forth between tweedledum and tweedledee, there will be only one message for the poor, whether they are in Africa or anywhere else: so long, suckers :-(