36-Year Congressman John Conyers Calls for Protest Against the Debt Deal: “Thousands of People [Should Mass] In Front Of The White House To Protest This

Monday, August 1, 2011
Washingtons blog

36-Year Congressman John Conyers Calls for Protest Against the Debt Deal: “Thousands of People [Should Mass] In Front Of The White House To Protest This”



Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri) said of the debt "compromise":

It looks like a Satan sandwich.

Traditional conservatives such as Ron Paul are strongly opposed to the deal, and have warned Americans that this could spell the end of America as we know it.

The debt deal is so bad that long-time (36-year) Congressman John Conyers is calling for people to march on the White House:

We’ve got to educate the American people at the same time we educate the President of the United States. The Republicans, Speaker Boehner or Majority Leader Cantor did not call for Social Security cuts in the budget deal. The President of the United States called for that. My response to him is to mass thousands of people in front of the White House to protest this.

(Conyers is right about Obama - not Republicans - initiating cuts to social security.)

Why is the debt deal so bad?

As I've previously noted, the deal would create a "super congress" which is an end-run around accountability to the voters and the constitution.

As Chris Floyd writes today:

[The] extraordinary "special committee" or "Super Congress" ... is an unaccountable politburo which will be able to circumvent all normal democratic (and republican) principles and issue budget-slashing, tax-cutting legislation that cannot be debated or amended, but simply approved or rejected by the rest of the now-powerless representatives and senators.

That's not all. If the politburo -- handpicked members split evenly between the two gangs of thieves and poltroons that now hold sway on Capitol Hill -- can't agree on just how much they want to gut the budget and cut taxes for the rich, why then, this will trip a series of "triggers" which will automatically start gutting, slashing and cutting, without any vote by the democratically elected representatives whatsoever. And surely it would be superfluous in me to point out that these unaccountable "superpowers" will soon stretch to cover other areas of legislation beyond budgeting and taxes.

Behind all the flim-flammery of this manufactured "crisis", we are watching the creation of a new form of government -- or rather, the further mutation of the new form of government that the United States has been crawling toward for a long time. We called it a "neo-feudal oligarchy backed by a militarist police state" here the other day. No doubt there are many other ways you could describe this murderous, ravenous, lopsided monstrosity of a system. But the one thing you cannot call it is a "republic".

But at least the compromise will allow us to get our ballooning debt under control by making painful but necessary slashes to the budget, right?

Unfortunately, no.

As Business Insider reports:

The “historic, bipartisan compromise” reached to raise the debt limit does not end the struggle to reign in the federal deficit — in fact, it pushes the most difficult decisions off into the future.

More surprising, the debt deal actually cuts almost nothing now–it just promises future cuts that may or may not materialize.

There are very few specific cuts in the deal — and the $1 trillion in immediate cuts are almost entirely constituted of caps on future spending. And those caps are not required to be honored by future congresses.

In short, for the past month, Congress has been arguing about little more than an agreement to reach an agreement at some point in the future. Your tax dollars at work.

And the debt deal won't preserve America's AAA credit rating. At most, it will buy a couple of months to a year, and then we'll be downgraded.

Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office scores the compromise as providing only half of the cuts required by Standard & Poor's to avoid a debt downgrade (and concludes that only 2% of the total cuts will occur prior to the 2012 presidential election).

In other words, Washington is once again doing what it has been doing for years ... kicking the can down the road ... and trashing the Constitution.

No wonder even long-time Congressman Conyers is calling for the American people to march on the White House.